Beautiful Thing That Awaits Us All

Disclaimer: This book has been on my radar for a while, but I decided to finally get a copy when the author began having medical problems late last year and a lot of my favorite authors asked the horror literature community to step up and help him out.

It's been a while since I've read a single-author short story collection. I always find it fun trying to find similarities or trends between different stories, and this was no exception. Save for one or two of them, all of the stories in this book took place around the same geographical location (PNW/rural Oregon), but over such different time periods that none of the character or events really had a chance of overlapping. I don't know if that was the intention from the start or if these stories were written over the course of a few years and it just kind of shook out that way, but I found it to be an interesting concept for a collection.

And while I understand that a "short story" is kind of an ambiguous term, some of these were quite long. I did some rough math, and the longest of them was almost three times longer than the shortest one, so at least there was some variety to keep things fresh. Beyond the setting, the only other throughline I noticed were surprisingly big casts of named characters and a repeated character archetype of just a really broad-chested, muscular man showing up in a few iterations (which I'm not complaining about, but I was just amused that it kept happening).

This was certainly a very creative collection, or at least that's the word that kept coming to mind. Some of the entries felt like proof of concepts to see what limits a horror story could be told within. A group of Victorian-era big game hunters try tracking down their most dangerous target yet, and find themselves being turned prey themselves. A group of school teachers have their annual end-of-summer get together at a haunted lake. A Prohibition-era mobster seeks revenge on someone who put a hit out on him and finds an occult turf war instead. A woman hides out in the woods from her abusive ex-husband and ends up in one of the most unique spins on a werewolf mythos I've ever read. An NSA agent is tasked with getting intel on a reclusive professor and experiences a night that defies description. I routinely found myself thinking, "I would've never even thought of that concept."

Not all of the entries landed for me, but the ones that did were fantastic. And there's also the issue you run into reviewing any short story collection that has a wide variance in quality (sometimes I found the prose very plain and straightforward, other times the literary devices were beautifully leaking out of the pages), but overall this should be one to pick up if you're tired of the same old horror tropes you've read a hundred times before and want a fresh breath of creativity.

The best stories in this collection could be labeled "rustic horror." Many of them take place in the Pacific Northwest, in the deepest forests and shadowy valleys. The protagonists are often rough and tumble men who are nevertheless set on edge by a variety of creepy occurrences. Imagine Jack London writing spooky stories and you'd be on the right track.

While the rustic horror stories are great, the ones set in more modern and more urban locales were much less engaging. These stories tended to be longer and also more obscure (probably with the intent of creating a phantasmagorical atmosphere), which made matters worse.

One thing I found interesting was the use of Old Scratch himself, the Devil, as the prime supernatural threat in many of the tales. While this might seem cliched to some, I actually found it delightfully retro, reminding me of the "Satanic Panic" stories from the 70s and 80s. There's some Lovecraft homage in here too, but more an appreciative acknowledgement than slavish devotion.

While I didn't love every story in this volume, I came away with a strong interest in Laird Barron's work. Recommended for horror fans, especially those who enjoy the classics of the genre and rural settings.