The Imago Sequence and Other Stories by Laird Barron

My rating: 1 of 5 stars


I would normally dislike anyone who writes in a library book, but in this case, whoever it was made some good points about Barron's writing. Here are a few examples starting with the quote from the book and then the penciled in notes (though I sometimes elaborate on those notes to make them clearer for you):

"Silence spread like a riptide..." (p. 178)
What does that mean? Riptides don't spread.

"I might as well have stared down the drain pipe of a gun..." (p. 182)
What? You mean the barrel since guns don't have drains.

"His truck dwindles and is lost when I round the bend." (p. 182)
No, the view dwindles.

"Jacob was feeling enigmatic when he called..." (p. 199)
People don't "feel" enigmatic; they act or seem it. Also, how would the narrator know what Jacob was feeling?

I wanted to like this book. I wanted to like the title story since it's one of his most acclaimed, but none of this worked for me. Okay, with one exception: I did enjoy the first story, "Old Virginia," but everything else failed. Even if I liked a story such as "Parallax", the ending was so bad I suddenly hated everything that came before it for wasting my time.




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A Collection of Desires: 7 Tales of Modern Horror by Shawn C. Baker

My rating: 2 of 5 stars


I really wanted to like this. I did. And I thought the first story, "Scare Me" was promising, but fell apart at the end. Which is what I found to be the case in most of the stories. There's no doubt that this writer has talent, but his endings remained unsatisfactory throughout. I think plotting is, perhaps, his biggest weakness.

There are other problems, but they are mostly easily fixed. For example, in "The Apartment" the ending is revealed at the beginning. Fine in some cases, but not here. Also, the title is rather bland and could easily be better, more enticing.

The biggest problem I had was with the story arc of "In His Arms, She Felt Loved" which I thoroughly disliked. It's about a woman afraid of her boyfriend who ends up accidentally killing him. She then frets about getting rid of the body when it's easily self-defense. Immediately, I had trouble regarding the character's motivation, especially since they lived together. It's not as though eliminating the corpse would eliminate her as a suspect. I found the character's intelligence and reasoning deeply flawed, not that it mattered as the out of left field ending mostly rendered it moot.

I guess that would be the other problem I noticed. Many of the endings didn't seem earned. Often, they came out of left field, I suppose as a surprise, but really they're just happening because. It feels lazy. There are some good concepts here, that, if workshopped to their full potential, would make good stories. Instead, they are wasted as setups to endings that don't work.

I hope that the author takes more time on his next collection as his work has potential. But it's not in this volume.



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