"Strange things exist on the periphery of our existence, haunting us from the darkness looming beyond our firelight. Black magic, weird cults and worse things loom in the shadows. The Children of Old Leech have been with us from time immemorial. And they love us. Donald Miller, geologist and academic, has walked along the edge of a chasm for most of his nearly eighty years, leading a charmed life between endearing absent-mindedness and sanity-shattering realization. Now, all things must converge. Donald will discover the dark secrets along the edges, unearthing savage truths about his wife Michelle, their adult twins, and all he knows and trusts. For Donald is about to stumble on the secret of The Croning."--Provided by publisher.
I was looking for Lovecraftian books and this book was recommended by multiple lists I found. Unfortunately I hated it and finished it out of spite. The book is for the most part, utterly mind-numbingly boring. The part I was looking forward to the most was writing this review to vent my frustration with this awful book. It is certainly Lovecraftian, but horror it is not. Not once did I feel uneasy, afraid or any other feeling I am looking for when reading horror. Why anyone would recommend this book is beyond me. It is best forgotten as there are so many other books you could read which are not this bad.
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.
This is a strange and occasionally disturbing tale of Lovecraftian horror. Barron does an expert job of infusing the edges of the story with dread and a certainty that everything is not exactly as it seems. Which, of course, it isn't.
