The Croning

"This was Laird’s first full-length cosmic horror novel. He had written a shorter novel called The Light is the Darkness , which is a strange, sprawling, Roger-Zelazny-meets-H.-P.-Lovecraft dark fantasy. The Croning concerns a man who is getting older, maybe reaching the end of his natural lifespan. He has been married to the same woman for decades, and he has realised at some point earlier in his life that he doesn’t really know his wife quite as well as he thought. At the end of his life, this grows ever more clear. They’re both older, although she does not seem to have aged quite as harshly as he has… The novel moves back and forth in time between their younger days and their later years, and times in between. In fact, it moves all the way back to a kind of fairy tale time that Laird calls antiquity, which he’s returned to in some of his more recent stories. As part of its plot, the fairy tale character who we may know as Rumpelstiltskin is revealed to be something far worse than Rumpelstiltskin. The novel is ambitious. It’s well-written. And it’s one of the few recent horror novels to have scared me. Laird’s stuff consistently tends to be the stuff that can really still frighten me. There’s lots of other stuff that I love, but which doesn’t have that same effect. The protagonist is experiencing gaps in his memory. Those gaps may be the result of old age, or of something like Alzheimer’s – but they may be the result of things that are far more sinister and terrible. Absolutely. Years ago, a friend of mine posted a picture somewhere on social media: it was a photograph showing a man holding a picture frame, and inside that picture frame was another picture frame, and inside that picture frame… infinite regression of picture frames. And he said, ‘Hey, look, it’s a John Langan story.’ And my friends thought that was much funnier than I did – but at the same time, fair enough. I have to cop to loving nested narratives. I don’t think I’ve gone quite as far as I could possibly go, but I do love and indulge that. Yes. I come from a family of storytellers. My parents were from Scotland. When they were very small, the Second World War was going on, so they grew up during the Blitz and such, and even after that, they grew up without TV, just the radio. So they developed the ability to tell stories. A lot of the stories were just, ‘This is what happened at work today’ or ‘Here’s a crazy thing that happened when I was younger’… When my brother and I were small, we could think of no finer entertainment than a Sean Connery James Bond movie, but they were always broadcast on American TV very late at night. We would only get to stay up and watch the first half hour. But the next day, my father would narrate the rest of the movie to us in exhaustive detail (carefully censored!). So I do have this family heritage of storytelling. At the same time, a lot of the fiction that I read… I really loved things like The Great Gatsby, and Conrad – so much of Conrad is all about those narrators telling stories. So you might say I’m over-determined to write this kind of narrative. Lost in the Dark is my new collection of stories out from Word Horde Press. It’s a collection of stories that I wrote over a couple of years in the later part of the 2010s. When I put together a collection, my methodology is really just chronological; I find it very interesting to take all the stories that I wrote over this thirty-month period, edit them and put them together in a book, and then see what connections develop among them as I’m writing the story notes. In this case, I noticed that a lot of the stories involve the sea or water in some kind of significant way… A lot of them were very deliberate and self-conscious riffs on earlier material. There’s a lot of stuff that looks at found-footage, both in a film sense, but also in the sense of that Dracula reliance on primary documents to tell the story. And there’s one which is a mix of a story and an essay about why I love horror. The book has an introduction by Victor LaValle , which is very flattering and makes me sound much smarter than I am, and for which I am eternally grateful to Victor. The water fascinates me. It’s one of the reasons that I write story notes for my collections. I have to spend time with them in a slightly more editorial or literary-critical way than I do when I’m writing them. Then I’m just trying to let it flow, but after, the literature student comes forth… Some of it has to do with the fact that at the time, I was invited to contribute to a couple of different anthologies whose theme was water horror, for lack of a better word. Horror anthology publishing goes through certain phases. In the early 2000s, it was all zombies, and then in the later 2000s into the teens it was all Lovecraft, and now it seems to be all folk horror. So that’s some of it. But beyond that, water shows up in other stories in all sorts of ways, which makes me wonder, does it represent something more fundamental? There’s important water imagery in my novel The Fisherman, and there have certainly been other stories where water has shown up. I think of water as a particularly liminal kind of space. It’s completely frightening – beautiful and fascinating, but also frightening and imposing."