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WFA nominated novelette. It originally appeared in the anthology The Book of Cthulhu 2 (2012), edited by Ross E. Lockhart. The story can also be found in the anthology The Year's Best Dark Fantasy & Horror 2013, edited by Paula Guran. It is included in the collection The Beautiful Thing that Awaits Us All (2013).

Laird Barron has emerged as one of the strongest voices in modern horror and dark fantasy fiction, building on the eldritch tradition pioneered by writers such as H. P. Lovecraft, Peter Straub, and Thomas Ligotti. His stories have garnered critical acclaim and been reprinted in numerous year's best anthologies and nominated for multiple awards, including the Crawford, International Horror Guild, Shirley Jackson, Theodore Sturgeon, and World Fantasy Awards. His debut collection, The Imago Sequence and Other Stories, was the inaugural winner of the Shirley Jackson Award.

He returns with his second collection, Occultation. Pitting ordinary men and women against a carnivorous, chaotic cosmos, Occultation's eight tales of terror (two never before published) include the Theodore Sturgeon and Shirley Jackson Award-nominated story "The Forest" and Shirley Jackson Award nominee "The Lagerstatte." Featuring an introduction by Michael Shea, Occultation brings more of the spine-chillingly sublime cosmic horror Laird Barron's fans have come to expect.

Table of Contents:

• Introduction - essay by Michael Shea
• The Forest - (2007)
• Occultation - (2008)
• The Lagerstätte - (2008)
• Mysterium Tremendum - (2010)
• Catch Hell - (2009)
• Strappado - (2009)
• The Broadsword - (2010)
• ----30---- - (2010)
• Six Six Six - (2010)

Procession of the Black Sloth was first published in The Imago Sequence and Other Stories (Night Shade Books, 2007). It was the only story original to that collection.

Read this story for free on Baen's site.

Laird Barron's fourth collection gathers a dozen stories set against the backdrops of the Alaskan wilderness, far-future dystopias, and giallo-fueled nightmare vistas.

All hell breaks loose in a massive apartment complex when a modern day Jack the Ripper strikes under cover of a blizzard; a woman, famous for surviving a massacre, hits the road to flee the limelight and finds her misadventures have only begun; while tracking a missing B-movie actor, a team of man hunters crashes in the Yukon Delta and soon realize the Arctic is another name for hell; an atomic-powered cyborg war dog loyally assists his master in the overthrow of a far-future dystopian empire; following an occult initiation ritual, a man is stalked by a psychopathic sorority girl and her team of horrifically disfigured henchmen; a rich lunatic invites several high school classmates to his mansion for a night of sex, drugs, and CIA-funded black ops experiments; and other glimpses into occulted realities a razor's slice beyond our own.

Combining hardboiled noir, psychological horror, and the occult, Swift to Chase continues three-time Shirley Jackson Award winner Barron's harrowing inquiry into the darkness of the human heart.

Over the course of two award-winning collections and a critically acclaimed novel, The Croning, Laird Barron has arisen as one of the strongest and most original literary voices in modern horror and the dark fantastic. Melding supernatural horror with hardboiled noir, espionage, and a scientific backbone, Barron's stories have garnered critical acclaim and have been reprinted in numerous year's best anthologies and nominated for multiple awards, including the Crawford, International Horror Guild, Shirley Jackson, Theodore Sturgeon, and World Fantasy awards.

Barron returns with his third collection, The Beautiful Thing That Awaits Us All. Collecting interlinking tales of sublime cosmic horror, including "Blackwood's Baby," "The Carrion Gods in Their Heaven," and "The Men from Porlock," The Beautiful Thing That Awaits Us All delivers enough spine-chilling horror to satisfy even the most jaded reader.

Table of Contents:

• Introduction - essay by Norman Partridge
• Blackwood's Baby - (2011)
• The Redfield Girls - (2010)
• Hand of Glory - (2012)
• The Carrion Gods in Their Heaven - (2011)
• The Siphon - (2011)
• Jaws of Saturn - (2013)
• Vastation - (2010)
• The Men from Porlock - (2011)
• More Dark - (2012)

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.

Sturgeon and Stoker Award nominated novella. It originally appeared in the anthology Inferno: New Tales of Terror and the Supernatural (2007), edited by Ellen Datlow. The story can also be found in the anthologies The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror: Twenty-First Annual Collection (2008), edited by Kelly Link, Gavin J. Grant and Ellen Datlow, Year's Best Fantasy 8 (2008), edited by David G. Hartwell and Kathryn Kramer, and The Weird: A Compendium of Strange and Dark Stories (2011), edited by Jeff and Ann Vandermeer. It is included in the collection Occultation and Other Stories (2010).

Read the full story for free at the Baen website.

WFA nominated novella. It originally appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, May 2005. The story can also be found in the anthology Year's Best Fantasy 6 (2006), edited by David G. Hartwell and Kathryn Cramer. It is included in the collection The Imago Sequence and Other Stories (2007).

To the long tradition of eldritch horror pioneered and refined by writers such as H.P. Lovecraft, Peter Straub, and Thomas Ligotti, comes Laird Barron, an author whose literary voice invokes the grotesque, the devilish, and the perverse with rare intensity and astonishing craftsmanship. Collected here for the first time are nine terrifying tales of cosmic horror, including the World Fantasy Award-nominated novella "The Imago Sequence," the International Horror Guild Award-nominated "Proboscis," and the never-before published "Procession of the Black Sloth." Together, these stories, each a masterstroke of craft and imaginative irony, form a shocking cycle of distorted evolution, encroaching chaos, and ravenous insectoid hive-minds hidden just beneath the seemingly benign surface of the Earth.

Table of Contents:

• 1 - Old Virginia - (2003) - novelette
• 19 - Shiva, Open Your Eye - (2001) - short story
• 31 - Procession of the Black Sloth - novella
• 77 - Bulldozer - (2004) - novelette
• 101 - Proboscis - (2005) - novelette
• 119 - Hallucigenia - (2006) - novella
• 169 - Parallax - (2005) - short story
• 189 - The Royal Zoo Is Closed - (2006) - short story
• 199 - The Imago Sequence - (2005) - novella

Conrad Navarro is a champion of the Pageant, a gruesome modern day gladiatorial exhibition held in secret arenas across the globe. Indentured by a cabal of ultra-rich patrons, his world is one of blood and mayhem, an existence where savagery reigns supreme while mercy leads to annihilation.

Conrad's sister has vanished while traveling in Mexico. Imogene, a decorated special agent for the FBI, was hot on the trail of a legendary scientist whose vile eugenics experiments landed him on an international most-wanted list. Imogene left behind a sequence of bizarre clues that indicate she uncovered evidence of a Byzantine occult conspiracy against civilization itself -- a threat so vast and terrible, its ultimate fruition would herald an event more inimical to all terrestrial life than mere extinction.

Now, Conrad is on the hunt, searching for his missing sister while malign forces seek to manipulate and destroy him by turns. It is an odyssey that will send this man of war from the lush jungles of South America, to the debauched court of an Aegean Prince, to the blasted moonscape of the American desert as he becomes inexorably enmeshed within a web of primordial evil that stretches back unto prehistory. All the while struggling to maintain a vestige of humanity; for Conrad has gazed into an abyss where the light is the darkness, and he has begun the metamorphosis into something more than human.

Brothers Macbeth and Drederick Tooms should have it made as fair-haired scions of an impossibly rich and powerful family of industrialists. Alas, life is complicated in mid-1950s USA when you're child heirs to the throne of Sword Enterprises, a corporation that has enshrined Machiavelli's The Prince as its operating manual and whose patriarch believes, Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds, would be a swell company logo.

Consider also those long, cruel winters at the Mountain Leopard boarding school for assassins in the Himalayas, or that Dad may be a supervillain, while an uncle occasionally slaughters his nephews and nieces for sport; and the space flight research division of Sword Enterprises "accidentally" sent a probe through a wormhole into outer darkness and contacted an alien god. Now a bloodthirsty cult and an equally vicious rival firm suspect the Tooms boys know something and will spare no expense, nor innocent life, to get their claws on them.

Between the machinations of the disciples of black gods and good old corporate skullduggery, it's winding up to be a hell of a summer vacation for the lads.

Nanashi was born into a life of violence. Delivered from the mean streets by the Heron Clan, he mastered the way of the gun and knife and swiftly ascended through yakuza ranks to become a dreaded enforcer. His latest task? He and an entourage of expert killers are commanded to kidnap Muzaki, a retired world-renowned wrestler under protection of the rival Dragon Syndicate.

It should be business as bloody usual for Nanashi and his ruthless brothers in arms, except for the detail that Muzaki possesses a terrifying secret. A secret that will spawn a no-holds barred gang war and send Nanashi on a personal odyssey into immortal darkness.

Welcome to the weird! Acclaimed author and editor Laird Barron, one of weird fiction's brightest exponents, brings his expert eye and editorial sense to the inaugural volume of the Year's Best Weird Fiction. No longer the purview of esoteric readers, weird fiction is enjoying wide popularity. Chiefly derived from early 20th-century pulp fiction, its remit includes ghost stories, the strange and macabre, the supernatural, fantasy, myth, philosophical ontology, ambiguity, and a healthy helping of the outre. At its best, weird fiction is an intersecting of themes and ideas that explore and subvert the Laws of Nature. It is not confined to one genre, but is the most diverse and welcoming of all genres. Hence, in this initial showcase of weird fiction you will discover tales of horror, fantasy, science fiction, the supernatural, and the macabre. Contributing authors include Jeffrey Ford, Sofia Samatar, Joseph S. Pulver Sr, John Langan, Richard Gavin, and W. H. Pugmire.

Table of Contents:

• "Success" by Michael Blumlein, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Nov./Dec.
• "Like Feather, Like Bone" by Kristi DeMeester, Shimmer #17
• "A Terror" by Jeffrey Ford, Tor.com, July.
• "The Key to Your Heart Is Made of Brass" by John R. Fultz, Fungi #21
• "A Cavern of Redbrick" by Richard Gavin, Shadows & Tall Trees #5
• "The Krakatoan" by Maria Dahvana Headley, Nightmare Magazine/The Lowest Heaven, July.
• "Bor Urus" by John Langan, Shadow's Edge
• "Furnace" by Livia Llewellyn, The Grimscribe's Puppets
• "Eyes Exchange Bank" by Scott Nicolay, The Grimscribe's Puppets
• "A Quest of Dream" by W.H. Pugmire, Bohemians of Sesqua Valley
• "(he) Dreams of Lovecraftian Horror" by Joseph S. Pulver Sr., Lovecraft eZine #28
• "Dr. Blood and the Ultra Fabulous Glitter Squadron" by A.C. Wise, Ideomancer Vol. 12 Issue 2
• "The Year of the Rat" by Chen Quifan, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, July/August.
• "Fox into Lady" by Anne-Sylvie Salzman, Darkscapes
• "Olimpia's Ghost" by Sofia Samatar, Phantom Drift #3
• "The Nineteenth Step" by Simon Strantzas, Shadows Edge
• "The Girl in the Blue Coat" by Anna Taborska, Exotic Gothic 5 Vol. 1
• "In Limbo" by Jeffrey Thomas, Worship the Night
• "Moonstruck" by Karin Tidbeck, Shadows & Tall Trees #5
• "Swim Wants to Know If It's as Bad as Swim Thinks" by Paul Tremblay, Bourbon Penn #8
• "No Breather in the World But Thee" by Jeff VanderMeer, Nightmare Magazine, March.
• "Shall I Whisper to You of Moonlight, of Sorrow, of Pieces of Us?" by Damien Angelica Walters, Shock Totem #7.