My kind is swift to chase, swift to battle. My imperfect memory is long with longing for the fight.

Yes, okay, I know. I’ve already done a collection of short horror stories this month. In my defense, Laird Barron’s collection Swift to Chase came out just this month, and as soon as I saw it I knew it was going to have to be part of the spooky books I reviewed in October.

Last week’s book had one story by Laird Barron, arguably the most off-the-wall one in the collection. Take that and magnify it by a hundred and you’ll come close to the insanity of a dozen of his stories in a row. Set in Alaska (or influenced by Alaska. Or has characters retreating to Alaska, or running away from whatever happened there), all of them are connected (somehow) and filled with some of the most disturbing images and gruesome ways to die. I’ve read through most of the book twice by now and I’m still not sure I understand what was going on. Or if I’m even supposed to understand. Strap in, folks, this is going to be a weird ride.



When I say these are connected, don’t get the idea that these stories should be treated as different chapters of one big novel. All twelve stories except the final one have previously been published in other collections. Barron excels at playing with different genres and styles (his two favorites seem to be hard-boiled mystery and cosmic horror) so they all have a slightly different feel, and each one stands on it’s own. It’s just that Barron has a long list of recurring characters, and if you’re left hanging at the end of one story then there’s a good chance more information will creep in with another story. Which will also probably leave you hanging.

The book starts out with two somewhat straightforward stories featuring Jessica Mace, Barron’s recurring “survivor” character. All you need to know about Jessica is that she survived a brutal attack by the Eagle Talon Ripper (shooting him to death in the process (except not really)), and her life is now a series of close calls and one night stands as she hitchhikes, drinks, and sleeps her way across the country. She’s got it rough, but she has zero pity for herself and an equal number of fucks to give for anything else.

“Screaming Elk, MT” has Jessica stumbling into the case of a cursed carnival, while in “LD50” she shacks up with a cowboy in eastern Washington state and tries to find out who’s slaughtering dogs in the nearby area. (Jessica likes dogs; it’s one of her better qualities.) Both stories are told in Jessica’s clipped and sharp narration, mixed with Barron’s descriptions that might start out grubby and harsh but more often than not turn into something chillingly cold and radiant at the same time.

We were rocking and rolling like a motherfucker now. The rickety farm truck’s tires cried mercy. But when the moon hove nine-tenths full and full of blood over the black rim of night and screamed white-hot silver through the boiling clouds, everything stood still.

Paul Tremblay in the introduction describes “Termination Dust” as Jessica’s origin story, but that’s only a part of what goes on as the action jumps from the Eagle Talon Ripper to the Frazier Estate Inferno to a brief scene of an elderly Jessica scaring off delivery trucks with a pit bull and a revolver. Lots of names to keep track of in an apartment complex filled with people snowed in for the long Alaskan winter. There are also tantalizing mentions of other scenes of violence (shooting deaths in Moose Valley, a slaughter in a shack on Midnight Road) and it isn’t clear if the killer is too crazy to remember who he is, or if the Ripper isn’t something that can be put into pigeonholes like “person” or “human”.

Visualize, if you will, a flat affect teen mimicking a dead comedian imitating a middle-aged crooner who enunciates through his nose imitating a faux Spanish accent and fucking the lyrics over precisely enough to sprain your brain, and you get the picture.

Then you have a high school’s girl’s attempt to give her cancer-stricken father a Tony Clifton impersonation (…how’s that again?) in “Andy Kaufman Creeping Through the Trees“, followed by a hunt for a has-been actor/death cult leader/vampire in “Ardor” (…well that’s weird…). “Ears Prick Up” is told entirely from the point of view of a cyborg battle dog in a feudal far-future dystopia (…now wait a minute…), and both “Little Miss Queen of Darkness” and “Slave Arm” have the character of Zane Tooms or his father dragging unwilling high school classmates into a vampire blood circle (..vampires again?) possibly the same blood circle that’s after the nameless couple in “Black Dog“, and I don’t even know what happened in “the worms crawl in” with the jealous husband getting transformed into a brain-eating unstoppable monster from the void (…the heck…), and “Frontier Death Song” shows that the worst case scenario for disturbing The High Hunt is being skinned alive and staying that way.

Are you starting to get a sense of the sheer strangeness of this collection, and how hard it is to write a review for it? I’m running out of synonyms for “weird”.

And not only do you have unique concepts for each tale, but all of the characters are suffering from having their memories changed, or they’re hallucinating while they’re dying of the cold on the Alaskan tundra, or they really do die except then they’re thrown back in time, or they get shunted to another dimension, or possibly they’re in hell. The narratives jump from place to place and time to time, tales about high-school vendettas are side by side with the memoirs of that cybernetic battle dog, who’s thoughts sound exactly like epic poetry and who’s oddly heartwarming story wouldn’t be out of place in a Kurosawa flick.

The last in the book is “Tomahawk Park Survivor’s Raffle“, brand new for this collection. Several different story threads weave together in this one. It features Jessica Mace’s mother Lucius, along with many of Lucius’s classmates and other recurring characters. The CIA make an appearance as well, running secret experiments on humans. At least I think that’s what’s going on. We don’t get nearly enough answers (and the answers we do get lead to many more questions), there’s a spectacularly nightmarish image towards the end that will probably cost readers some sleep (in Laird Barron’s universe, you don’t get to escape by dying) and the end circles right back around to the beginning.

And it all works. The stories in this collection are baffling and disturbing, and I keep paging through them to pick up on any little details I missed. Laird Barron has been building up his mythology for decades now, and I hope the last story in the book isn’t the last story for these characters. Because I have to tell you, I have many, many more questions.