The Croning

De: Laird Barron

Narrado por: Emily Zeller

Strange things exist on the periphery of our existence, haunting us from the darkness looming beyond our firelight. Black magic, weird cults, and worse things loom in the shadows. The Children of Old Leech have been with us from time immemorial. And they love us....

Donald Miller, geologist and academic, has walked along the edge of a chasm for most of his nearly 80 years, leading a charmed life between endearing absent-mindedness and sanity-shattering realization. Now, all things must converge. Donald will discover the dark secrets along the edges, unearthing savage truths about his wife Michelle, their adult twins, and all he knows and trusts. For Donald is about to stumble on the secret... of The Croning.

From Laird Barron, Shirley Jackson Award-winning author of The Imago Sequence and Occultation, comes The Croning, a debut novel of cosmic horror.

©2012 Laird Barron (P)2012 Audible, Inc.

Reseñas de la Crítica

"It’s a rare year in which a superabundance of fine horror novels — novels that reward rereading — appears. That said, most years bring at least a handful of novels whose titles can stand to be mentioned alongside Matheson’s I Am Legend, Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House, and King’s The Shining. To this year’s list, add Laird Barron’s The Croning." ( Los Angeles Review of Books)

Great Writer - Good story - VERY Wrong Reader,

Is there anything you would change about this book?

YES! The narrator! Laird Barron writes Horror Noir - a dark & scary cross of Mikey Spillane & H. P. Lovecraft. He is bound for not just being good, but being GREAT. He writes from a first person view of gritty tough-guys that have stepped right out of a violent 1940's crime pulp novel. His characters gruffly talk about their cocks, and middle age, and death, and killing, and horror. Audible, for some strange reason, chose the very beautiful, young, very feminine voice of "Emily Zeller" to read you this story. This story: of a tough old man facing cosmic inhuman mind-bending vile evil.
It's like picking "Hanna Montanna" to sing KISS's "Destroyer" album. It's as wrong as "The Captain and Tennille" singing Judas Priest's "Sad Wings of Destiny" Album, or Metalica's "Black" album. Julie Andrews should NOT sing Rob Zombie's "Hellbilly Deluxe"!
Ya' gettin' me here?
It just don't work!
The greatest reader of H. P. Lovecraft work is "Wayne June". His voice is deep, rough, and sounds like he's had a life of first hand experience of... evil things, he's walked to the edge of the pit, looked in, and made it back.
Do you want to hear Laird Barron and a correct narrator? I urge you now to go to "Tales To Terrify" (the pod cast) and listen to episode # 40. Listen to "Frontier Death Song" by Laird Barron and read by "David Robison". David has a whiskey and smokes rough voice that turns Laird's tough, noir, words into cryptic-dark-spine-freezing passages punched out of the Necronomicon by way of a 40's detective radio show wearing brass knucles. Awesome.
Don't get me wrong, Emily Zeller is a fine reader.
I want Emily Zeller to read me "The Hobbit".
Or "Lord of the Rings". Something with Elves in it.
What I DON'T want is Emily Zelle, who sounds like my cute 20 year old niece, telling me about HER dick "shooting blanks"... I don't even want to think about her thinking about things like that, let alone trying her best to sound "tough" and "mean" and middle aged, and well, male.
OK, maybe a woman could have narrated this book. However, she needs to sound like she could eat bullets and spit nails. She needs "the chops" to do it - she needs the sound in her voice of a life of hard drinking, smoking, heart breaking, and ass-kicking.
Audible - you forgot the golden first rule on this one!!!
RULE #1.) You need to know the book, and you need to know the narrator and "IF" they will work together. This is maybe one of the worst choices of reader for this novel. We needed "Mickey Rourke" , instead we got "Annette Funicello"!

What did you like best about this story?

Laird Barron is a good talent, becoming GREAT!

How could the performance have been better?

You needed "David Robison", or "Wayne June" to read this, NOT "Emily Zeller".

If this book were a movie would you go see it?

Yes.

Any additional comments?

Please know the material and put it together with the right reader! This is a good/ maybe great horror noir book, but it's hard to tell because the narration is done by the wrong person.

Not so much!

Had promise, but by mid book I was ready for it to be over. The narrator was just not appropriate for a story that was primarily male characters. Probably would have been better in book form.

Cucked by Cthulhu

Nobody does building dread like Barron, whose prose is on point in this slightly-predictable cosmic horror fairy-tale. Zeller’s reading is wonderfully emotive, though her character voices could use some more differentiation.

Beautiful Horror Story.

I admittedly have just found out about this author after reading--(or listening? ah, nevermind) his entry in an anthology. I loved that story so much I used a credit on this novel as it was said to be a Cosmic Horror novel.
I was actually at a loss for word after the final paragraph. Not a single novel has managed to do that to me since "Pet Sematary." This is now one of my favorite reads of the last decade. READ IT.

Fantastic novel, not the best reading

If you could sum up The Croning in three words, what would they be?

Fantastic Cosmic Horror

Who was your favorite character and why?

Don, the protagonist, is really the only character anyone would be rooting for, though it's difficult not to like the old, gregarious, larger-than-life family friend Argyle.

What didn’t you like about Emily Zeller’s performance?

I don't have any problem with a woman narrating the story just because the protagonist is an elderly man. Emily Zeller's voices were just fine, I was happy with them and I appreciated that she aged the characters' voices appropriately during the various flashbacks. However, there seems to have been absolutely no editorial oversight on this production. She mispronounces quite a few words throughout the entire novel, which really started to distract; I can see, maybe, getting 'copse' wrong, but 'chasm'? Also, somewhere around the final third of the novel, she utterly switches two characters' dialog, reading Michelle's lines in Don's voice and vice versa. I don't know how she managed to end up doing that, but it was especially egregious that it wasn't caught in post. I very definitely got the impression that this was recorded in one take and then uploaded immediately. I was very disappointed with the result.

If you were to make a film of this book, what would the tag line be?

EATEATEAT

Any additional comments?

Skip the audiobook and get the novel, and get Barron's three short story collections that co-habitate the same universe with it - The Imago Sequence, Occulations, and The Beautiful Thing That Awaits Us All.

Took a while to get into, was hooked by the end

Slow start, and some of the hopping around made it hard to follow sometimes, but by the end I couldn’t get enough. Narrator was an odd choice, wonderful voice and narration but maybe wasn’t the right pick for this story. Worth the listen.

Barron is an elegantly raw weird fiction heir

Eccellent, imaginative and ticklingly dark. While his short stories may be better suited to to genre in general, this one really got to me.

Perhaps laird barrons best book

I don’t often write reviews but the way this novel folds in on itself is wonderful. Humorous and spooky at the same time, I enjoyed the entire thing. The narrator was good, I don’t understand why everyone is so down on her?

Good but

I initially liked the narrator. She does great with the unique voices and energy. Then there's the bland description tone with the mumbling. If your not doing anything then go for it. If you listen to books while working this isn't gonna be a great choice.

Awesome

It was awesome. Fun, dark, and grandiose.
Little slow in the middle, however. Overall, a great novel, and an excellent performance.