Laird Barron books

Anthologies

Best Horror of the Year Reading Order

Collections

Come Join Us By The Fire II Reading Order

Isaiah Coleridge Reading Order

Nanashi Novellas

Short Stories/Novellas

Standalone Novels

The Heroic Legends Reading Order

The Year’s Best Dark Fantasy & Horror Reading Order

Laird Barron was born in 1970 in Palmer, Alaska, and grew up in isolated rural poverty. He has described his childhood as harsh, living in the wilderness with limited resources, which gave him an early appreciation for pulp fiction and westerns. In his teens and early twenties, he trained and raced sled dogs, competing in the Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race three times in the early 1990s and finishing 22nd as a rookie in 1991. He also worked as a commercial fisherman in the Bering Sea before retiring from racing and moving to Washington in 1994.

Barron sold his first short story around 2001 and quickly became one of the most respected voices in modern horror. His debut collection, The Imago Sequence and Other Stories (2007), won the inaugural Shirley Jackson Award for Best Collection. He followed it with Occultation and Other Stories (2010) and The Beautiful Thing That Awaits Us All (2013), which he has described as a loose trilogy of cosmic horror with noir and occult influences. His two standalone novels, The Light Is the Darkness (2011) and The Croning (2012), brought his Lovecraftian sensibility to longer form.

In 2018, Barron shifted gears with Blood Standard, the first book in the Isaiah Coleridge series. These noir crime novels follow a half-Maori former mob enforcer turned private investigator in upstate New York, blending hardboiled detective fiction with the creeping dread that runs through all of his work. His 2024 collection Not a Speck of Light was named one of the best horror books of the year by The New York Times and NPR. He currently lives in the Rondout Valley of New York.