The Light is the Darkness, Laird Barron

After I had read Laird Barron's short story in the Grimscribe's Puppets anthology I decided I wanted to read more of the man, preferably some novel-length stuff, as I was quite taken with the style of what I had read and simply wanted just-more of it. Browsing through his work I found there were only a few full-length novels, 2 of which were only the opening salvo in a series of books of which the third has just been announced, and which 2, especially the latter one; Black Mountain, are apparently getting rave reviews. As I am a slow reader, I figured that if I was taken enough with his work I'd end up picking the rest up anyway and that it would be better then to delve through a whole slew of books at once, the more the better, and that in this case it'd be a good idea to wait a while.

 Of the two books that remained, The Croning's cover put me off of it a little bit,

yes, I am indeed shallow like that. and after that I proceeded to look at the last novel which both in cover and in blurb warmed my cockles enough to give it a go.

And though I confess to being a tad disappointed with The Light is The Darkness' style, which was more fast and loose than what I was expecting, more pulp oriented than literary styled, it was nonetheless such a fast-moving and such a busy novel that I did end up having a good time.

It is a world in which the super rich fund illegal old-school gladiatorial games where man and beast fight until the spilled blood drowns the sands themselves. Groomed by his patron from childhood to become the best of these gladiators, Conrad Navarro has worked himself up to the number 1 position in America, and uses the money earned from these matches to both drink himself into a steady stupor and to fund the search for his vanished sister Imogene.

Imogene, an FBI officer, had gone missing while on the hunt for a sadistic scientist called Dr Drake who experimented on numerous children, including their ten-year old brother Ezra.

But recently Conrad has found out that Imogene has gone off the grid on purpose, and as he begins to find the clues she left behind, it swiftly becomes clear that arrayed against them are forces ancient and terrible and that their brother's killer might just be the smallest fish in the pond.

 And that it is a pond filled with creatures grown vast and terrible, and glutted on power. They posses dark and mysterious abilities and they make nightmares of the dreams of the living. Operating from the shadows these forces move entire organizations in advancement of their own mad designs. And Imogene reveals that they have their sights set on Conrad.

But Imogene has also revealed a way for Conrad to use the knowledge gained from Drake's sick experiments for himself. And soon Conrad himself might even become someone for the dark itself to be wary of.

     Yeah, it was pretty good. As I said, a very busy read. There was always something new around the corner, which frequently was also going to be, besides being new and different, also dark and twisted, and very damn brutal.
     It rubbed me good in all the right places, and I just wish there had been more of it, or that this world and the concepts had been explored more, given time to make fixed impressions in the brain. Conrad zips around the globe in pursuit of Imogene while taking part in blood-sport and having mind expanding experiences, and I would have liked to have seen that paced out a bit more.

     But then, though the novel moves along at a fast pace, it does dip in the middle a bit, at a point when Conrad goes through a transitory period filled with dream-like scenes and hallucinations, and the prose almost becomes a stream-of-consciousness babble, incoherent and seemingly unconnected, a style that does wonders for some people, but which for me, this time, didn't quite do the trick.

     The ending was quite interesting in the way that it leaves you to wonder, to guess and hypothesize about what might come next, though again, I just wish there would have been more of it.

     If I'm sounding ambivalent on the whole thing, then that's because I'm feeling out of sorts today, not because of any fault on the part of the novel. It's a good read, and a fast read, and though I feel as if there's a little niggle here somewhere, something I just can't quite grasp, I do want to go ahead and recommend this one.

     I'm also going to go ahead and order either one or both of Barron's first 2 short story collections, that or the Croning novel, which I've seen does go the whole literary route that I so wanted to see more of.

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Also, I should note that this edition came with three black and white illustrations by David Ho.