Book Review: The Wind Began to Howl, by Laird Barron
An Isaiah Coleridge novella makes the fourth book in the series creepier and weirder.
Bad Hand Books, LLC, 2023, 192 pages
Laird Barron's acclaimed crime saga makes a triumphant return in The Wind Began to Howl, an all-new story set after the events of Worse Angels. A seemingly benign case gradually pulls mob enforcer-turned-P.I. Isaiah Coleridge into a chilling mix of music, movie magic, mayhem, and madness.
This time, Coleridge's dark journey forces him to confront a brutal truth: For some who try to escape the past, there is no way out.
Laird Barron is a horror writer at heart, so while the Isaiah Coleridge series began as detective noir with a half-Maori former mob enforcer trying to go straight as a private dick, each book has become a little creepier and stranger, flirting with the supernatural without quite crossing the line into urban fantasy. I said basically the same thing in my review of the third book, Worse Angels, where the villain almost turns into some sort of horror movie Big Bad. In book four, a shorter, novella-length installment that Barron wrote while recovering from a life-threatening illness, we don't quite get chanting cultists but we're getting ever closer to Things Man Was Not Meant to Know and I wonder if Barron will eventually just say fuck it and bring the darkness.
Coleridge is now trying to settle into some semblance of domesticity with his steady girlfriend Meg, her adorable son who's now adopted Isaiah as a father figure, his beer-swilling shotgun-toting lady-laying buddy Lionel, and his combat-trained dog Minerva, who is the Goodest Girl.
A movie producer wants Coleridge to track down a pair of musicians in upstate New York. They need their signatures on a release to allow the use of their tracks on some big budget film that's almost in the can, and for various contrived reasons involving Hollywood shenanigans they can't just switch out the soundtrack. Coleridge's mission: find the Barnhouse brothers, get them to sign the contract. Using whatever means of persuasion are necessary...
This sounds like a perfectly mundane case, but the Barnhouse brothers turn out to be weird hard-to-find auteurs with hidden cabins in the woods and for reasons that were never quite clear to me, a bunch of spook shops (as in, intelligence agencies, not the other kind of spooks) are also involved. Coleridge has run into these outfits before, and the implication is that he's getting in deeper with shadowy organizations besides his former bosses.
The climax is a shootout with betrayals and bloodbaths, which is how all Isaiah Coleridge books end, and a really weird set piece that could have come right out of a Delta Green module.
Laird Barron clearly likes this character and has stated he intends to continue the series, which is good because I'm enjoying them. Barron's writing is heavy and poetic, like Lovecraft but a little less purple and a lot more violent. That said, it sometimes gets a bit thick for the story, and I'm getting a little tired of being teased with the supernatural without actually seeing it.
Coleridge is getting older, he gets the shit kicked out of him in every book, and he's accruing a growing family of dependent side characters, and with the stuff he gets involved in, it seems like only a matter of time before things get ugly.
Also by Laird Barron: My reviews of The Beautiful Thing That Awaits Us All, The Croning, Occultation, Blood Standard, Black Mountain, and Worse Angels.
My complete list of book reviews.
Bad Hand Books, LLC, 2023, 192 pages
Laird Barron's acclaimed crime saga makes a triumphant return in The Wind Began to Howl, an all-new story set after the events of Worse Angels. A seemingly benign case gradually pulls mob enforcer-turned-P.I. Isaiah Coleridge into a chilling mix of music, movie magic, mayhem, and madness.
This time, Coleridge's dark journey forces him to confront a brutal truth: For some who try to escape the past, there is no way out.
Laird Barron is a horror writer at heart, so while the Isaiah Coleridge series began as detective noir with a half-Maori former mob enforcer trying to go straight as a private dick, each book has become a little creepier and stranger, flirting with the supernatural without quite crossing the line into urban fantasy. I said basically the same thing in my review of the third book, Worse Angels, where the villain almost turns into some sort of horror movie Big Bad. In book four, a shorter, novella-length installment that Barron wrote while recovering from a life-threatening illness, we don't quite get chanting cultists but we're getting ever closer to Things Man Was Not Meant to Know and I wonder if Barron will eventually just say fuck it and bring the darkness.
Coleridge is now trying to settle into some semblance of domesticity with his steady girlfriend Meg, her adorable son who's now adopted Isaiah as a father figure, his beer-swilling shotgun-toting lady-laying buddy Lionel, and his combat-trained dog Minerva, who is the Goodest Girl.
A movie producer wants Coleridge to track down a pair of musicians in upstate New York. They need their signatures on a release to allow the use of their tracks on some big budget film that's almost in the can, and for various contrived reasons involving Hollywood shenanigans they can't just switch out the soundtrack. Coleridge's mission: find the Barnhouse brothers, get them to sign the contract. Using whatever means of persuasion are necessary...
This sounds like a perfectly mundane case, but the Barnhouse brothers turn out to be weird hard-to-find auteurs with hidden cabins in the woods and for reasons that were never quite clear to me, a bunch of spook shops (as in, intelligence agencies, not the other kind of spooks) are also involved. Coleridge has run into these outfits before, and the implication is that he's getting in deeper with shadowy organizations besides his former bosses.
The climax is a shootout with betrayals and bloodbaths, which is how all Isaiah Coleridge books end, and a really weird set piece that could have come right out of a Delta Green module.
Laird Barron clearly likes this character and has stated he intends to continue the series, which is good because I'm enjoying them. Barron's writing is heavy and poetic, like Lovecraft but a little less purple and a lot more violent. That said, it sometimes gets a bit thick for the story, and I'm getting a little tired of being teased with the supernatural without actually seeing it.
Coleridge is getting older, he gets the shit kicked out of him in every book, and he's accruing a growing family of dependent side characters, and with the stuff he gets involved in, it seems like only a matter of time before things get ugly.
Also by Laird Barron: My reviews of The Beautiful Thing That Awaits Us All, The Croning, Occultation, Blood Standard, Black Mountain, and Worse Angels.
My complete list of book reviews.