Strange Aeons: Issue #9 Now Available, Featuring Comics, News, Reviews, Art, and Original Fiction by Stephen Graham Jones

cover by JD Busch

Sometimes its better to be lucky than good.

This is exactly how I feel about my current position as the Fiction Editor of Strange Aeons magazine, which was a favorite, four-time-a-year read of mine long before I was set up with a SA e-mail account.

As a child of the late 70's/early 80's who haunted dingy book stores and "hobby shops" - as retailers devoted to RPGs, lead figurines, models, comics, fiction, and other geekery were known back then - whenever I could get my mother to drop me off for a few hours, my foundation is girded with the aesthetic of pulpy fantasy/sci fi mags like Heavy Metal, oversize horror comics like Eerie and Creepy, wargaming journals like Dragon and White Dwarf, and brawny, ultra violent sword & sorcery black and whites like Savage Sword of Conan.  My inner world of fantasy was carved out by illustrators and writers of the ghastly and the fantastic, at that age when my mind was a sponge and imagination was my dearest friend.  As such, these images and textures are ingrained in me, bonded with that peculiar childhood DNA that shades the rest of one's days.

This was before I knew who H.P. Lovecraft was (although I was absorbing his echoes almost everywhere), or that Weird fiction existed as a vibrant, established scene, with proud roots, a present, and a future.  This was before I knew that I wanted to be a writer (or an editor), but I was certain - then, and now - that I loved to live in those dark, haunting, exhilarating worlds more than any other. Reality for me was doomed in the face of such unconquerable competition.  Fantasy, and all of its far flung outposts, would be my mental escape route when the dulling grind of reality threatened to pull me down in the morass of the crushingly common.

So, imagine my childish glee when I stumbled across Strange Aeons a few years ago, just as I embarked on my creative journey back home to my roots. It took me back to those cramped, out of the way shops, to that distinctive smell of moldering paper and ink and musty air spiced with junk food wrappers stuffing the bin behind the counter. Strange Aeons seemed like a throwback to those times, and celebrated a tradition of fantasticism and FUN (a concept often forgotten in this often grim, post ironic days) that I had missed so much.

Making the Masthead, flanking a stellar ToC

I quickly became a fanboy of the magazine, and struck up a professional relationship with Strange Aeons creator K.L. Young, who - along with Rick Tillman and Laurence Amiotte - made up the magazine's core at the time.  Content in my glorification of the lost art of the Pulps on the pages of Strange Aeons, which has featured some of the best in Lovecraftian, horror, and Weird fiction writers, artists, craftsman, retailers, and newsmakers since its worldwide launch in the spring of 2010, it came as an unexpected shock when Young invited me to come aboard as Fiction Editor earlier this year.  I couldn't believe my luck, and still can't, but won't question the movements of the stars, both visible and waiting.  For now, I'll count my blessings and pledge to uphold the tradition of excellence forged so long ago, and continued on the pages of Strange Aeons.  Our humble magazine isn't the first to do what we do, but we think we are doing it as good or better than anyone else out there right now, and we're just getting started.  Plans are afoot (and a-wing) for expansion, including a rumored all-fiction issue, electronic circulation through additional platforms, and other multimedia delights.

Stay tuned, true believers, and bring that inner child in from outside.  Playing football in the street is fun, but we have so many things to show you best seen under lamplight in a darkened room, while the rest of the flat world sighs.

And now, a walking tour gallery of page shots taken from Strange Aeons Issue #9.  Enjoy, and realize that until you feel that paper between your greasy fingers, you ain't seen nothing yet:

After a very tough selection process, in which I read the works of many of THE top Weird/horror/sci fi fiction writers working today, I finally settled on "Welcome to the Reptile House," by the unparalleled Stephen Graham Jones.  Having an original, fresh-off-the-brain piece from a true rock star of the speculative fiction scene mark my first issue as Fiction Editor is something I never could have dreamed, and makes me so incredibly proud.   Mostly, it serves as concrete testament to the reputation of Strange Aeons among the top level creatives working in the industry.

The first page to SGJ's spanking new story, featuring art by The Hat

In "The Corpse's Crusade", you are treated to a further tale of Zothique, Clark Ashton Smith's fabled land of charnel gods, necromancy, and bloodied steel, wrought from the poisoned pen of Cody Goodfellow, who once again joins up with long time collaborator Mike Dubisch to create a boldly illustrated tale that hearkens back to the best of the Pulps and graphic novels that truly are exactly that.

Evil tyrants, flesh eaters, and corpse humpers - Must be another Strange Aeons tale!

Issue #9 brings to our regular readers the first regular installment of "Anno Ktulu" (written by K.L. Young and Vincent Ferrante, pencils by Ben "1314" Hansen, graytones by Chris Hagerman, letters by Eduardo Martinez) recently launched with the special edition, oversize one-shot currently available at the Strange Aeons website, which premiered to resounding acclaim at Crypticon Seattle and the 2012 H.P. Lovecraft Film Festival in Portland last month.  The one-shot ties into the ongoing "Anno Ktulu" storyline that will be running all year in Strange Aeons.  Get in on this innovative story of superheroes set in a Lovecraftian universe now, as you definitely don't want to miss this.

With "Hell Dorado", SA's own cigar chomping Editor-In-Chief Laurence Amiotte pens a story of gunslingers and hellish monsters in the new old west, illustrated by Rob Corless.

Double threat Lee Davis offers up Part 3 of his supernatural zombiedrama "Bloodworm."

Eric York brings to life an excerpt from H.P. Lovecraft's epic poem "Fungi From Yuggoth" with his distinctive artistic style.

The Eldritch Words segment starts out each issue, giving a lowdown around Strange Aeons HQ, providing a bit of staff and related news, and introducing the wonders in the pages to come. Notice the smiling gent on the right. That's Strange Aeons staff artist Nick "The Hat" Gucker, who has decided that 2012 is now officially his.  Thank goodness he likes to share.

Also included in Issue #9 is an official report taken from Portland's recent H.P. Lovecraft Film Festival, where SA's own Nick Gucker won the first annual "Pickman's Apprentice" competition, besting such worthy adversaries as renowned artists (and Strange Aeons favorites) Mike Dubisch and Lee Moyer.  Congrats to The Hat, and to all of us, as we're all winners based on the three mind bending end results.  YAY for everyone, and puppies too!

Book reviews are "Forbidden Lore" to us.  In this this issue, we give the business to Rough Music by Simon Kurt Unsworth, Lucky Bastard by S.G. Browne, and Laird Barron's The Croning, with a shout to All Monster Action by the above mentioned Cody Goodfellow, Nick Gucker, and Mike Dubisch in the "Currently Reading" circle.

Our "Unearthed" section features all the cool shit you need to know about, including the Monopoly-style board The Doom That Came to Atlantic City (which absolutely destroyed its goal on Kickstarter), the always fantastic Lovecraft eZine (which has featured work by yours truly), and this wonderful reproduction of Lovecraft's ghost written Weird Tales piece for Harry Houdini titled "Under the Pyramids" (aka "Imprisoned with the Pharaohs"), complete with a working lock and vintage-style U.S. mailbags, featuring art by our global landlord Nick Gucker (who proffers more info here).

In each issue, we always include something extra, from lobby cards to mini posters to your very own kitten (I MIGHT be fibbing a bit about one of those).  In Issue #9, the staff of printing gnomes stashes two "Anno Ktulu" trading cards by some guy named Nick Gucker into each magazine before mailing.  Collect them all, and trade with your friends.  Way cooler than the seventeen Ken Griffey Jr. cards doing exactly nothing in a cigar box in my parents' basement.

Well, that's the penny tour, kids.  Interested?  Goddamn right you are.  Now click through here and pick up the latest Strange Aeons, then work backwards on the previous issues, like any good collector of comics and the Pulps.  We're just getting warmed up, so watch us grow tall, dark, and infinitely monstrous.  We have such Things we'd like to show you...

TC Book Review & Interview: Laird Barron Weaponizes the Weird in Debut Novel ‘The Croning' from Night Shade Books

Laird Barron made me gain five pounds.

No, he didn’t hold me down and shovel deep fried butter wedges into my gaping yapper (although, dare to dream). What he did was write a colossal piece of fiction that was nearly impossible to put down, even at the gym, where I do much of my reading every morning. As I hazily recall, just before cracking open Barron’s debut novel The Croning some weeks back, I marched my happy ass off to the local garishly lit LA Fitness, eager to absorb a few pages in between moving weighted objects from one place to another. Forty-five minutes later I found myself on the floor, sprawled in some lazy stretching pose, peering at the pages in front of me with wide, slightly twitching eyes while sadly oblivious meatheads preened in front of mirrors around me. I was hooked, boated, and clubbed, and stayed that way until I closed the last page some blurry span of time later. As I became doughier, I also became more willing, suppliant. I was fattened and ready for the provender plate of dear Old Leech. Just like They wanted it.

Barron’s storytelling has that rare power of grip, weaving a particular strain of beautiful, sinewy prose that somehow possesses enough tiny microfibers to pick up the grit and sharp things swept into the corners of forgotten history. Both beautiful and monstrous, his evocative imagery lures you into the forest with the cadence of lost eons, leaves you in expectant silence, and then rips back the shading canopy, exposing you to the terrible realities that lie waiting under the thin veneers of bullshit “civilization”.

Not surprisingly, the writing is a reflection of the writer and his unique experience set. Barron grew up in the wilds of Alaska and spent several years fishing the murderous Bering Sea and racing the Iditarod on arctic tundra like some goddamn throwback to a time of brawnier, more road-tested scribes, who could lay down some poetic verse before laying you out in a pool of your own teeth for spilling his drink. Papa Hemingway. Jack London. Dashiell Hammett in a parka. All sitting in the corner booth of the Bar on the Borderland, waiting for their Weirdling pals from the Pulps to show up and swap stories of the violent and strange.

Indeed, his meaty, imaginative style is an amalgam of all of these rough and smooth elements, taking shape as a barrel-chested ballerina, a professional wrestler moonlighting as an ice skater. A pagan ninja hopped up on blood saki, beautifully weaponizing the sublime and stuffing horror into documented and geological mysteries long buried for a reason. Barron respectfully nods his heads to his forebearers, but is truly his own man, blazing his trail through the wild, untamed places to find the haunted ruins. The cryptic mounds.  The dolmens... This is Weird fiction boiled hard.

Unfairly or not, Barron is often compared to (elder)godfather of cosmic horror  H.P. Lovecraft, but in many ways, Barron’s work is far more bleak than the Gentleman from Providence. In Lovecraft’s Mythos, profoundly alien Great Old Ones and Outer Gods were mostly oblivious or apathetic to our meaningless existence. The horror often came from the realization of unimaginable truth.  Much like Barron, HPL’s protagonists reflected the man, and as such, were bookish and aloof, ghosts in the coal powered machine, sneering strangers in the hated crowd. In Laird’s “Barronic Mythos” (an increasingly legitimate construct that I may or may not have just given a name), the unearthly entities not only know where we are and what we’re doing, they pop in from time for a bite, and/or to continually fuck with us just because they can. His characters ARE the crowd, reflecting all strata of life, from the aristocratic elite to the shithouse dogs. Barron understand them all, and spares none. All are claymation figurines caught up in a Game Unutterable organized before the beginning of time. All of them are doomed, and Barron allows us a front row seat to the slow, excruciating execution.

The Croning, Barron’s first full-length novel after making his bones and racking up accolades as a conjurer of short fiction, is a perfect reflection of what he does as a writer, while serving as a stage one culmination of much of his storytelling from the past decade. Characters, artifacts, and even families that were introduced in such short stories as “Mysterium Tremendum” and “The Men From Porlock” reappear in The Croning ready to cast off their potential and reveal their dreadful destiny. After a prologue of sorts, which serves as more than just a pitch-black origin story of Rumpelstiltskin, we are lead through three life stages of the affable geologist Don Miller, and together, we follow Don as he follows his brilliant and headstrong wife Michelle, forever living in her secretive shadow as she chases arcane anthropological discoveries around the world, when not locked away in her study researching her family tree, obsessing over the hard-to-find root system buried impossibly deep in the antediluvian loam. As Michelle pursues her own path that occasionally intersects with her husband, Don is left to reflect on his own life barely lived, and in doing so, starts to unspool – with the help of off-the-grid intelligence agencies, old money eccentrics, and even his own son – the mind shattering reality of what has been slithering around his ankles and through his home for decades, and his role in ongoing Outer Machinations older than the cosmos and twice as dangerous. Cults and conspiracies. Secret societies and powerful bloodlines with grand designs forged through unwholesome alliances dating back to the Stone Age. Mind snuffing dread born beyond the reach of time and space. This is the world of The Croning, and this is the writing of Laird Barron, who effectively synthesizes science fiction with science fact, creating a New Kind of Truth that can be as mortifying as it is wondrous. And it all works. Perfectly, it works.

Much like Bloch, Carter, Lumley, Campbell, Klein, and even Ligotti before him, and with the curiously scarred crone looming protectively behind him, Laird Barron has emerged as the new poster boy of cosmic horror, thankfully without a shred of pastiche anywhere in the shot. The Croning shows an already masterful writer fully in the throws of his own, unique style somehow getting better, and that bodes well for us, his readership, which grows by the hour.  We are the Children of Old Leech, and we love you.

In the end, and after all of this convoluted blather, I supposed the highest compliment I can pay The Croning is that it’s the sort of novel I wish I had written had I not first read it. It’s a gift of cosmic naturalist horror that will force you to re-examine everything and everyone around you, if only slightly. The X-Files in print, only infinitely scarier and hitting far closer to home.  It will make you fear the trees.  It will make you check for zippers.

I reckon that’s not too shabby for a first novel.

(The Croning can be purchased directly from Night Shade Books [recommended by The Cosmicomicon, because it's the right goddamn thing to do], and from Amazon for you corporate-felching cheapskates who hate Santa Claus a little and Ross E. Lockhart even more)

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As you process the jibber jabber above, please enjoy the second installment of the The Cosmicomicon Book Review & Interview (the first of which was christened upon the diamond cut abs of Simon Strantzas).  I'd like to thank Laird for making time to sit down with me across the table o' ether, as I know his hours were limited in the days leading up to the hugely anticipated release of The Croning.  As such, I kept my questions as brief as possible, attempting not to repeat inquiries covered in other interviews.  The resulting answers show a very candid, free-form/riffy side of Laird that I don't think I've read before.  Fantastic stuff, that I'm honored to share with you all below.

TC:   Your writing is often compared to that of classic cosmic Weirdists H.P. Lovecraft, Arthur Machen, Algernon Blackwood, etc. (including by yours truly above), but there seems to be far more at play under the surface of your prose.  More contemporary, brawnier, bare-knuckled stuff.  Just as much Lawrence Block as T.E.D. Klein.  Who are your influences, both conscious and subconscious?

LB:  My earliest influences were pulps and adventure novels. H. Rider Haggard, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Robert E. Howard, that was my crowd as a kid. Big men with axes, naked alien princesses, exotic landscapes, fantastical beasts. Rivers of blood. Hell of an escape from my family’s sub-Arctic shack.

My interests have shifted over the years. I enjoy Martin Cruz Smith and Kelly Link in equal measure. I riff on Lovecraft and McCarthy if the firing solution calls for it. But my love of the pulps is always there and ever inflecting what I write.

TC:  Charlie Parker had a great quote that always stuck with me:  “If you don’t live it, it won’t come out of your horn.”  Based on your diverse, wide-ranging jobs, pursuits, and travels – many of them often taking place in some pretty gritty, unforgiving locales - you’re a writer who has certainly “lived it” out under the sun and rain, in contrast to a more reclusive individual like Lovecraft or Thomas Ligotti.  How important do you think it is for a writer to get out into the world in order to write about it and the homo sapiens taking up so much space, or can the same time be spent researching to achieve a similar result?

LB:  A good artist had better be able to fake it until he makes it. There’s a reason I do what I do, however. I look at the more desolate portions of my youth as a sacrifice to the muses.

My professional writing career has spanned a decade. What was I doing before that? Digging my way out of the hole provenance dropped me headfirst into as a baby. I know what it feels like. To be punched, kicked in the balls, frozen, dragged, bitten, betrayed and heartbroken. I’ve fired guns and swung clubs when my life depended upon them. I’ve set aside years to train in combatives, and I’ve used them too. I’ve gone completely off the deep end from too many months alone in the wild and come all the way back again like a drunk who drinks himself sober. If a man’s going to write about damaged human machinery it doesn’t hurt to have spent time on fishing boats among ex cons and addicts. Doesn’t hurt to have bunked with bikers and trappers and professional ne’er do wells. I don’t have to invent much when I write. I just reach into my pocket and pull out some bloody receipts.

TC:  I’m sensing that you wouldn’t trade one second of it - the many hardships, tough upbringing, and dangerous scrapes you’ve been through.

LB:  There are moments here and there I’d do anything to change. Just like everybody alive. In the end, it’s all grist for the mill.

TC:  The natural world features heavily into your brand of cosmic horror (I call it “cosmic naturalism”).  Do the wild places on earth – places where you’ve spent quite a bit of time – truly terrify you, or are you instead mining what you know and enjoy, and then twisting it to the dark side?

LB:  I lived in Alaska for about twenty-five years. My family was nomadic. We chased the snow in order to train huskies for the racing circuit, and most especially the Iditarod. Of course the more fabulous elements of my stories are fabricated. But there’s no dismissing the sinister grandeur of primeval wilderness. There’s got to be some natural force in Alaska that fucks with human circuitry. I think Lovecraft’s head would’ve popped like a balloon if he’d found himself trapped in some of the places I’ve been.

TC:  Your memoirs could be a piece of Weird Noir.  Have you ever thought about publishing something entirely autobiographical?  Or hell, maybe you already have.

LB:  Oh, perhaps someday. In the meantime I’m working on a sequence of stories that deal in more explicit terms with Alaska and what I saw there during my youth.

TC:  When writing previous tales like “The Men From Porlock” and “Mysterium Tremendum”, did you know that the characters, locations, situations, and/or Mythology would someday evolve into a novel?  Into this novel?

LB:  With a tiny handful of exceptions, my entire body of work exists within a continuous universe. A few stories, such as those you highlighted, indeed feed directly into one another. I seldom write something that doesn’t inflect or reference every other piece I’ve done prior. I don’t write for an anthology or magazine, regardless of theme, without plotting how it’ll fit in to the mosaic.

TC:  Building on the previous question, are you intentionally constructing a Mythos, or perhaps adding onto that which was initially crystallized by Lovecraft?

LB:  I owe debts to every piece of fiction I’ve read, every man I’ve fought, every woman I’ve loved, every musician or artist who’s taken my heart out then handed it back, changed. The classical masters of dark fantasy and cosmic horror perfected a tradition of the weird story that generally features aloofness and restraint. For better or worse, I am not that guy.

The old tradition’s hallmarks include those of repressed sexuality, violence hinted at or understated, vagueness, iciness. Lovecraft is a giant in the field and I don’t believe the canon needs a contemporary update from me. I don’t repress jack shit. There’s going to be fucking, fighting, blood and thunder in a Barron tale. When I write in this tradition, I’m interested in weaponizing it.

TC:  You’ve emerged as a standard bearer, of sorts, for whatever we’re calling the brutal amalgam of Weird fiction/dark fantasy/cosmic horror these days.  I’ve personally described “Barronic verse,” and I’ve seen “Barronian” used as an adjective.  Did you ever foresee this sort of impact on speculative fiction from the back of a dogsled heading up into the frozen white all those years ago?

LB:   No. My dreams were humble. I was usually too worried about starving or whether freezing my dick to the side of my leg would have long term consequences.

TC:  In a perfect world, what would you be writing in twenty years?

LB:  In a perfect world I’ll be alive twenty years.

TC:  What’s next on the docket for you?  Longer term, what’s a personal or professional goal still unachieved?

LB:  There should be a new horror collection out next year. Deal just needs to be inked. I’ve several stories set to appear soon. Longer term, I’m working on a crime novel. Right now, my main goal is just to keep moving forward as a writer. Keep pushing myself to the breaking point.

TC:  Who would look better poured into a tight pair of spanking new Jordache jeans?  Robert E. Howard or Ramsey Campbell?

LB:  Considering how much weight Mr. Howard has lost these past decades, I’d say Mr. Campbell wins it in a landslide.

"Laird Barron" by JD Busch

Coming Soon: Laird Barron's Debut Full-Length Novel 'The Croning' from Night Shade Books, Now Available for Pre-Order

I love me some Laird Barron.  Yes, I know.  How very original.  It's like saying, "Lovecraft did some good work," or "Kubrick really knew his way around a camera."  Barron has garnered awards, accolades, and acclaim by the bushel basket, and all of it has been well deserved.  Hype doesn't get you very far when the proof is right there stained in black and white.  He has the rep because he's earned it.

Laird Barron was one of the first living writers of speculative fiction that I read after making the leap from Lovecraft (aka "The Foundation"), and ever since then, I voraciously read and carefully collect his works like I do the old Weirdling Masters of  the Pulp Golden Age - or more recently, Grau Haus faves Thomas Ligotti and T.E.D Klein.  He's one of those "instant classic" sort of writers, who only come along a few times a generation.  Luckily for us, he came of literary age during our time, so we can all lean back in our nano-powered rocking chairs some decades hence, whistle through our noses, and let fly a nostalgic "I remember when..."

Barron just makes it look easy.  His effortless blend of the coldly cosmic with the uncomfortable heat and grit of the natural world make the everyday happenstance or forgotten patch of flyover wilderness a brush with the brutally unsettling.  Danger can lurk within any shadowed vale where the old psalms are still sung.  Incalculable danger waits at the end of every weed-choked country driveway.  Mankind has been driven quietly mad, and is seeking to bring down Everything by unlocking the doors that were never meant to be opened.  Dread drenches the Barronic air, which is what makes his fiction so engrossing, and so terrifying.  I sometimes heave a sigh of relief at the end of one of his stories - not because I'm glad it's over, but that I'm glad that the poor, unlucky sap I've just been reading about for thirty pages isn't me.  It's like finally waking up after a seemingly real nightmare and kissing the bedroom carpet because none of it was real.

That's what Laird Barron does.  He writes nightmares that we can walk away from.  And thank the mute gods, we can walk back to them, as well.

We covered the release of Barron's last book, the novella The Light is the Darkness (with a titular nod to my current musical obsession Lustmord) - masterfully crafted, bound, and published by Infernal House and Miskatonic Books - through a review by Cosmicomicon regular Alex Lugo published here back in November.  Today, I'm here to bring you news of The Croning, which is his first full-length novel, published by the good peeps at Night Shade Books (who most recently brought us the fantastic The Book of Cthulhu, edited by Ross E. Lockhart, which contains the epic Laird Barron tale "The Men From Porlock", which will surely go down in the annals as one of the most celebrated stories in the modern era of the genre).

From the Night Shade Books presser:

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... Coming May 2012  

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. 

The Croning can be pre-ordered now through Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and other larger electronic outlets.

Laird Barron by JD Busch

Just a word of caution to procrastinators:  Barron's books sell out rather quickly, so don't sleep on The Croning.  You need to jump on this now, before you're combing eBay for out-of-print copies, cursing your lack of foresight while bemoaning your separation from the dark, strange places that only a few left on earth can show you.