Book Review: The Croning by Laird Barron (2012)
Night Shade
(this review contains minor spoilers.)
The Croning features one of the most memorable opening chapters I’ve encountered in recent memory: a grimly whimsical (and slightly horny) retelling of Rumpelstiltskin, in which a royal spy tracks the fabled bargainer to a hinterland and finds that his quarry serves an esoteric deity called Old Leech. The strange god is a primordial cosmic entity who exists in some unknowable outer darkness but regularly makes their presence felt on Earth. The spy returns to his queen with the dwarf’s name, but when the fated day comes round, the hard-won knowledge has no effect, and the imp takes the queen’s child and then brings her and the spy to a bloody end.
It’s a dark subversion of the popular myth that sets a grim tone for what is to come, and the novel turns next to a young American couple vacationing in Mexico City in 1958: Donald and Michelle Miller academics who spend their careers in the far corners of the world uncovering lost history. The trip, while also functioning as a second honeymoon of sorts, is for Michelle’s research into some recently-discovered ruins in the jungle. Michelle goes missing, and Donald, receiving no help from the police, falls in with some local ex-pats and hired muscle to search for her. Only there’s more to these men than initially appears, and Donald soon finds himself in conflict with the modern day servants of Old Leech, who have a mysterious connection to his wife’s work.
Donald and Michelle will be at the heart of the novel, and the remaining chapters will be devoted to moving back and forth through the decades of their lives, wherein they have always been unknowingly walking a tightrope above Old Leech’s maw. Each chapter serves as a vignette into a time when they have had a brush with the otherworldly, and piece-by-piece the wider story of Old Leech comes into focus. Cults, personal secrets, haunted houses, and people who may not be people follow in what is a wonderfully dark and breath-snatchingly tense slowburn of a horror novel.
(I’ve since learned that much of the mythos in this novel builds upon Barron’s short story collection, The Beautiful Thing that Awaits Us All, which I haven’t read at the time of writing but will soon.)
Voices From the Void
This novel understands the rewards that can be reaped from a patient reveal. While there are horrific moments in the early chapters and Donald sometimes witnesses inexplicable and terrible events, but by the time the next chapter begins, showing a period sometimes decades apart, the details of his memory are suspiciously foggy to earlier events.
The novel also does a great job imparting dread while keeping the shadows deep. A group of laborers who clear overgrowth at the edge of the neighborhood don’t look quite right. The Miller’s home, which they’ve lived in for decades, is filled with voices and whispering. The wealthy couple down the road hide dark secrets while pulling strings anchored in the lives of the Millers. Everywhere the characters look, there is strangeness.
Long before I learned anything substantial about the horrors in this book, I loved the moments when they set their eyes on the story characters. Stylistically, the narrative is subtle for long stretches, and as the scenes of domestic interactions unroll, the reader can almost forget this is a horror novel until it is abruptly just that. The character work is exceptionally rich with the main couple (reminiscent of John Langan’s House of Windows), and their adult children do a solid job of illustrating the influential legacy of Old Leech beyond those who directly encounter them.
As the story builds to its conclusion, Barron does an excellent job of keeping the reader intrigued, giving just a little bit more substance to the horrors behind the larger narrative in each chapter. We learn that Old Leech’s followers aren’t confined to the fringes, and they’ve been close to families of Donald and Michelle for centuries.
The mythos at the edge of the story is deep, but doesn’t overwhelm the main narrative, which is still about a longstanding marriage between two interesting and intelligent individuals who have experienced a high degree of strangeness in their lifetimes. By the time the story wraps up when Donald and Michelle are in their eighties, it feels like their story is complete, and any further narrative would be about the further explorations of Old Leech and its followers. We rarely get a near complete look at the lives of characters in fiction, and finding it here makes the novel particular memorable.
The Black of the Ink
This was my first introduction to Laird Barron’s work, but I plan to read the rest of his catalog soon, as both the style and the execution were simply too good to leave his other work unexplored. He has a languid, patient voice that is always ready to bend an aside or explore a history, taking an attitude that the main story can wait, and readers will enjoy it all the more if reached by the long road. He’s the type of author you instinctively understand to be intelligent, and his voice lays heavy on the entirety of the work, a capable narrator speaking to the dark.
Plot-wise, there are occasional wobbles, and some chapters felt like they didn’t quite stick the landing. Many chronologically earlier moments in the narrative flirted with stereotyping, but I suspected this element may be the result of Barron trying to impart a sense that this is an earlier time, and a bar in Mexico City in 1958 is not as it appears in 2024. Similarly, the chapter pacing can occasionally be weird, with strange visions and an unclear perspective from characters who are drugged or under unclear influence, but the storytelling and writing were good enough to eclipse these infrequent stumbles.
Charting the Stars
After a nearly unparalleled build, with things rolling strong through the first 85% of the novel, I feel like this one really slipped in the home stretch. Barron spent an extensive amount of time building out the mysteries behind Old Leech and its intersections with Donald and Michelle, but the final few chapters end as many challenges to Lovecraftian gods do: with the upstart being ground down, driven mad, confined to an asylum, or simply killed. While none of those things happen here, the spirit of that abrupt and unceremonious defeat is very much what defines the close of this novel. It is realistic—mortals typically do not defeat the elder powers in fiction, but Donald’s ultimately late-game fall felt so abrupt, so unimaginative, it left an unmistakable taste of disappoint. For so long we have been building, and nearly everything put down is of exceptional quality, but the pinnacle of this structure is tarnished.
After much thought, I don’t criticize Barron’s talent for this; I think this is the ending he envisioned, perhaps intending to continue building his mythos in future works, but from a reader’s perspective it was unshakably disappointing. Cosmic horror is hard to do any other way, I’ll admit, but we should still aspired to do something new in this space.
Despite that sentiment, The Croning remains and exceptional novel, and if you’re the type of reader who can appreciate the journey even if the final destination underwhelms, I highly recommend the novel.
Verdict: 8.3
Strengths
Effective underlying mythology supporting the main story without overtaking it
Natural, immersive writing style means the story continues to built throughout, with no weak chapters
Genuinely creepy, with a building sense of dread that permeates the novel
Weaknesses
Occasional odd description or dialogue, perhaps an effort on the part of the author to present the speech of an earlier time
Unforgivable, underwhelming final chapter leaves the journey to be the entirety of what is worth while here
The Croning can be purchased on Amazon, Barnes and Noble, or preferably, from a bookstore in your community.
You might also like: The Fisherman, Cunning Folk, House of Windows
