What Laird Barron accomplishes, among so many other things in The Croning is a stitching together of tropes that call out from myth and fairy tale, from that odd blip of literary history where H.P. Lovecraft toiled on into the Friday nights and Saturday afternoons where horror movies rode those squelchy analog frequencies to scare the crap out of you if that was your thing when you hoped your TV antenna caught more than public television and one other channel. Then you wished it hadn’t.

Don Miller is not a doughty protagonist. While he has his two-fisted moments, he’s mostly an affable, absentminded professor married to a gorgeous anthropologist descended of aristocratic stock. Don’s dirty work with rocks still keeps him separated from that jet-setting, trust-funding, old-money world through which Michelle will always navigate with more decorum than her husband could ever hope to summon. Barron takes us on a sixty-plus-year journey, rifling through shifting timelines and keeping focus tightened on Don’s accretion of revelations about sudden trips to darker corners to Mexico or the Siberian taiga--all of it secondhand and colored by gaps and holes in Don’s memories.

Because you can’t hat-tip to Lovecraft, see, without screwing with your protagonist’s mind, and Barron doesn’t wait until the denouement to do this. He rather adroitly gets Don’s brainpan Swiss cheesed in Act 1. In the 1950’s. Then the 1980’s. Yet again in the Now.

Barron paints the story with great brushstrokes of tropes: the secret society, the corporate and government conspiracies, the creaky mansions, the ritual sacrifices, the unexplained disappearances, the wackadoodle Hollow Earth stuff (oh, and it is *not* hokey here), maggoty, limbless grotesques in service to Old Leech of the Dark Ones. I mean, this is not a stew of horror send-ups per se; it is the strange brew itself. Croning, you see.

Let me be clear about something: Laird Barron juggles those multiple plot lines well, but The Croning is a book you can put down. Let me further qualify: This is not a failure on the author’s part in hooking the audience but a necessity in a novel whose narrative acrobatics demand an accretion of suspense and a few red herrings. Hey, third-limited POV worked well in this case. There will reach a point where you can’t put the book down, where the cellar door is open, where the mouth of the cave yawns its immutable blackness at you, and you are stuck. Committed. Forego engagements because you have to confront the abyss along with dear ol’ damned Don Miller. And, yes, at some point you may even wonder how the protagonist has made it through life long enough to do anything, let alone manage headlining a horror storyline.

It’s all because They love him.

And it’s a big finish, a solid payoff Laird Barron delivers on those carefully laid flagstones earlier in the novel.

Because, you see, you’ve already read this story. You know it. But Barron shows you the square was just a cube with this weird dilating hole wormed straight through its center. When you put your eye up to it--

Well, you’ll see.


ETA: Bonus Thoughts:

* Trust your dog if you have one.

* Drugs are bad, hence, the morality play effect of horror.  Yay.

* Root for the semblances of working-class heroes all you want.  Even they can't handle the infinite, cosmic horrors of the Dark Ones.  Beautiful losers--King or Seger, take your pick.

* Always check the meatsacks for zippers.  Always.

Let’s keep this simple. I wrote this as gleefully as my inner jacked-up-on-energy-drink fourteen-year-old self would allow. Well, maybe seventeen-year-old self. Or twenty-three. You’ll get it. 

Some spoilers follow.

Loki wants the Tesseract (the cube from Captain America: The First Avenger and the post-credits of Thor) so that he can leverage it to _________ in order to raise an army and take the fight back to his once-foster brother and fulfill his own megalomaniacal ambitions. He steals it after turning Hawkeye and Dr. Selvig into Loki-slaves. Nick Fury pursues and fails. Inciting incident incited. Check.

There is much in the way of excellent scenery with Tony Stark and Dr. Banner. Mark Ruffalo was a real scene stealer.

Nick Fury doesn’t want this plan coming to fruition. Apparently, not even the reluctant heroes want what could be a source of unlimited energy for mankind (but NOT because, hey, it’s the sub-rosa military, y’all--read whatever you will of the polemics; you were anyway). So, get back the Tesseract. Egos get in the way. Big time (GET IT?!). Lots of superhero pissing contests and plenty of repartee for all parties. They capture Loki! They put him in a cell on the motherfrakkin’ S.H.I.E.L.D. helicarrier (ZOMG, it is sweeter than the sweetest honey given you by a cherubic-faced toddler who has no idea the value of finally getting a feature length film of Earth’s Mightiest Heroes--move, kid, grown folks are watching this!).

Crap goes down in the air. Loki tricks Thor (oh noes!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!). Someone very much liked and enjoyed dies. My son sobbed. I heard other kids crying. I think it was other kids crying--maybe even the little dude deck out as Capt. America sans mask. He was cool. Back to the good stuff . . . Iron Man and Cap fix a major FUBAR issue on the helicarrier just in time, of course. Loki escapes due to Hawkeye's swooping in as Loki-slave.  Shootouts.  He hand-to-hand fights Black Widow, who readjusts him plenty. Thor kind of gets rendered out of the loop in this scene. At some point in the chaos and before Black Widow actually encountered Hawkeye, but I'm not clicking and moving anything here, Banner turns and knocks around Black Widow because, hey, she’s just a puny human in the way of his rage. I'm also remiss in referencing the Hulk-Thor fight.  So, there.

Helicarrier falling and falling apart. What could’ve been a team’s falling apart (GET IT?!--That’s form follows function, kids!). Iron Man fixes the FUBAR, so the ship’s still in play, and this is a Good Thing™ since it’s a costly set piece of GCI and real-life interiors. Nick and Co. are pissed about ______’s death. Tin Man actually *has* a heart and figures out where the Tesseract is (or will be) annnnnnnnnnd SCENE.

Oh, turning point, why did you have to turn out this way?

[Of course, I’m leaving out so much that isn’t spoilerish that it’s pathetic. This movie is a geek-gasm of the highest order, a cigarette before, during, AND after the, dare I quote Sheldon, high-adrenaline-action-flick coitus that this movie is for the audience. The only thing missing was lack of augmented reality technology to make the movie so immersive that it was the comic book story arc of an alien invasion and not simply celluloid. I mean, one does not simply walk into The Avengers without going, “Hey, guys and dolls, we need aliens in the Third Act for the payoff, but, really, though, fight every five to ten minutes, aight?”]

***For newbies, this is the point in the review where you get why it’s called a Rambling Not-Review.***

While Nick Fury convinces some nebulous Council that he’s still the BMF in charge of firing up this barbecue to cook up some retaliation, nay, avenging, against Loki invading Chitauri forces (just go with it), the Avengers by-God assemble. Teserract and associated tech on Stark Tower (oh noes!!!!!!!!). Tony tries to convince Loki he’ll lose (Loki, not Tony); Tony gets flung out of his own bar. Jarvis sends the Mark VII armor. Yes, sends the armor. A portal opens. Aliens pour through. The Avengers go on a nonstop throat-punching, head-slamming, double-tapping, hammer-swinging, shield, flinging, arrow-hurling, kiss-the-curb-you-foul-Chitauri romp through downtown Manhattan.

By the way, Banner hasn’t even shown up yet. He had fallen out the hover-carrier. He drives up on a broke-A motorcycle. Some monstrous techno-biological Chitauri troop carrier that looks like a cybernetic sturgeon from one of the Great Lakes--take your pick--shows up.

Banner calmly walks toward it and informs the other assembled Avengers that he’s always angry when they need to know, “Hey, man, how you gonna kill the cybernetic sturgeon without being angry?”, and in a few steps ROIDHULKSTHEFRAKOUT!!! And punches the cybernetic sturgeon and kills it dead. Like dead dead.

This particular Rambling Not-Review will be successful if, for no other reason, I claim coinage on “cybernetic sturgeon.” Moving on . . .

Thor and Loki beat the Hel outta each other. The battle rages, and they join where the narrative demands. Oh, and Hulk eventually confronts Loki, who proceeds to inform Hulk just how low-brow a critter he is, and they clash. By clash, I mean that Hulk grabs Loki by the legs and slams him down repeatedly on the floor for about a ten-second scene, leaves the god addled, and walks off with the best line of the flick, “Puny god.”

The nebulous council gives Nick Fury orders to nuke Manhattan. He demonstrates displeasure and nixes the idea, but they override him because they are the Council, and Nick Fury has one good eye and a sidearm. Screw him, even on his own hover-carrier. Now that most of the alien issues are solved--Thor and the chokepoint of the portal and the summoning of earthly lightning yet Asgardian approved (and you can bet your Asgard it was awesome)--Tony has to stop a nuclear missile, downtown and inbound, baby. The team is finished. Stick a fork in them. They are tired from the nonstop alien abuse and the dishing out of curb kissings. Black Widow helps turn off the portal’s switch even as Tony mans up big time and (1) catches the missile, (2) steers it through the portal, (3) continues into other-space, and (4) sends it into the tainted heart of the Chitauri mothership. When the mothership explodes, there is a lovely, dramatic nuclear space-fireball, and Tony knows he’s really done something worthy of Cap’s respect since Cap doesn’t respect Tony in the first place. Anyhow, the suit shuts down, and Iron Man is working on less than zero power and plummets to earth, but Hulk catches him, falls with him, and flops him over onto the street.

Tony is dead.

Hulk bellows at him.

Tony resuscitates.

The theater shares just one of many communal laughs.

The team confronts Loki, who is all Lectered up in the denouement. Thor and and unwilling Loki take the Tesseract off earth. The team go their separate ways. Nick assures the Council it’s none of their never mind and to a loyal second-in-command that the Avengers will always assemble when needed.

Stay for all the credits as there are two--count ‘em, TWO--post-credit teasers.

At two hours and twenty-two minutes, it felt like a standard ninety-minute affair.

Bonus: Seeing it with my son and my best friend.

Bonus-Bonus: That kid in the Capt. America costume. Boots were quite nifty. I would’ve fought him for the shield. No lie. And his paunchy father, too.

Super-Bonus: It’s cheat day, so I had a Coca-Cola Icee.

[This is where you take a breath after reading this not-review. And feel free to leave the comments for which I’m obviously fishing! But no cybernetic sturgeons!]