The best-written horror fiction of the year: Not a Speck of Light by Laird Barron
Read the opening pages below
In a Cavern, in a Canyon
Husband number one fondly referred to me as the Good Samaritan. Anything from a kid lost in the neighborhood to a countywide search-and-rescue effort, I got involved. If we drove past a fender-bender, I had to stop and lend a hand or snap a few pictures, maybe do a walk-around of the scene. A major crash? Forget about it—I’d haunt the site until the cows came home or the cops shooed me away. Took the better part of a decade for the light bulb to flash over my hubby’s bald head. He realized I wasn’t a Samaritan so much as a fetishist. Wore him down in the end and he bailed. I’m still melancholy over that one.
Lucky for him he didn’t suffer through my stint with the park service in Alaska. After college and the first kid, I finagled my way onto the government payroll and volunteered for every missing person, lost climber, downed plane, or wrecked boat scenario. I hiked and camped on the side. Left my compass and maps at home. I wanted to disappear. Longest I managed was four days. The Feds were suspicious enough to send me to a shrink who knew his business. The boys upstairs gave me a generous severance check and said to not let the door hit me in the ass on the way out. Basically, the beginning of a long downward slide in my life.
Husband number three divorced me for my fifty-fourth birthday. I pawned everything that wouldn’t fit into a van and drove from Ohio back home to Alaska. I rented a doublewide at the Cottonwood Point Trailer Park near Moose Pass, two miles along the bucolic and winding Seward Highway from Cassie, my youngest daughter.
A spruce forest crowds the back door. Moose nibble the rhododendron hedging the yard. Most folks tuck in for the night by the time Colbert is delivering his monologue on Comedy Central.
Cassie drops off my infant granddaughter, Vera, two or three times a week or whenever she can’t find a sitter. Single and working two jobs (hardware cashier by day, graveyard security at the Port of Seward Wednesday and Friday), Cassie avoided the inevitability of divorce by not getting married in the first place. She kept the dumb, virile fisherman who knocked her up as baby-daddy and strictly part-time squeeze. Wish I’d thought of that. Once I realized that my nanny gig was a regular thing, I ordered a crib and inveigled the handsome (and generally drunken, alas) fellow at 213 to set it up in my bedroom.
On the nanny evenings, I feed Vera her bottle and watch westerns on cable. “Get you started right,” I say to her as Bronson ventilates Fonda beneath a glaring sun, or when a cowboy rides into the red-and-gold distance as the credits roll. She’ll be a tomboy like her gram if I have any influence. The classic stars were my heroes once upon a time—Stewart, Van Cleef, Wayne, and Marvin. During my youth, I utterly revered Eastwood. I crushed big time on The Man with No Name and Dirty Harry. Kept a poster from The Good, The Bad, And The Ugly on my bedroom wall. So young, both of us. So innocent. Except for the shooting and murdering, and my lustful thoughts, but you know.
Around midnight, I wake from a nap on the couch to Vera’s plaintive cry. She’s in the bedroom crib, awake and pissed for her bottle. The last act of High Plains Drifter plays in scratchy 1970s Technicolor. It’s the part where the Stranger finally gets around to exacting righteous vengeance. Doesn’t matter that I’ve missed two rapes, a horsewhipping, Lago painted red and renamed HELL… all those images are imprinted upon my hindbrain. I get the impression the scenes are always rolling down there against the screen of my subconscious.
I am depressed to recognize a cold fact in this instant. The love affair with bad boy Clint ended years and years ago, even if I haven’t fully accepted the reality. Eyes gummed with sleep, I sit for a few seconds, mesmerized by the stricken faces of the townspeople who are caught between a vicious outlaw gang and a stranger hell-bent on retribution. The Stranger’s whip slithers through the saloon window and garrotes an outlaw. I’ve watched that scene on a dozen occasions. My hands shake and I can’t zap it with the remote fast enough.
That solves one problem. I take the formula from the fridge and pop it into the fancy warmer Cassie obtained during a clearance sale. The LED numerals are counting down to nothing when it occurs to me that I don’t watch the baby on Sundays.
More information on the book »
Shortlist for the 2025 Bram Stoker Award for a fiction collection
Not a Speck of Light by Laird Barron
A Sunny Place for Shady People by Mariana Enriquez
The Dead Spot: Stories of Lost Girls by Angela Sylvaine
Old Monsters Never Die by Tim Waggoner
Love is a Crematorium and Other Tales by Mercedes M. Yardley
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