First Word on Horror
Episode: Frontier Death Song
Created by Philip Gelatt
Starring Laird Barron
Exclusively on ETCH Studio’s Substack beginning April 4th, 2025

by Sasha Ravitch, Staff Writer

“Horror is something that can invade almost any other type of writing, music, any other creative endeavor: you can tinge it with darkness. Literature, film, music, these are filters and they’re lenses and they allow us to interact with these very powerful emotions. It’s like putting on your gloves before you handle toxic material. You’re going to do this, but this is a way to do it safely. [...]”
Laird Barron: “Frontier Death Song,” First Word on Horror

Philip Gelatt’s First Word on Horror is a prescient and powerful concept, with a pleasing execution and result. This fifteen-part documentary series chronicles five of our most esteemed contemporary horror writers: Stephen Graham Jones, Paul Tremblay, Elizabeth Hand, Laird Barron, and Marian Enriquez. Hosted on Etch Studio’s Substack, a new episode is delivered into the inbox of subscribers each Friday, beginning the week of February 3rd. It feels as if the series has been thoughtfully constructed to illuminate the thinning line between lived experience and crafted story, and the subsequent exploration of narratives (and what shapes them) is rendered afresh by each author who takes the stage. Oscillating seamlessly between the telling of fiction, the telling of truth, the telling of both, and perhaps the sharing of neither, these episodes reveal the integral humanness of these supernaturally talented storytellers.

Our fourth author for ETCH Studios’ series is one of my personal favorite writers: the searing visionary Laird Barron. Barron has earned such unparalleled respect for both the quality of his creative work, and the nature of his character. A rare jewel, his writing is as if polished by ice, grit, and an acute observation of human nature which sets him apart in its fearlessness. He has written innumerable short stories and multiple collections, novels, and novellas. His predilection for the pulp fiction, western, and noir genres marries weird and horror motifs to create a new genre entirely unto himself. He has been included in multiple Lovecraft-themed anthologies, such as Lovecraft Unbound and Black Wings: New Tales of Lovecraftian Horror, and has been published in the revered institution The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction. He won the Shirley Jackson Award for his collections: The Imago Sequence and Other Stories and Occultation and Other Stories, as well as best novella for Mysterium Tremendum. He has been nominated for the Crawford Award, International Horror Guild Award, World Fantasy Award, Bram Stoker Award, Locus Award, and Sturgeon Award. His most recent collection, Not A Speck of Light (Bad Hand Books, 2024), is lauded as one of the best collections of the year, and likely of the past decade. He writes from the woods of upstate New York.

“Narrative resists control,” Barron posits, and his episodes reflect the same keening enchantment and unrelenting surprise. Our time beside the Alaskan-born author feels, perhaps more than any of the previous features, the most enspirited and irresistibly strange. He shares the same quality of charisma as a blizzard. It’s a bright, glaring beacon one can’t resist fascination with, despite knowing the endless churning is liable to push you to reality’s limit. It’s the sort of wisdom-suffused magnetism you associate with a certain character archetype: a man so much an extension of the wilderness that he becomes ambassador for it, an emissary or liaison between worlds. Such is the virtue of Barron’s storytelling: he writes from the emic lens within the teeming wilds and darkness, not as an anthropologist playing in hypotheticals and what-ifs. Barron knows something, knows something that the majority of us most certainly do not know, and it feels innate and evident without ever being explicitly mentioned. You don’t really want Barron to tell you outright what secrets of vicious woods or hungry mountain’s he’s privileged to—you want him to show you. And that’s exactly what his stories do: show you this shifting truth, its telluric and supernal mysteries, and his role as mediator between.

Full of dances with death, strange and vivid dreaming, the lurking threat of doppelgangers, the slowed beating of hearts, the barking of dogs, the slicing of blades, “Frontier Death Song” is a tour-de-force of visceral imagery and the kind of lived-experience which creates the best craft advice. Throughout this half-hour with Barron—rapt with attention at the feet of a real master-writer—I only found myself craving more. Where are the Laird Barron masterclasses, the workshops, the craft talks? Two quotes in particular left me speechless, inspired. Barron claims he: “learned this technique, not the ‘oh you should be willing to edit,’ no you should be willing to utterly subvert, destroy, annihilate what you think you are. Something can be born from that. Not a better version of it; what it wanted to be all along.”

This technique of craft applies the same telos of cosmic horror to the process of editing the work, whereas one might normally gravitate toward applying such a framework mostly in the initial crafting or developing of story. What a galvanizing and visionary suggestion. The idea that completely subverting the work, ripping it apart, dismantling it at its nuclear level, can give way to its revelation in form, a truer thing, is a masterful example of monster-theory at work. Beneath the first drafting of any great story is a truer story, even if it requires acts of annihilating atavism to arrive at. The skulking, final, mutant form of great art exists beneath all its aesthetic defenses!

Barron is asked about what he finds liberating about genre, and he shares with us great advice once shared with him:

Referring back to form. I have to give credit to John Langan, who said, “don’t look at form [...] as a straitjacket, or handcuffs, or whatever; it’s your homebase, it’s your point of departure.” It’s a pillar you can walk around it for the entire story but it’s also something like a beacon where if you wander too far you can still see it over there.

This is an exceptional suggestive and instructive offering, and it's generous as well. It shifts the locus of conversation about genre from an asphyxiating, narrowing grip around a story, and explores how genre allows a story instead to push back against narrative margins while maintaining its anchor should it desire to. As Langan shared with Barron and Barron now shares with us, genre is an emancipator of inhibitions, a blade with which to cut us free from fetters instead of binding us further.

Barron writes about “what evil men do,” and this meaning is twofold. There are “evil men,” and there are “men who do evil.” We find ourselves facing down such real-life stories of bad men and their bad actions, and so Barron’s stories become even more important, more prescient. We make sense of our experiences through art—we desperately need a scaffolding of meaning, of catharsis, of release through said art. The narrative which resists control, the character whose arc provides the reader with release, the “safety gloves” of story that allow us to touch the toxic chemicals of reality, all of these are a medicine which Barron can be trusted to serve with his characteristic grace.

“Frontier Death Song” is anxious and pressing in the best ways; it stirs the heart, it makes you feel more vigilant, it’s a call to action and aliveness and creation, even if it just means staring back at the wildness as it stalks you in your own backyard. Life is as strange as fiction for Barron, and when he shares his constant weirding with you, you believe. And even though the world is dark and full of suffering, he’s got the perfect piece of advice for you on that subject as well: “There’s a certain nobility in suffering with grace. People can take things away from you, life can take things away from you, but as long as you have the ability to make choices you can make choices that ennoble you as opposed to debase you.”

Gripping, can’t-look-away, archival-worthy footage, this interview will be preserved in the amber of my memory, returned to many times, and shared with many peers and students. Essential viewing for writers and readers, alike.

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