Chief Executive Old Leech

The corporate horror of Laird Barron

by Zach Bartlett

Contemporary cosmic horror has broadened its scope since the days of H.P. Lovecraft and Weird Tales. Modern authors like Larissa Glasser, Victor LaValle, and Jon Padgett have taken the niche genre’s typical toolbox—alienation, unknowability, an indifferent universe—and used it to build a vibrant space for stories encompassing gender, race and more nuanced views of mental illness than the old “found evil book, went crazy” formula. 

One of the most talented voices currently expanding the range of cosmic horror is Laird Barron. His personal spin on Mythos elements peers into the century-spanning plans of carnivorous entities lurking in the ancient forests of the Pacific Northwest, and his skies are riddled with dim hungry stars. Devouring and consumption are frequent motifs in his writing, where humanity is shown to be prey for more than just the Children of Old Leech. Those are the human-ish servants of a cosmic parasite who make frequent appearances throughout his work, but there are other misanthropic forces operating in the periphery of his world who are just as hideous when dragged squealing into the light: multinational corporations.

There are other misanthropic forces operating in the periphery of Barron’s world who are just as hideous when dragged squealing into the light: multinational corporations.

Barron may not be a card-carrying communist like China Mieville, but there is a definite tendency in his work to parallel the actions of eldritch horrors with the supposedly mundane real-world evils of capitalism and corporate interests. His characters are frequently tools of the ultrawealthy or private industry: detectives, paramilitary goons, or researchers contracted to investigate something which will, more often than not, swallow them once they find it. While traditional weird fiction protagonists are often lone eccentrics whose own paranoia or curiosity leads them to their demise, Barron’s tend to be knowingly sent into a meat grinder by the people holding the pursestrings.

This tendency is brought to the forefront in his Isaiah Coleridge novels, which follow a former mob enforcer turned private investigator. The series’ most recent entry, 2020’s Worse Angels, has Isiah investigating an employee suicide at a decommissioned supercollider in upstate New York— a project of the Redlick Corporation, which was the largest employer for the surrounding towns that have gone to seed in its absence.

Several scenes with Redlick’s spokesman Thomas Mandibole play up the close ties between the corporate and the cosmic: an odd flute noise is heard when he first steps into view (the same sound that accompanies Lovecraftian deity Azathoth in many mythos stories) and Mandibole’s ability to influence others edges on the supernatural, as does the strength and resilience of the cannibalistic cult he secretly leads.

The plight of Barron’s protagonists isn’t dissimilar to that of environmental activists, where the foes are protean business concerns unlikely to be deterred by a couple scrappy protesters blocking the route of a single pipeline.

Laird Barron needs no metaphors for late-stage capitalism here: multinational corporations are literally devouring rural America. And when Coleridge does solve the murder, he discovers it’s merely one drop in a vast existential bucket and he’s powerless to actually stop the Redlick Corporation’s grander schemes, whether financial or metaphysical—an expected ending in environmental and anti-corporate activism, where the foes are protean business concerns unlikely to be deterred by a couple scrappy protesters blocking the route of a single pipeline.

Similar themes are also present in Barron’s first novel, The Croning. Framed by a dark retelling of Rumplestiltskin, the novel follows an 80-year-old retiree named Donald Miller who has begun experiencing the onset of dementia. This itself is a clever setup for a cosmic horror novel, but it goes further than that.

As Miller reflects on his life, if he’s remembering it right, a pattern emerges. Miller—who comes from a long line of company men and spent most of his career working for the conglomerate AstraCorp—begins piecing together memories of strange persons or person-shaped creatures that have intervened in his family’s affairs. It becomes apparent that his line has been an unwitting accomplice to the Children of Old Leech for decades, and not only for their more exotic plans (which directly involve devouring human brains).

In Barron’s fiction, the Children of Old Leech wear the hides of people you used to know and regularly tell you how they “love” humanity.

After a career that involved investigating and acquiring mineral rights, Miller also appears to be a pawn in their more prosaically evil pursuits. After all, this is a lucrative field that has irreparably ruined parts of the world like West Virginia and the Gulf Coast—and whether he was directly involved in anything of that sort, well, he has a lot of convenient blind spots. After all,  how far can you go in such a career before your hand is on the lever that spills benzene into an aquifer? But Donald Miller is a perfect corporate lackey, never questioning his complicity until something wearing his dead friends’ faces comes back to bite him. 

In Barron’s fiction, the Children of Old Leech wear the hides of people you used to know and regularly tell you how they “love” humanity. Assuming you wouldn’t take a monster at its word, what is that if not every oil company saving face after a major disaster, every corporate training video trying to make you feel like you’re part of a family while it drains you of life and livelihood?

The Croning‘s penultimate chapter sees one of the Children personally demanding that Miller feed his grandaughter to it, in what is ultimately the culmination of the book’s existential dread and its societal critique. The Greatest Generation, Boomers, Gen X—under capitalism, it’s the fate of every generation to become easily-confused Donald Millers who sell out their kids to misanthropic monsters wearing ill-fitting human masks. (The Great Pacific Garbage Patch and pictures of Mark Zuckerberg surfing are evidence enough of that.)

Laird Barron’s fiction uses the structure of cosmic horror to underline the inhumanity and incomprehensibility of our own real-world corporate evils. But unlike the Children of Old Leech, our own monsters don’t come from beyond the stars, and they do have names you can pronounce with a human tongue. You’re just more likely to learn them from reading the Economist than the Necronomicon.

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