The current featured contributor to Writers Read: Laird Barron, a writer whose work has appeared in places such as The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, SCIFICTION, Inferno: New Tales of Terror and the Supernatural, and The Del Rey Book of Science Fiction and Fantasy. It has also been reprinted in numerous year's best anthologies. His debut collection, The Imago Sequence & Other Stories, was recently published by Night Shade and was named an outstanding horror title of the year by the American Library Association.One book he mentions:
One of the best thrillers I've encountered in recent years is Sarah Langan's second novel, The Missing. This is a horror novel in the macabre tradition of early Stephen King, except, I daresay, more disturbing than King's early work. To borrow from comments I made for a libraryVisit Laird Barron's website and LiveJournal.recommendations project: "In The Missing, a boy sneaks away from a class field trip and stumbles across a bizarre clearing in the woods -- a clearing where the earth has gone black with blood and animal bones are piled in sacrificial biers. The boy's intrusion stirs a great evil that soon begins to consume the Maine town of Corpus Christi, transforming its unwitting citizenry into something atavistic, and, ultimately, quite inhuman. Langan wrenches the hoary tropes of sleepy towns and festering curses into the Twenty-first Century. Her depiction of small town life and the dark side of human nature would be no less compelling were it utterly stripped of its supernatural elements." A superior thriller, The Missing made the American Library Association's Reading List as an outstanding title in the horror genre. [read on]
Writers Read: Laird Barron.
--Marshal Zeringue
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