The Beautiful Thing That Awaits Us All by Laird Barron
My rating: 3/5 cats
friday night, i killed a bug.
now, i don’t like to kill things, even bugs, but i have a code: if you are a spider, or a moth, or a housefly, or one of these teeny tiny black beetles we seem to get every summer, you get to go out the window. i will spend a very long time, in some cases, chasing you and containing you in a juice glass, and setting you free. where you will probably be eaten by a bird, but that’s out of my hands. however, if you are a roach, you gotta go, man, i’m sorry. i don’t cotton to roaches living in my cupboards. this… i have no clue what this was. it was flying around my lightbulbs, and it was so big, its wings were audible, like “bzzzzzzzzz”
but deep.
and i couldn’t reach it with the paper towels i was trying to swat it with, because the ceiling is too high. and my cat was all crouching huntress style, looking up at it with huge golden eyes.
finally, i just had to do it. in my defense, i really wanted to watch project runway, and this bug was just too disruptive, making all that noise, and blocking the light. (seriously, it was BIG) i got this can of raid and i started squirting it up at the bug. probably not the best idea because it was one of those cans that doesn’t give off the nice fan of spray, but a highly-concentrated stream of it, like a hose. so i was just spraying this poison everywhere. but i hit the bug on the third go, and it collapsed onto a book. and i smooshed it. and blood came out of it. red blood.
i do not know what kind of bug it was. it was about quarter-sized, and it had wings like a moth, but also a fucking stinger. and it was filled with blood. presumably my blood.
so, and here we get to the point of this story.
my cat.
she was freaked out. i don’t know if it was the smell of the poison or what, but she would not go into that room for the rest of the night. i say this as though there are many rooms. mine is a studio apartment, and she basically hid in the hallway-to-the-outside or, once i tried to carry her back in with me, the hallway-to-the-bathroom. and even that would have been fine, except for her eyes. they were crazy. she stayed in battle-ready position for the whole night – crouched down low, muscles tensed, and staring STARING up at the ceiling where the bug had been flying. my cat is not a dope – she knew the bug was long gone. but it is a really haunting thing to see a cat hunkered down and staring with bigger-than-normal eyes at… nothing. for hours.
and i was reading this book over on the bed, and all i could see were her giant golden eyes in the darkness, staring at nothing. and it made me very uncomfortable, and i just felt off for the rest of the night, which also might have been poison-fumes, but i was very on edge, and feeling like there was a vengeful ghost or something, angry that i had murdered its friend.
which is kind of a perfect setting to read this book.
this is my first laird barron book. i have been meaning to read him for a while because loads of people i respect love him.
but i didn’t love it as much as i had expected, even though the last story was absolute perfection.
apparently, laird barron writes in that style of horror that i have run into before with algernon blackwood and lovecraft that just leaves me cold: all things slithery and ritual sacrifice and the ineffable. and if you are one of the hundreds of thousands of people who enjoy those authors, i beseech you to pick this up, because you are going to love it.
because even though the payoffs in these stories don’t work for me on a horror level, just because of my inability to respond to the great paralyzing ineffable, his writing is fantastic. most of these stories interlock in some way, mostly by location, and he writes beautiful atmosphere and tension, and his characters are well-written. i loved the blending of noir-tough-guy stories with “that which goes bump in the night.” i loved the creeping sense of dread that permeated these stories. i just wasn’t really a fan of the big bad, when it was unveiled. or wasn’t.
again, the flaw in this equation is me and my particular tastes. i am still trying to figure out what kind of horror works best for me. slashery-bloody types don’t do it, and the unexplained dark powers don’t do it, and yet i long to read horror that affects me. i am going to keep trying.
and those of you who haven’t tried laird barron should try this one.
just watch out for bugs.
