This has never really been Laird Barron's thing, but what makes these two stories special is that it offers a considerably scarier alternative: casting doubt on everything you think you know. A greedy quest for absolute knowledge if you will. In the Lovecraftian sense of the word, cosmic horror is about accessing a greater understanding. Other stories I really liked from Occultation were the loosely related The Forest and -30-, which deconstructed conventional cosmic horror somewhat. The Lagerstätte is perhaps one of the ten best stories I've read from him and I've read many. Taking cosmic horror from the hands of alienated and misanthropic intellectual protagonists and putting it in context for the every man. This is something Barron has always been great at. What makes it powerful is that what happens to protagonist Danni could happen to anyone of us. The boundaries of human knowledge in a domestic, intimate setting. The Lagerstätte is about the explainable and the inexplicable. It's perhaps the most typical Laird Barron story in the collection and the least connected to the others from a thematic standpoint. My favorite story in Occulation was the cold and gloomy The Lagerstätte, where a grieving woman's attempt to reunite with her husband and son triggers something she can't control or even understand. Occultation is also a great tool to understand cosmic horror, as we're about to see.

It's a collection about the predatory relationship between men and nature, the invisible and the visible, the infinitely big and the infinitely small. Occultation and Other Stories is a great introduction to whoever is trying to bridge the gap between Lovecraft and other voices in cosmic horror. These themes aren't unfamiliar to Barron, but there's a definite emphasis on them here. They're slower, more cerebral (what I don't dislike) and, slightly closer to being conventionally Lovecraftian. There a physically or mentally alienated protagonists, sprawling estates lost in the wilderness, dark secrets buried in the heart of nature, etc. The stories in Occultation have a slightly different tone than what Laird Barron got me used to. So, today I'll be discussing Occultation and Other Stories, the successor to his debut collection The Imago Sequence. The man is a grandmaster at inspiring terror with a few words and I would've have let a month of October pass without reviewing a collection from his. The best horror author working today, * from who I believe I've never anything over a hundred pages long. So, what would make me go out of my way, buy a short story collection to feature on the site? Or rather who? Laird Barron. They're quicker to write and relatively easy to put together in this day and age. If I'd review every short story collection submitted to Dead End Follies, I could go an entire years without featuring a novel on the site.

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