The Croning by Laird Barron (2012): On second reading, Laird Barron's The Croning yields up more frights and more depth, along with a greater understanding of the interconnectedness of all of his fiction. What a frightful universe Barron conjures up, one in which the existential terror of his particular form of cosmic horror manifests itself in the simplest of human emotions and actions.
This terrific first novel touches upon almost everything Barron had written to this point, and on many things he hadn't written yet, but the novel doesn't require knowledge of those other works -- though knowing of The Black Guide or the events of "The Men of Porlock" certainly deepens one's understanding of the events related here.
There's tragedy here in the story of Don Miller, who in the present day lives in a rambling old house in small-town Washington state, is 80-something and still devoted to his curiously youthful wife, Michelle Mock, and their adult children, fraternal twins Holly and Kurt. But Miller has become almost paralyzed by fear of the dark, especially when Michelle is away on one of her curious, frequent anthropological expeditions. The very house Miller lives in is a source of recurring terrors, the cellar most of all. But they must be the nightmares of an aging man with the attendant mental-health problems of old age. Right?
Barron's concern with identity is a career-long one, and Miller represents a study in the limits of the continuity of human character. Don's memory is failing, possibly the result of incipient dementia or Alzheimer's. But it's been failing almost as long as Miller can remember. When he remembers. There are holes in his mind almost too many to count, and Don gets through the day by avoiding the most basic questions about his own past.
But memories sometimes flare up, in nightmares forgotten upon waking. And the absence of memories must also be dealt with or ignored. How, Don wonders at one point, can a person forget not only an entire language (Spanish, in this case), but that he ever knew that language at all?
Well, he's going to find out. And as we travel back and forth across the history of Don and the history of these strange, powerful monsters known collectively as the Children of Old Leech, we find out too. Barron's prose is brutal and beautiful. He links the cosmic and the personal and the visceral in fascinating and rewarding ways, in this tragedy of the losing and finding and losing of memory.
Besides the terror, there's sorrow for humanity here, as a whole and in its constituent parts. Don's a fascinating character, mentally wounded but pushing onwards towards knowledge that he knows at every step he probably doesn't want to possess. And the various manifestations of evil, human and otherwise, ring true. The humans who collaborate with the Children of Old Leech do so for power and money and immortality. The cost of these things is exceedingly high, but as in our world, people can do the most frightful things for the most basic of reasons. Highly recommended.
The Croning by Laird Barron (2012): Laird Barron has fairly quickly made a name for himself in horror fiction with a unique blend of cosmic horror, graphic depictions of horrific violence, and a constant concern with masculinity and its discontents, satisfactions, and challenges when faced by maggot-like, child-eating horrors from beyond the rim of conventional space-time. Some of Barron's male protagonists (sort of) break even in their confrontations with gibbering, capering, nigh-omnipotent horrors, though generally only through escape or death. Most of them are either destroyed or subverted.
Many of Barron's stories share the same mythology, in which a race of cosmic horrors collectively known as the Children of Old Leech lurk in the lost places of the Earth, spiritually and physically feasting on humans while occasionally offering a small handful of people the "honour" of joining them. Technically speaking, the Leech are both endo- and exocolonists: they conquer from without and within, all in preparation for the day Old Leech itself wakes up hungry and devours the populations of whole planets. Which is what happened to the dinosaurs, among other lost Earth populations.
Yes, he's the feel-good writer of 2012!
The Croning is Barron's first novel, and it's a doozy. For the most part, the narrative follows hapless geologist Don Miller who, in the present day, is in his 80's and plagued by gaps in his memory that, when encountered, his mind scrambles to either explain or forget that such a discovery ever happened (he's even forgotten that he ever knew Spanish well enough to translate Spanish documents).
Don's uncannily young-looking wife of more than 50 years, Michelle Mock, has always pursued the anthropology and archaeology of "lost" tribes, periodically leaving Don for weeks or even months at a time. And as the narrative swings back and forth in time and space, we begin to see why Don's mind is so screwed up -- and why, despite his great love for Michelle, he also occasionally fears her.
The horrors here are indeed horrible, the worst coming from the failures of human morality when confronted by terrible tests. Barron weaves history and mythology and legend (including a crackerjack origin for the story of Rumplestiltskin) into this backwards-and-forwards-looking opus, presents the horrors of the flesh and the soul, and gives us scant light in the face of world-annihilating darkness. It's a brilliant debut, but not for the physically or philosophically squeamish. Highly recommended.
