The Croning

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About this listen

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.

Laird BarronEmily ZellerAudible Studios

Fantasy

Fiction

Horror

Scary

Fantasy Fiction Horror Scary

Editor reviews

Laird Barron's debut novel plays to his strengths as a short story writer by fragmenting the chapters with a mind suffering from senile dementia. Flashbacks and forgetfulness build character of Don, a doomed man walking the edge of cosmic horror that the listener alone perceives, like a killer waiting in a closet.

The delicate-voiced Emily Zeller highlights how expertly and carefully Barron chooses his words, and also allows The Croning's horror to sneak up and stab the listener when it unexpectedly rears its hideous head. The quiet, exacting sweetness of Zeller's performance offsets the coldness of Barron's universe, its indifference to human suffering, and the sureness of its ultimate victory.

Critic reviews

"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)

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I love this performer and she did great with the characters as always but I found this very hard to listen to it seemed to jump all over the place