Book Review: Not a Speck of Light by Laird Barron

 

Not a Speck of Light by Laird Barron

372 pages, Paperback

Published September, 2024 by Bad Hand Books, LLC

 

Audio of my interview with Laird on this book! 

 

Video of the interview 

 I don’t know Laird Barron as well as some authors, we have had nice interactions with the podcast, but most of my relationship with Laird is as a reader, and a Twitter follow. I felt so deeply for his close family and friends when he was sick in 2022/23 I nervously followed the news like most of the horror fiction community. So, I don’t want anyone to think I am making light of this situation.  It was scary for us fans too, we didn’t want to lose one of the best writers of cosmic horror, the writer behind the amazing Ishiah Coleridge trilogy. 

I understand how scary this would be for Laird, who has written about near-death experiences he had earlier in life. When Laird worked his way back to health I had a feeling that this man with his fingers on the pulse of the dark beating heart of the cosmos would come back with power. When I heard there was a new collection, I knew I had to read it. A Laird Barron book is always a cause for celebration, a collection is even more reason as LB is one of the best short story writers on the planet. Now add the weight of his recent brush with death and I knew this was going to be the most powerful collection in a career of strong work. 

Not a Speck of Light is Barron’s 5th collection, and it appears most of the stories from before LB’s latest brush with death but two of the most powerful tales in the collection, ‘Mobility’ and the title story both seem influenced by the events in his life. Strangely it predated the illness. That said I don’t think it is possible to come that close and not experience a new relationship with the cosmos. The first story Laird wrote in recovery was the title story, Not a Speck of Light is a bit of a dark painful dog love story, it is a powerful heart-pounding story that I wish never existed as it does. It took a recovering man turning his pain into a beautifully dark art for it to happen.

The prose as always is poetic, lyrical, and fine-tuned to paint a picture in your mind’s eye. Barron blends noir, cosmic, and moments of humor with a sense of grand literature. The quality of the word-to-word prose is hard to describe with hyperbole, and I feel it is getting better. Having written a trilogy of street-level noir modern Barron has clarity enough in the fantasy stories that his early stories didn’t excel in. 

The collection is divided into four stylistically unified parts. Part one is called Blood Red Samaritans. My guess is these stories were more character based stories Part two being Wandering Stars which was more cosmic horror, section three has the most informative name. “Alan Smithee is Dead,” Smithee is the pen name directors put on movies they are embarrassed by. I don’t think Barron is saying these are bad, they are not. I think he is admitting to their pulpy nature.  The last sections are called Fear Sun and Lake Terror.

 

‘Soul of Me’ was my favorite story of the collection It has the wild fantasy feel of Jack Vance Dying Earth novels, and in a way has the far future pastoral feel of Clifford Simak. It is a short piece, but worth every penny I spent on the book. “In your final incarnation on this miserable, blood-soaked world, you are Rex. Spot, Fido, Roscoe, yellow, ramp, rusty, Rin Tin Tin, Buck, and the others, the ever-popular others, yes, those two. But always and forever Rex. The last of your kind and the kinds that came before.”  

Rex is a character that I love. This universe and character need a novel or novella. PLEASE Laird.

This collection shows how playful the author is with titles, but also how he grounds his tales in the living breathing landscapes of Upstate New York and of course Alaska, his childhood home state.

“Alaska is a damned big, empty place bordered by nowhere. Between frigid temperatures and snowfalls as deep to a giraffe, it has weapons to kill anything more complex than Iraq. Civilization exists in tiny, disenfranchised pockets surrounded by a howling void. Basically, it's the universe and microcosm.

There's always plenty of tinfoil hat theories and superstitious legends to go along with all that frozen tundra lost radar sites fronting for secret nuclear launch silos aimed at Russia; FEMA concentration camps for the inevitable apocalypse, UFO observation bases; etc, etc..”

Not a Speck of Light is the best collection of stories by an author who has excelled at the powerful short story. Every story is powerful. Every page drips with dark energy. All in a beautiful package with amazing black and white art to open every story. Get it now.

Book Review: Philip K. Dick The Dream Connection Edited by D. Scott Apel

 

 

Philip K. Dick The Dream Connection Edited by D. Scott Apel

 299 pages, Paperback
Published May, 2014 by The Impermanent Press

This will not be a very detailed review, but in the wake of Philip K. Dick’s posthumous stardom several books have been published that are just interviews with the guy. Several of the ones from the post-VALIS publication. This interview was just one of many that were held as a part of Apel's Oral history of Science Fiction (A book I just picked up). It also includes numerous essays, including one Robert Anton Wilson on PKD's mystical experiences, R. Faraday Nelson on collaborating with PKD on the unpublished High Castle sequels, a rare (at the time) short story about PKD's mystical experiences, 

The interview is not as focused as some of the others. It may have something to do with the timing, during his brief relationship with Joan Simpson, when he was living in transition. Must have for die-hard PKD scholars, general Dickheads not so much.

Book Review: Why Call Them Back From Heaven by Clifford D. Simak

Why Call Them Back From Heaven by Clifford D. Simak

192 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1967

 

Clifford Simak is one of the most important voices of 20th-century science fiction, and he is largely forgotten outside of serious SF circles. His books crowd the shelves at used bookstores, and several are considered classics. I prefer his work to Ray Bradbury but he doesn’t have the cultural impact or name recognition. Not even as well-known as Heinlein or Asimov whom he inspired.  Bradbury’s reputation for pastoral fantasy comes from a short part of his childhood in the Midwest but he was a Los Angelino really. Simak on the other hand was a lifelong Midwesterner.

Simak was publishing SF when Asimov was a teenager. He went to high school on a horse before his Wisconsin village had roads for cars.  His very far-out idea-driven SF has a unique feel because of how midwestern his point of view was. His novel City is one of the most singular novels about our species dying because the end was inspired by Simak’s loathing of city life.

 SWCTBH was written and released five decades into his SF career, an amazing accomplishment for any writer.  So one of the reasons this book was ALREADY on my TBR was a desire for a picture of what Simak was doing in 1967, a time when the New Wave dominated. Philip K. Dick wrote Galactic Pot Healer that year, and Brunner was doing edits on Stand on Zanzibar.  Leguin was two years from releasing Left Hand of Darkness, and Vonnegut was moving mainstream. Heinlein won the Hugo for Moon is a Harsh Mistress beating a more deserving Babel-17 by Delany (in my opinion)  Exciting time in SF and mostly in the next generation.

 Three years after winning the Hugo award himself for the pastoral Way Station Simak wrote a thought-provoking philosophical surrealist SF novel Why Call Them Back From Heaven?  It is not an action novel, it doesn’t have the pulp strength of City, and for my money, this might be my second favorite of Simak’s novels. 

 I read this novel because fellow Sci-fi historian Jochim Boaz brought up this novel during a podcast we recorded about Simak, and I knew I was going to bump it up my list of stuff to read. The Link to that episode is here… You can hear the moment that I decided to read this book, and of course get lots of Simak talk.

WCTBFH  is about immortality, and more specifically economics and capitalism. The details of how immortality reminds me of the current affordable housing crisis in the U.S. Tons of people are having children but no one is building housing for them. 

 The Forever Center in the context of the novel has not figured out how immortality works, but it is close. This starts a race for people to put themselves on ice, the problem is there are not enough resources to wake them up. This presents the core conflict of the novel. Unlike the majority of his novels, the future is not natural or pastoral. The society is urban and overcrowded. Worse much like our society is a capitalist race towards acquiring things. In this future, it is about amassing capital for your death/afterlife.

 “A man had to live, this first life, as long as he was able, it was the only opportunity that he had to lay away competence for his second wife. And when every effort of the society in which he lived was bent towards the end of the prolongation of his life, it would never do to let a piece of carelessness or an exaggerated sense of economy (such as flinching at the cost of a piece of padding or the reorganizing of a buffer) to rob him of the years needed to talk away the capital he would need in the life to come.”

Much of the novel is built around the impacts of a world trying to adapt to civilization, think about how hard we have to work for our short lives now live thousands of years. Of course, the novel touches briefly on the resources it would take.

“… it doesn't matter that it's a little swampy. The human race will need every foot of land there is upon the earth. There will come a time perhaps, when the earth will be just one big building and…”

“But there's space travel, too.” the woman said. “All those planets out there…”

“Madam,” said the salesman, “let's be realistic for a moment they've been out there 100 years or more and they have found no planets that a man could live on…”

Simak doesn’t often idealize the space frontier, this trap even the typically pessimistic PKD fell into in the fifties. But much like Kim Stanley Robinson made the point recently in Aurora, Simak suggests that Earth is rare in the ability to support human life, and the price or immorality may be a crowded Earth.

The collection of wealth takes on a whole new meaning when life never ends.

“No! No! Protested Gibbons. “Not apply for death they'd suspect something if you did arrange your death. A very natural death. Give me ten thousand of the loot and I'll get it done for you. That's the going rate. Very neat and easy. And the investment, of course, couldn't be in forever center stock. Something you could stash away a bunch of paintings, maybe.”

Another interesting part of this equation that Simak builds is the divide that would develop between those who would engineer a death that preserved them for immortality and those born to it.

“And now I understand, said the grizzled man, “that in just a few years a man need not even go through the ritual of death to attain immortality. Once Forever Center has this immortality business all written down and the methods all worked out, a man will be made immortal out of hand. So just stay young and go on living and there won't be any death once you get born, then you will live forever.”

The writing itself is great, and playful at times. Chapter 9 is a single sentence that doesn’t get paid off or explained until nearly the end. Chapter 23 is a beautiful meditation on the whole scope of the novel through the eyes of an older woman in a rocking chair thinking about the next thousand.

“Would the lilacs smell as sweet, Mona Campbell wondered, when spring came around a thousand years from now? Could one still catch the breath in wonder at the sight of a meadow filled with daffodils a thousand years from now. If it were a thousand years from now would any room remain on earth for lilac or for daffodil?”

I mean the entire chapter is beautiful. I kind of wanted to post the whole thing. I don’t think most Sci-fi critics or fans consider this top-tier Simak, but I love this novel. This is a must-read for any fans of 20^th-century SF who want to read works from a more literary angle.

 

 

Book Review: Devils Kill Devils by Johnny Compton

 

Devils Kill Devils by Johnny Compton

 288 pages, Hardcover
Published September 24, 2024 by Tor Nightfire

I met the author of this book briefly at Stokercon and heard him on the Talking Scared podcast, a few days after I made the mental note that I had to read some of his work an arc sounded up in my mailbox. So when I finished reading Forgotten Sisters (for a great modern horror double feature) I decided to dive in without reading anything about the plot, or setting, and I went in totally cold. Now that I have read it, I would say part of my enjoyment of the first act was entirely based on not being spoiled about major elements of the plot. 

So, if you want that cold entry, and you trust me this is a fine work of Supernatural horror fiction. I recommend this book to most horror readers. It tells an epic tale, with an economical style that in the 80s would have played out over 600 pages. It is refreshingly lean without sacrificing the elements that work. 

 I have to talk about elements of the story in this review so if you trust me you can go read Devils Kill Devils and report back here for an in-depth look at why it works. If you don’t mind a little background to be sold then keep reading.

So not knowing the plot helped with the first act so again this is your final warning. Sarita is a little worried about her in-laws when her wedding day comes, but despite a little drama with her biological mother-in-law the marriage goes okay until a brutal attack leaves her new husband murdered right in front of her. The mystery is well set up when Sarita admits to her family she knows who did it but didn’t tell the police for reasons…

This was an interesting mystery, and sure a part of me speculated in other directions from a traditional monster set-up. Yes, DKD is a vampire novel, I didn’t know that. I am glad I didn’t know that. There are plenty of twists to the story. I enjoyed how the mystery was all laid out. You Sarita felt invincible for years because of her Guardian angel who has saved her life multiple times, and her family who have all seen the evidence call him Angelo. The dynamic of this relationship provides many powerful moments.

“None of that would bring him to her, though. Save for the one horrible exception of her wedding night, Angelo only appeared when she was in mortal peril.

She put the loaded gun to her head and waited for him to come to her period she told herself she wasn't bluffing, said it aloud a few times hoping he would hear her she even considered squeezing the treasure trigger and relying on an Angel being faster than a bullet, her being able to use divine means to save her, but she wasn't quite ready to risk that.”

Why would this mysterious spirit who saved her life over and over brutally attack the love of her life? The mystery leads to a family of monsters that reminded me of the True Knot from Doctor Sleep. Sarita, her brother David, and her best friend find themselves in the middle of a battle between monsters and gods.  “Who are they? Who are you?”

“They are demons of a sort,” Myra said, then paused and seemed to gauge Sarita's reaction to this how did she expect Sarita to react?”

Devils Kill Devils starts with a light Rosmary’s Baby-type mystery and explodes into horror action, and along the way, there are moments of great character and suspense. Compton wields little details with great strength. “The ones who were free to go appeared to obey an instinct, like animals heading for high ground in advance of a tsunami no human could sense coming. She thought the last of them had left, heard cars starting in the parking lot, she surveyed how many remained. There were those at her table, Everett’s three boys the two who had eyes on her at the park, and seated in the corner behind her the third member of their party. The fake runner. His chest heaved as he stared past her, toward the entrance of the restaurant. She gathered that the crisis that the rest had fled was arriving at last.”
 

This is a fantastic novel, and for me a good introduction to an author I want to read more of over time. Devils Kill Devils is a great modern spin on the monster novel. Big thumbs up.