Laird Barron is one of the best cosmic horror and weird fiction writers working today. He has a new novella coming out: X’s For Eyes. If you’re familiar with his work, then I probably had you at “Laird Barron” and “new novella,” and now all you need is the order link. Right? Right.
Cover art: Matthew Revert
For everyone else, let me just say that if you’re a fan of Lovecraftian themes and cosmic horror (and you are, that’s why you’re here, right?), you should definitely be reading Laird Barron.
From the book synopsis:
Brothers Macbeth and Drederick Tooms should have it made as fair-haired scions of an impossibly rich and powerful family of industrialists. Alas, life is complicated in mid-1950s USA when you’re child heirs to the throne of Sword Enterprises, a corporation that has enshrined Machiavelli’s The Prince as its operating manual and whose patriarch believes, Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds, would be a swell company logo.
Consider also those long, cruel winters at the Mountain Leopard boarding school for assassins in the Himalayas, or that Dad may be a supervillain, while an uncle occasionally slaughters his nephews and nieces for sport; and the space flight research division of Sword Enterprises “accidentally” sent a probe through a wormhole into outer darkness and contacted an alien god. Now a bloodthirsty cult and an equally vicious rival firm suspect the Tooms boys know something and will spare no expense, nor innocent life, to get their claws on them.
Between the machinations of the disciples of black gods and good old corporate skullduggery, it’s winding up to be of a hell of a summer vacation for the lads.
Sounds awesome to me. I can’t wait to read it.
“This has the narrative velocity of the best thirties pulp, the grim countenance and surly demeanor of the deadliest noir, and a premise the X-Files would wish for.” – Stephen Graham Jones, author of AFTER THE PEOPLE LIGHTS HAVE GONE OFF
“[X’s for Eyes is] so ripe with cosmic horror allusion and riffs that it qualifies as post-modern, but so charged with narrative drive that one can only hold on for dear life and hope to escape with their mind intact.” Jeremy Robert Johnson, author of SKULLCRACK CITY
The Lovecraft eZine 