Iron Tears

I recently acquired just about the last R.A. Lafferty short story collection that I hadn't read till now, Iron Dreams.  I had a bit of trepidation starting it -- would it be up to the standard that I remember Lafferty setting in 900 Grandmothers?  Was he ever that good?

Fortunately, Iron Dreams shows that he was indeed that good.  Not that every story is a masterpiece; it's a decidedly odd-lot collection, containing the second story he ever wrote (unpublished till now) and also late-career stories from 1992 or thereabouts.  But at their best, these stories are whimsical and deep, funny and serious, and with a voice unique in fiction.  But what I found that I wasn't expecting was also a real wistfulness that I don't usually associate with Lafferty.

The title story is a great example; it's the story of an oread, though in the usual Lafferty fashion we're never actually told that that's what she is.  The actual story is hard to describe, as it always is with late Lafferty.  But there's an undercurrent of sadness in the way that she can never form an adult attachment.  The same current of wistfulness is more obvious in the first story, "You Can't Go Back Again."  It's the story of five kids who go to visit a small moon floating just about a canyon in Tulsa.  Later, as adults, they go back to find that it's just not as marvellous as it was when they were young.  Of course, it's also a commentary in how adults see the world, because as adults they're not impressed with the fact that they're visiting a moon; they can only look back and see that it's not as impressive as they'd thought as kids.  (And the moon-yetis are somehow smaller than they seemed back then too).

Overall, the collection has plenty of good works in it, and I'm glad to have finally have had the chance to read it.  It's a good showcase for his ability to make stories strange through his unique narrative voice.

Occultation

Occultation is a collection of horror stories by Laird Barron.  Most of the reviews I've seen compare Barron to Lovecraft, but I don't really see a huge resemblance.  If nothing else, Barron is a much tighter writer.

I think that people are focusing on the sense one gets in Barron that the horrors are bigger than just a vampire or zombie, that sense of "big" horror that we can't even really comprehend.  But Barron makes it much more personal than Lovecraft does, and I liked these stories more for it.

One side note -- Barron seems to love insect imagery, I'm not really sure why, even in stories where insects don't play a large part.  Other than that, this is a short note, because other than saying that these are good horror stories, I don't find much else to say about them.

Angel on the Beach

Angel on the Beach was a set of short stories by Jay Caselberg.  Overall, I liked most of them, enough to pick up one of his novels.  They tend to have a slightly spooky feel without going into overall horror.

Unfortunately, one downside of reading short stories and then waiting to blog them is that I can't remember the details of most of the stories I read, so this is going to be a very short post.

She Nailed a Stake Through His Head: Tales of Biblical Terror

She Nailed a Stake Through His Head: Tales of Biblical Terror has a title somewhat belied by its contents.  To me, the title seems to promise looking at the bible stories through a slightly different lens, in which they're actually scary, but at the same time, it seems to me a bit of a tongue-in-cheek title.

The stories themselves are mostly not funny (although one is).  They're a bit of a grab-bag, from fairly direct retellings of biblical stories (Ruth as a vampire, Jonah as a disciple of cthulhu) to ones very loosely inspired by the original (Daniel as a modern-day poet brought in to help with forecasting the future at the firm of Bell, Chase, and Her).  This last was a good story in its own right, and I quite enjoyed it.  The Ruth story was good.  Cathrynne Valente had a story, and, despite the fact that I usually enjoy her writing, I didn't like it at all.

All in all, I'm glad I gave it a try.