mikerickson reviewed The Croning by Laird Barron
Review of 'The Croning' on 'Goodreads'
2 stars
I just had two back-to-back plane flights for a short trip. Were it not for the fact that I didn't bring anything else to read, I don't know that I would've brought myself to finish this book.
This is my second book with this author, and I really enjoyed The Beautiful Thing That Awaits Us All. But whereas I found that to be a very creative and inventive short story collection, this book was a single narrative that felt like an entirely different person wrote it, which is wild considering they were only published a year apart from each other. The Croning also felt very dated, like classic horror literature from the 70's or 80's, so I was surprised to see it came out in 2012.
It's hard to criticize and nail down what I didn't like here, and a large part of that is that there wasn't a …
I just had two back-to-back plane flights for a short trip. Were it not for the fact that I didn't bring anything else to read, I don't know that I would've brought myself to finish this book.
This is my second book with this author, and I really enjoyed The Beautiful Thing That Awaits Us All. But whereas I found that to be a very creative and inventive short story collection, this book was a single narrative that felt like an entirely different person wrote it, which is wild considering they were only published a year apart from each other. The Croning also felt very dated, like classic horror literature from the 70's or 80's, so I was surprised to see it came out in 2012.
It's hard to criticize and nail down what I didn't like here, and a large part of that is that there wasn't a lot that happened in this book. I haven't read as much cosmic horror as other subgenres, but I'm at least aware not to expect outright explanations or a clearly defined central conflict or antagonists. Still, it felt like there was nothing to focus on at all. Tangents and side stories and endless prose out the wazoo in this one! For a story coming in under 250 pages, it felt way longer and a lot could have been trimmed out for the benefit of the main plot. Maybe on a meta level it was an intentional decision to be written that way because the protagonist suffers from multiple signs of dementia (for a reason that has an in-fiction justification). So whenever we did catch a glimpse of something interesting happening in the background it felt like one of his increasingly rare moments of lucidity before it was gone again.
But it didn't roll all the way over for me. There was simply too much unnecessary infodumping and drinking and smoking and out-of-left-field horniness for me to care about the occasional passages I was meant to remember. Or maybe I just don't like books where the most clearly interesting person isn't the protagonist that the narrative is tied to. Or maybe this one just went clear over my head, because a lot of my trusted mutuals on GoodReads gave this one high praise and I cannot understand why.
