The Croning
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4.0 • 28 Ratings
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- $14.99
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Teeming with the cosmic horrors that distinguish the fiction of Lovecraft, Machen, and other weird fiction masters, this eerie first novel offers up a picture of human civilization as a plaything in the claws of malignant alien entities. Don Miller, a corporate geologist, is married to globe-trotting anthropologist Michelle Mock, who for decades has tracked clues pointing to the existence of "the little people." As Michelle's research exposes her and Don to numerous weird experiences over the years, it becomes evident that she is investigating something primal and that she may be shielding Don from its mind-blasting incomprehensibility. The narrative toggles back and forth from past to present, establishing a rhythm between disturbing events and their foreshadowing that reaches a terrifying climax. Barron (Occultation) has studied the work of his predecessors well; already acknowledged a master of the horror short story, he shows himself equally skilled at novel-length work.
Customer Reviews
The best that cosmic horror has to offer
Incredible book. I’ve revisited Lovecraft for years, searching for the “dread” of cosmic horror experience. The Croning delivered the goods. Barron writes with the lyric of a poet and the story unwinds in miraculous ways. As an eternally optimistic person, I fear the cosmology suggested in this book may cloud my outlook for some time. I’ll never forget this book.
Rip off of Lovecraft
I give it 1.5. It would have worked so much better as a short story than a novel. Even then, it still would have been little more than a homage to Lovecraft.