Most Popular Books by Laird Barron

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 eighty years, leading a charmed life between endearing absent-mindedness and sanity-shattering realization. Now, all things must converge. Donald will discover the dark secrets along the edges, unearthing savage truths about his wife Michelle, their adult twins, and all he knows and trusts. For Donald is about to stumble on the secret... ...of The Croning. From Laird Barron, Shirley Jackson Award-winning author of The Imago Sequence and Occultation, comes The Croning, a debut novel of cosmic horror.

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. Barron returns with his third collection, The Beautiful Thing That Awaits Us All. Collecting interlinking tales of sublime cosmic horror, including “Blackwood’s Baby,” “The Carrion Gods in Their Heaven,” and “The Men from Porlock,” The Beautiful Thing That Awaits Us All delivers enough spine-chilling horror to satisfy even the most jaded reader.

It''s about to get very dark. Bram Stoker Award-winning author Laird Barron returns to the dark and dreadful with his fifth horror collection, which weaves sixteen weird tales into a mosaic of the bloody and the macabre. Bring a flashlight and a book of matches. Where we''re going, there''s not a speck of light.

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.

Laird Barron has emerged as one of the strongest voices in modern horror and dark fantasy fiction, building on the eldritch tradition pioneered by writers such as H. P. Lovecraft, Peter Straub, and Thomas Ligotti. His stories have garnered critical acclaim and 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. His debut collection, The Imago Sequence and Other Stories, was the inaugural winner of the Shirley Jackson Award. He returns with his second collection, Occultation. 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." Featuring an introduction by Michael Shea, Occultation brings more of the spine-chillingly sublime cosmic horror Laird Barron''s fans have come to expect.

Introduction by Paul Tremblay Publishers Weekly top ten list for most anticipated horror/Scifi Fall 2016 releases. Laird Barron’s fourth collection gathers a dozen stories set against the backdrops of the Alaskan wilderness, far-future dystopias, and giallo-fueled nightmare vistas. All hell breaks loose in a massive apartment complex when a modern day Jack the Ripper strikes under cover of a blizzard; a woman, famous for surviving a massacre, hits the road to flee the limelight and finds her misadventures have only begun; while tracking a missing B-movie actor, a team of man hunters crashes in the Yukon Delta and soon realize the Arctic is another name for hell; an atomic-powered cyborg war dog loyally assists his master in the overthrow of a far-future dystopian empire; following an occult initiation ritual, a man is stalked by a psychopathic sorority girl and her team of horrifically disfigured henchmen; a rich lunatic invites several high school classmates to his mansion for a night of sex, drugs, and CIA-funded black ops experiments; and other glimpses into occulted realities a razor’s slice beyond our own. Combining hardboiled noir, psychological horror, and the occult, Swift to Chase continues three-time Shirley Jackson Award winner Barron’s harrowing inquiry into the darkness of the human heart.

A novel set in the underbelly of upstate New York that''s as hardboiled and punchy as a swift right hook to the jaw, a classic noir for fans of James Ellroy and John D. Macdonald. Isaiah Coleridge is a mob enforcer in Alaska--he''s tough, seen a lot, and dished out more. But when he forcibly ends the money-making scheme of a made man, he gets in the kind of trouble that can lead to a bullet behind the ear. Saved by the grace of his boss and exiled to upstate New York, Isaiah begins a new life, a quiet life without gunshots or explosions. Except a teenage girl disappears, and Isaiah isn''t one to let that slip by. And delving into the underworld to track this missing girl will get him exactly the kind of notice he was warned to avoid. At turns brutally shocking and darkly funny, heartbreaking and cautiously hopeful, Blood Standard is both a high-tension crime novel and the story of a man''s second chance--the parts of his past he will never escape, and the parts that will shape his future.

Ex-mob enforcer-turned-private investigator Isaiah Coleridge pits himself against a rich and powerful foe when he digs into a possible murder and a sketchy real-estate deal worth billions. Ex-majordomo and bodyguard to an industrial tycoon-cum-U.S. senator, Badja Adeyemi is in hiding and shortly on his way to either a jail cell or a grave, depending on who finds him first. In his final days as a free man, he hires Isaiah Coleridge to tie up a loose end: the suspicious death of his nephew four years earlier. At the time police declared it an accident, and Adeyemi isn''t sure it wasn''t, but one final look may bring his sister peace. So it is that Coleridge and his investigative partner, Lionel Robard, find themselves in the upper reaches of New York State, in a tiny town that is home to outsized secrets and an unnerving cabal of locals who are protecting them. At the epicenter of it all is the site of a stalled supercollider project, an immense subterranean construction that may have an even deeper, more insidious purpose. . . .

Winner of the 2010 Shirley Jackson Award, nine stories of cosmic horror from the heir apparent to Lovecraft’s throne. Laird Barron has emerged as one of the strongest voices in modern horror and dark fantasy fiction, building on the eldritch tradition pioneered by writers such as H. P. Lovecraft, Peter Straub, and Thomas Ligotti. His 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. His debut collection, The Imago Sequence and Other Stories, was the inaugural winner of the Shirley Jackson Award. He returns with his second collection, Occultation. Pitting ordinary men and women against a carnivorous, chaotic cosmos, Occulation’s nine tales of terror (two published here for the first time) were nominated for just as many Shirley Jackson awards, winning for the novella “Mysterium Tremendum” and the collection as a whole. Featuring an introduction by Michael Shea, Occultation brings more of the spine-chillingly sublime cosmic horror Laird Barron’s fans have come to expect. Skyhorse Publishing, under our Night Shade and Talos imprints, is proud to publish a broad range of titles for readers interested in science fiction (space opera, time travel, hard SF, alien invasion, near-future dystopia), fantasy (grimdark, sword and sorcery, contemporary urban fantasy, steampunk, alternative history), and horror (zombies, vampires, and the occult and supernatural), and much more. While not every title we publish becomes a New York Times bestseller, a national bestseller, or a Hugo or Nebula award-winner, we are committed to publishing quality books from a diverse group of authors.

Ex-mob enforcer Isaiah Coledrige has hung out a shingle as a private eye in New York''s Hudson Valley, and in his newest case, a seemingly simple murder investigation leads him to the most terrifying enemy he has ever faced When a small-time criminal named Harold Lee turns up in the Ashokan reservoir--sans a heartbeat, head, or hands--the local mafia capo hires Isaiah Coleridge to look into the matter. The mob likes crime, but only the crime it controls . . . and as it turns out, Lee is the second independent contractor to meet a bad end on the business side of a serrated knife. One such death can be overlooked. Two makes a man wonder. A guy in Harold Lee''s business would make his fair share of enemies, and it seems a likely case of pure revenge. But as Coledrige turns over more stones, he finds himself dragged into something deeper and more insidious than he could have imagined, in a labyrinthine case spanning decades. At the center are an heiress moonlighting as a cabaret dancer, a powerful corporation with high-placed connections, and a serial killer who may have been honing his skills since the Vietnam War. . . A twisty, action-packed follow-up to the acclaimed Blood Standard, Black Mountain cements Laird Barron as an inventive and remarkable voice in crime fiction.

A pair of sisters are hired to find--and if necessary, dispose of--whatever is killing neighborhood pets in a dying town. At the Publisher''s request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.

Paul Tremblay, Ramsey Campbell, and other modern masters of horror explore just how scary it is to be alone in this horror anthology featuring 20 horror short stories! Lost in the wilderness, or alone in the dark, isolation remains one of our deepest held fears. This horror anthology from Shirley Jackson and British Fantasy Award finalist Dan Coxon calls on leading horror writers to confront the dark moments, the challenges that we must face alone: survivors in a world gone silent; the outcast shunned by society; the quiet voice trapped in the crowd; the lonely and forgotten, screaming into the abyss. Featuring short horror stories by: • Nina Allan • Laird Barron • Ramsey Campbell • M.R. Carey • Chịkọdịlị Emelumadu • Brian Evenson • Owl Goingback • Gwendolyn Kiste • Joe R. Lansdale • Tim Lebbon • Alison Littlewood • Ken Liu • Jonathan Maberry • Michael Marshall Smith • Mark Morris • Lynda E. Rucker • A.G. Slatter • Paul Tremblay • Lisa Tuttle • Marian Womack Experience the chilling terrors of isolation!

The stories are legendary, the characters unforgettable, the world horrible and disturbing. Howard Phillips Lovecraft may have been a writer for only a short time, but the creations he left behind after his death in 1937 have shaped modern horror more than any other author in the last two centuries: the shambling god Cthulhu, and the other deities of the Elder Things, the Outer Gods, and the Great Old Ones, and Herbert West, Reanimator, a doctor who unlocked the secrets of life and death at a terrible cost. In Lovecraft Unbound, more than twenty of today''s most prominent writers of literature and dark fantasy tell stories set in or inspired by the works of H. P. Lovecraft.

A blockbuster anthology of original, blood-curdling vampire fiction from New York Times bestselling and award-winning authors, including Charlaine Harris, whose novels were adapted into HBO’s hit show True Blood, and Scott Smith, publishing his first work since The Ruins. Before being transformed into romantic heroes and soft, emotional antiheroes, vampires were figures of overwhelming terror. Now, from some of the biggest names in horror and dark fiction, comes this stellar collection of short stories that make vampires frightening once again. Edited by New York Times bestselling author Christopher Golden and featuring all-new stories from such contributors as Charlaine Harris, John Ajvide Lindqvist, Scott Smith, Sherrilyn Kenyon, Michael Kortya, Kelley Armstrong, Brian Keene, David Wellington, Seanan McGuire, and Tim Lebbon, Seize the Night is old-school vampire fiction at its finest.

The eighth book in Little Book Series II is by one of the best writers of his generation—Laird Barron, and A Little Brown Book of Burials is a great intro to his work if you’ve never read him. Stories included in this collection: "Gamma" "Man with No Name" "D T" "Babes in the Wilderness" **NOTE** This digital edition has been re-edited and all content missing from the original print publication has been included.

Capturing the electric short fiction energy that led Robert E. Howard to be one of the top fantasy writers of the century, with exclusive serialized eBook stories starring Conan, Solomon Kane, and more by many of today’s top writers in fantasy and sword-and-sorcery. After killing his latest employer, a bored Conan wanders Stygia. His wanderlust is brought to an end when he is bitten by an asp. Though he attempts to extract the venom, it’s no use. At death’s door, the Cimmerian is saved by an otherworldly woman and a skull-headed tarantula. Conan awakens being attended to by the merchant Khal, an acolyte of the strange goddess who saved his life. Khal came to Conan’s aid because Conan has been blessed by The Lady of the Desert; the Cimmerian is fated for something extraordinary. As it happens, fate is a seductive priestess with a legend to tell and coin to offer. Will Conan answer her call to adventure?