A golden pendant set with an obscenely large ruby reinforced his image as the moribund potentate, a sorcerer-king who'd stepped from a tarot card to hold a final debauched court. He laid an obsidian rod across his knees. Kosokian had dispensed with the oxygen mask and donned resplendent silk robes of crimson trimmed in gold, and jeweled rings on every finger. Pipes groaned.And even more effective than the ordinary rendered bizarre is the exotic rendered unworldly, as when Conrad's dying mentor arranges a last party:Īttendants wheeled the great man into the hall aboard a mahogany chair oversized as a throne and carved in the likeness of a dragon. Voices seeped through the plaster, mingled with the complaints of the flies. Rough plaster walls were scarred by fissures, brown water stains and occasional jags of graffiti that almost made sense to Conrad if he regarded them from the corner of his eye. Flies shrilled in the dark globes tiny, damned souls searching for the light.
#Miskatonic books complaint series#
A wheezing, shuddering elevator with brassy wall plates raised them to the third floor, deposited them in a claustrophobically narrow corridor that went on and on under a series of dim globes, many of which were broken out, or blank as glass eyes. The foyer was damp and papered by dead leaves. A rundown apartment building can have a terrible grandeur: Whether the characters are hardened fighters, stern FBI agents, or decadent billionaires, they're all in it for themselves, survivors who have seen or done terrible things, and the world through which they move, though superficially our own, takes on other qualities in Barron's stark yet poetic prose. The key is in the title: the light is the darkness, ugliness has a beauty all its own, and good and evil aren't even relevant terms. Yet the plot is, in many ways, not the point, but simply a matter of tone, the outline around which the novel's themes and images are placed. Drake, the forceful yet unflappable Conrad enters a world even darker and more baffling than that of the Pageant, in which family secrets, government experiments, and rumors of godlike entities with untold power are all in a day's work. Drake, the scientist whose unorthodox treatments she suspects were response for the death of their third sibling, Ezra. The protagonist, Conrad Navarro, is drawn away from- well, it's not what you'd call a career- as a fighter in the Pageant, a secret, bloody, and fatal gladiatorial combat, by the disappearance of his sister Imogene, an FBI agent who was hunting the mysterious Dr. Published in a gorgeous limited edition by Infernal House, with interior art from David Ho, The Light is the Darkness is hallucinatory weird fiction with a harsh edge in which the cold, vast strangeness of the universe, the seething power of the natural world, and the quiet self-sufficiency of driven human beings create a powerful atmosphere of frantic desolation. Now, after two Shirley Jackson Award-winning collections, Barron's first piece of novel-length fiction has appeared. His stories, which might loosely be called Lovecraftian but blend cosmic supernaturalism with the grittiness of pulp and noir in ways only Barron himself could come up with, have been reprinted in more than a dozen annual best-of volumes and nominated for just about every genre award there is. Over the past ten years or so, Laird Barron has emerged as one of the most popular and critically acclaimed writers of horror and dark fantasy.
0 kommentar(er)
