Reading order
| # | Title | Published | Author | Buy on Amazon |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | The Light Is the Darkness | 2011 | Laird Barron | Buy |
| 2 | The Croning | 2012 | Laird Barron | Buy |
Laird Barron published two standalone novels before turning to the Isaiah Coleridge crime series. The Light Is the Darkness (2011) takes place in a world of illegal underground gladiatorial combat. The protagonist, Conrad Atticus, is a fighter searching for his missing sister, and his investigation pulls him through layers of conspiracy toward a cosmic revelation. The book has a brutal, compressed energy that reads like pulp fiction filtered through Lovecraft.
The Croning (2012) takes a quieter approach, at least at first. Don Miller is an aging geologist married to a woman named Michelle, who has spent their decades-long marriage connected to an ancient cult and its patron entity, Old Leech. Miller has been willfully blind to the strangeness in his life, and the novel peels back those layers of denial one by one. Old Leech and its followers appear throughout Barron’s short fiction as well, making The Croning a central piece of his larger mythology.