Occultation

Starred review from April 19, 2010
Writing with a poet's eye for detail and a folklorist's understanding of mythos, Barron lives up to his reputation for elegant, subtle, and nightmare-inducing tales with a Lovecraftian edge in his second short story collection (after 2007's The Imago Sequence and Other Stories
), which includes six reprints and three original stories. In “The Lagerstätte,” a woman who cannot come to terms with her husband's loss clings to an occult artifact said to reunite lovers whom death has separated. A guerrilla art exhibit turns murderous in the taut and bloody “Strappado.” A mysterious guidebook leads four men on a terrifying camping trip in “Mysterium Tremendum.” Heartbreaking, hilarious, sophisticated, and gory, these stories will thrill, trouble, and haunt Barron's fans and have newcomers scrambling to search for his other work.

Starred review from May 15, 2010
Most of, maybe all, the nine stories in Barrons second book belong to his bold and artful variation, launched in The Imago Sequence and Other Stories (2007), of H. P. Lovecrafts Cthulhu mythos, according to which hideous aliens are emerging from within the earth to wipe out humanity. One says maybe all because Barrons tight focus on a single protagonist or two intimately related ones makes us unsure that were getting all the info we need to figure out just whats going on. That is, Barron puts us in a predicament like those of the protagonists, who hardly believe what they must noticeor die. The Lagersttte may be what it seems, an unusually harrowing record of a woman descending into suicidal madness after her husband and son perish in a plane crash, but then she does hear voices, like the much more overtly threatened macho gay friends in Mysterium Tremendum, memory-haunted retiree in The Broadsword, ex-lover wildlife researchers in --30--, and young marrieds investigating the house inherited from his occultist father in Six Six Six. Unfortunately, voices arent all that the woman in Occultation hears. In every tale, everything heard and unheard, seen and unseen becomes creepier and creepier. The protagonists try to escape by drinking, drugging, fighting, fucking, even fleeing. Yet its doubtful any of their gorgeously scary stories has much of a sequel.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2010, American Library Association.)