Comments on: 101 Weird Writers #23 — Laird Barron

By: A Couple of Old Pieces | Timothy J. Jarvis

A Couple of Old Pieces | Timothy J. Jarvis — Tue, 08 Jul 2014 23:19:10 +0000

[…] I’ve an essay on Laird Barron’s story ‘The Forest’ up at the WeirdFictionReview.com, ‘Stages of Horrific Vision’, in which I use some critical theory in order to try and get to grips with the powerful charge Barron’s writing has. That essay is here. […]

By: Kyle Flowers

Kyle Flowers — Mon, 06 May 2013 16:06:45 +0000

The incomparable works of Laird Barron continue to entertain and impress me with every new story or novel I read. I wonder how he is able to continue creating such ingenious complex or simplistic narratives and prose. I feel the most fascinating aspects not to be his concurrent themes of an all-powerful dark side, but his ability to become the character, create an accessible, visible atmosphere, and his ability to show readers his stories. His dark material is mind blowing, but secondary to his unique voice that has grown louder when reading his work chronologically. There have only been a handful of writers EVER that use a truly original style and Laird Barron is one of them. I am addicted to his stories like a drug. Thank you, Laird Barron, for working so hard to make fans like myself intensely gratified and sometimes terrified, and always needing more.

By: Jodi

Jodi — Thu, 11 Apr 2013 14:34:06 +0000

Wow, I have this book, but have been mostly saving it because I won’t have much weird to read once it’s done. But your series works as a great companion piece to the book. Thanks for doing this!

Jodi

By: Timothy Jarvis

Timothy Jarvis — Tue, 09 Apr 2013 22:03:40 +0000

Thanks Terasa!

And that’s a really good point about our nebulous desire to be afforded these glimpses of the dark, even though they horrify us. It’s an impulse weird fiction interrogates, perhaps better than any other form, I’d say.

By: Terasa Skultety

Terasa Skultety — Tue, 09 Apr 2013 19:55:29 +0000

Quote:

“Barron’s tales ask: What if friendships and fucking and drinking beer and getting fucked are the best things there are? You want to spoil all of that for a taste of occulted knowledge, for a vision of the void, by screwing around with mysteries before which all things tremble?” ~ Timothy Jarvis, about the work of Laird Barron

Comment:

There is a greater question(s) there because most who seek that “vision of the void” do so in so called innocent curiosity and then knowing something, cannot unknow it. Having looked, can we look away? Are some of us then become perpetual rubberneckers of that seeming void? And is that the womb of which writers of the so called weird are born?

Great piece.

Terasa Skultety