Showing results by author "Laird Barron" in Science Fiction & Fantasy

Pitting ordinary men and women against a carnivorous, chaotic cosmos, Occultation's eight tales of terror (two never before published) include the Theodore Sturgeon and Shirley Jackson Award-nominated story "The Forest" and Shirley Jackson Award nominee "The Lagerstatte."

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 80 years, leading a charmed life between endearing absent-mindedness and sanity-shattering realization. Now, all things must converge.

The Gods of H.P. Lovecraft: a brand new anthology that collects the 12 principal deities of the Lovecraftian Mythos and sets them loose. Featuring the biggest names in horror and dark fantasy, including many New York Times best sellers; full of original fiction; and individual commentary on each of the deities by Donald Tyson.

The title story of this collection - a devilishly ironic riff on H. P. Lovecraft's "Pickman's Model" - was nominated for a World Fantasy Award, while "Probiscus" was nominated for an International Horror Guild award and reprinted in The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror 19. In addition to his previously published work, this collection contains an original story.

Over the course of two award-winning collections and a critically acclaimed novel, The Croning, Laird Barron has arisen as one of the strongest and most original literary voices in modern horror and the dark fantastic. Melding supernatural horror with hardboiled noir, espionage, and a scientific backbone, Barron's stories have garnered critical acclaim and have been reprinted in numerous year's best anthologies and nominated for multiple awards, including the Crawford, International Horror Guild, Shirley Jackson, Theodore Sturgeon, and World Fantasy awards.

Darkness, both literal and psychological, holds its own unique fascination. Despite our fears, or perhaps because of them, listeners have always been drawn to tales of death, terror, madness, and the supernatural, and no more so than today when a wildly imaginative new generation of dark dreamers is carrying on in the tradition of Poe and Lovecraft and King, crafting exquisitely disturbing literary nightmares that gaze without flinching into the abyss - and linger in the mind long after.

Here are six stories from the January and February 2003 issues of The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, at once more current and more human than today's headlines.

Brothers Macbeth and Drederick Tooms should have it made as fair-haired scions of an impossibly rich and powerful family of industrialists. Alas, life is complicated in mid-1950s USA when you're child heirs to the throne of Sword Enterprises, a corporation that has enshrined Machiavelli's The Prince as its operating manual. Consider also those long, cruel winters at the Mountain Leopard Boarding School for Assassins in the Himalayas, or that Dad may be a supervillain, while an uncle occasionally slaughters his nephews and nieces for sport.