The Imago Sequence

Starred review from August 20, 2007
Horrors that defy description and challenge reader expectations charge the electrifying stories in this powerful debut collection. Barron synthesizes influences ranging from H.P. Lovecraft to hard-boiled crime fiction in nine ingeniously plotted tales whose many layers peel away to reveal highly original and viscerally unsettling premises. “Old Virginia” is narrated by a Cold War–era CIA agent, unaware that the chaos around him is due not to Communists but to occult forces escaping the control of the scientists he's guarding. In the period western “Bulldozer,” a Pinkerton agent discovers that serial killings are part of an elaborate occult ritual for placating a supernatural entity. The title story concerns a triptych of photographs used by a malign cult to snare acquisitive art collectors. Barron intensifies the emotional impact of his fiction by providing protagonists who ultimately realize that their doom is inevitable and drag the reader down with them. These vividly imagined and eerily credible stories herald a potent new voice in horror fiction.

Starred review from September 15, 2007
H. P. Lovecrafts bleak vision of huge, evil creatures from outer space that once dominated Earth and will again has captivated sf-minded horror writers from the moment it began appearing in 1920s pulp magazines. Barron one-ups most if not all his Lovecraftian predecessors by casting entirely different characters in the old roles. Whereas Lovecrafts protagonists areeccentric scholars, Barrons are thugs and spies working for tycoons and black-ops masterminds. Whereas Lovecrafts Old Ones are extraterrestrial, Barrons monsters are revoltingly earthy yet psychically controlling. Lovecraft wrote a hyperbolic prose in which relatively rare words like eldritchwere staples and that rose in pitch until the narrator ran out of breath and/or sanity. Barron doesnt shrink from going over the top, but his narrators, like some of pulp crime novelist Jim Thompsons, keep going beyond when they should be dead. And while what happens just after a Lovecraft ending seems predictable and fatal, Barron sometimes leaves us wondering whether the protagonist just might make it. Barrons repertoire of genre manners is greater than Lovecrafts; H. P. never plonked his beasties down in the Old West, as Barron does to hilarious, but still scary, effect in Bulldozer.Bloody wonderful stuff.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2007, American Library Association.)