Laird Barron, Author

Laird Barron writes mostly short cosmic horror fiction, although it would be a mistake to stick him in that one box.

“Short fiction can be more than a trivial amusement, or short, sharp shock, or a quick kiss in the dark. Short fiction can and often does aspire to true greatness. Ambition is permitted. Short fiction opens a keyhole into the universe. If you’re lucky, short stories dilate and become discrete universes.”

— Laird Barron, Interview with Dead End Follies, 30 October 2016

His first sale was an odd story of just under 6,000 words, called Shiva, Open Your Eye which appeared in the September 2001 issue of the Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction. Shiva, Open Your Eye was reprinted in Nightmare Magazine in June 2013 and can be read online there.

No matter what genre he’s writing in, his stories all operate in the same Laird Barron universe. (Although there is a belief that there may be two Laird Barron universes that sometimes crossover.) His stories often connect in some way and readers find enjoyment in going back and rereading stories to try and spot those connections.

Laird Barron’s stories are character-driven narratives that use setting and atmosphere, secrets and darkness, to weird us out. His characters tend towards spies, enforcers, and thugs, and are often described as ‘tough’. However, he’s not a fan of his characters being described as ‘tough’ because, to him, these traits are reflective of the normal Alaskan people he grew up around.

“It’s probably more accurate to say my work focuses on gritty characters undergoing trauma.”

— Laird Barron, Interview with Smash Dragons, 3 August 2016

Laird Barron describes his first three short story collections (The Imago Sequence, Occultation and Other Stories, and The Beautiful Thing That Awaits Us All) as a ‘loose trilogy’ of cosmic horror with some noir and occult influences thrown into the mix.

He wrote mostly horror for fifteen years, pumping out a lot of shorter fiction as well as two novels, The Light Is the Darkness (out of print) and The Croning. Then he decided to give crime and mystery a go, publishing the Isaiah Coleridge trilogy (Blood Standard, Black Mountain, and Worse Angels), which also touch on the supernatural.

While he embraces Lovecraft’s literary influence, he also finds inspiration in writers such as Peter Straub, Michael Shea, and Jack Vance, among others.

If you look closely, you might also find some overlaps between Laird Barron stories and John Langan stories. Barron has said that in the early 2000s, they agreed to borrow elements where one may have mentioned something briefly but decided not to explore it more. For example, Barron took a Broadsword symbol from the runes in Langan’s novelette On Skua Island and ran with it in his Old Leech mythos.

His short story —30—, about two scientists researching land once occupied by a cult, was adapted in 2018 into the movie They Remain.