Occultation and Other Stories

Laird Barron's second collection gathers nine stories, two of them published here for the first time, in which perfectly ordinary people, drinkers and hikers and married couples on a bad weekend, walk into something older and hungrier than they are.

Barron writes in the eldritch tradition of Lovecraft, Thomas Ligotti and Peter Straub, but the register is his own: hard-drinking, physical, rooted in the Pacific Northwest, and more interested in the moment a person realises the ground is not solid than in the thing waiting underneath it. The horror arrives slowly and rarely explains itself.

The collection won the Shirley Jackson Award for Best Collection, and the novella "Mysterium Tremendum" won in the novella category the same year.