Jayaprakash Satyamurthy
Knivesout no more
- Shiva, Open Your Eye
Barron gazes long into the cosmic gloaming in the course of the short stories assembled in The Imago Sequence, his first short story collection. What he sees is a doomed, oblivious race, scuttling about in chaotic orbits, attending parties, chasing thrills, living lives, unaware that something larger lurks behind the scenes, waiting to devour everything.
Shiva, Open Your Eye is the oldest story here, and in some ways the most rudimentary. After a short scene-setting introduction we are plunged into an extended monologue from an ancient consciousness that exists merely to destroy and devour. This is at once the most bare and the most telling story in the collection; it sets the stage, I think, lets us know what kind of a ride we are in for.
Elsewhere, Barron indulges an obsessive eye for surface detail, piling nuance after nuance up in a sort of phantasmagoria that embraces the quotidian with the same brio with which it trots out the horrific. The story The Royal Zoo Is Closed is nearly all detail - a kaleidoscopic view of the apocalypse that resolves into a Beckettian stalemate for its impotent protagonist.
In between these two extremes, Barron tells us a variety of tales that partake of the surface conventions of noir, with their tough-guy protagonist, investigative thrust, settings that are either seedy, glamorous or a mix of both, and a certain dry, wry tone of voice. There's a Pinkerton detective chasing a circus freak who has stolen a tome of ancient terrors across the old West; a failed wrestler and strongarm man who is sent to track down a missing millionaire and the last photo in a sequence that purports to show the face of pure, primal evil (or is it ultimate, bind Godhead?); a corporate spy who tracks shady dealings in Asia and winds up in a very nasty Buddhist hell and so on.
These are men of the world, not Lovecraft's wimpy scholars. They're tough customers who can swing a punch and take one too. They live in worlds where crazy stuff of the more mundane, violent variety is common. And then, the other sort of crazy stuff - the bad, supernatural sort - filters through.
Barron conjures up a baroque filigree of disjointed yet telling horrific detail overlaid on the very real world his protagonists inhabit. There are vast entities, primal, blind predators lurking behind the surfaces he so lovingly describes, and the surfaces crumble away to reveal the horrors within in story after story.
Most of his stories are loosely linked by characters, phrases or concepts. These tales are largely set in the USA and can be read as an interlinked series if you want to. Procession Of The Black Sloth stands apart from these with its Asian setting and retributive rather than merely all-consuming terrors; it may represent a new departure for Barron. Either way, I'm, convinced that here is a very original stylist, a sort of richly patterned, sensory-overloading complement to Ligotti's more austere, tenebrous fiction. A writer who evokes a truly cosmic sense of unease.
- Shiva, Open Your Eye
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