WHEN WE THINK COSMIC HORROR, what comes to mind first? Cthulhu, the Necronomicon, tentacles, H.P. Lovecraft, tentacles, slimy appendages, tentacles…Did I mention tentacles?
You get the point.
But cosmic horror is so much more than that. Many authors tamed the path both before or at the same time as Lovecraft: Ambrose Bierce, William Hope Hodgson, Frank Belknap Long, R.W. Chambers, or Algernon Blackwood, to name a few. Although often less known to the general public, all of them provided us with such unique and universal concepts of horror and cosmic horror that we can still see their roots settling the foundation of modern horror literature.
In my opinion, Laird Barron stands among them: the modern path-carvers, the innovators, the masters of the genre. What he offers us with The Croning is nothing short of the best of the best in cosmic horror—but also horror literature in general. Lovecraft said, “The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown.” In a sense, that’s what cosmic horror is all about—the fear of the unknown, to instill in us a reminiscent sense of dread and insignificance toward the greater and more obscure forces in play.
Here is an example of cosmic menace taken from The Croning:
“The children oozed and squirmed in noisome mounds, and even in the dream Don thanked God he only glimpsed an impression of them. For they were the stuff of nightmares: maggoty abomination possessed of incalculable and vile intellect that donned flesh and spines of men and beasts to shield themselves from the sun and enable themselves to walk upright instead of merely slithering.”
Chilling.
The Croning is a slow burn. It is written in a way that infuses us with a sense of dread but also fills us with information and details used to scratch at the back of our mind, a sense of remembrance and deja-vu as the story goes, until the whole scheme is being deployed and the puzzle assembles itself before us. I adored this book, the author, the prose, Barron’s way of building tension, and how the story never quite stopped tormenting my brain with apparently meaningless details that, in the end, mattered much more than I first thought.
If you’ve never read The Croning, you’re missing something. Go grab yourself a copy and enjoy the descent into the lair of the Children of the Old Leech!