Laird Samuel Barron (born 1970) is an award winning author and poet, much of whose work falls within the horror, noir, and dark fantasy genres. He has also been the Managing Editor of the online literary magazine Melic Review. He lives in Washington.
Bestselling author Stewart O'Nan said of his work:“If you think there aren't any new Richard Mathesons or Harlan Ellisons out there, you need to read Laird Barron.”Nick Gevers, reviewing for Locus Magazine, has called Barron, "...a miraculous synthesis of Lovecraft and Lucius Shepard." LOCUS October 2005, Issue 537 vol. 55 no. 4
Mr. Barron spent his early years in Alaska, where he raced the Iditarod three times during the early 1990s. He has described the circumstances of his youth in various interviews as exceedingly harsh due to his family's dwelling in isolated regions and general poverty. Barron retired from racing and moved to Washington in 1994 where he became a certified strength trainer and earned a third degree brown belt in Professor Bradley J. Steiner's Jen Do Tao system, a fighting art based on WWII close quarters combat techniques developed by W.E. Fairbairn and Colonel Rex Applegate. At that time he became active on the poetry scene, publishing with a number of online journals and eventually serving as the managing editor of the Melic Review, a journal once praised by United States Poet Laureate Billy Collins. His professional writing debut occurred in 2001 when Gordon Van Gelder published Shiva, Open Your Eye in the September issue of The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction. Barron's debut collection, The Imago Sequence & Other Stories, was published in 2007 by Night Shade Books.
He credits among his major influences Michael Shea, Peter Straub, Cormac McCarthy, TED Klein, Roger Zelazny, Martin Cruz Smith, H.P. Lovecraft, Robert E. Howard, Shirley Jackson, Jack Vance and poets such as Mark Strand, Anne Sexton, Sylvia Plath, Wallace Stevens, and Charles Simic. He has stated affection for pulp fiction, westerns, and noir, and his work typically combines one or more of these elements with a horrific or weird supernatural intrusion. Barron has frequently referred to the Bible as "the greatest horror story ever told."
Known as a Lovecraftian, in recent years his techniques have expanded to feature body and psychological horror, and ghostly tales. While his sophomore collection Occultation possesses elements of cosmic and Lovecraftian horror and his trademark fascination with masculine themes as depicted by burned out tough guy protagonists and hardboiled/noir tropes, there is a significant shift toward naturalistic treatments of the occult and the weird, and a more nuanced exploration of such subjects as sexuality and romance.
In addition to The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Barron's work has been featured in SCI FICTION, New Tales of Terror and the Supernatural, Lovecraft Unbound, New Tales of Lovecraftian Horror, and The Del Rey Book of Science Fiction and Fantasy. It has also been reprinted in numerous year's best anthologies and nominated for multiple awards.
