Blood Standard
By: Laird Barron
Narrated by: William DeMeritt
Series: Isaiah Coleridge Novels, Book 1
4.3 out of 5 stars 4.3 (115 ratings)
When a small-time criminal named Harold Lee turns up in the Ashokan Reservoir - sans a heartbeat, head, or hands - the local mafia capo hires Isaiah Coleridge to look into the matter. The mob likes crime, but only the crime it controls...and as it turns out, Lee is the second independent contractor to meet a bad end on the business side of a serrated knife. One such death can be overlooked. Two makes a man wonder.
Great story, superbly written and performed!
By TODD BANISTER on 08-01-19
Worse Angels
An Isaiah Coleridge Novel, Book 3
Ex-majordomo and bodyguard to an industrial tycoon-cum-US senator, Badja Adeyemi is in hiding and shortly on his way to either a jail cell or a grave, depending on who finds him first. In his final days as a free man, he hires Isaiah Coleridge to tie up a loose end: the suspicious death of his nephew four years earlier. At the time police declared it an accident, and Adeyemi isn't sure it wasn't, but one final look may bring his sister peace.
every single book in this series is amazing.
By Berserk on 06-23-20
The Croning
Narrated by: Emily Zeller
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.
Great Writer - Good story - VERY Wrong Reader,
By Old ManParker on 10-17-12
By: Nick Cutter
Narrated by: Marc Vietor
Original Recording
John Hawkins is counting down his last days as chief of police on the Lone Crow Reservation in the lonely, frigid woods of the Yukon. But when a faceless body with mysterious wounds washes up on the shores of the Porcupine River, he's pulled deeper in than ever before. Hawkins and coroner Jacob Littlecorn suspect the disfigured body is that of theoretical physicist Graham Raphelson, also known as the "molecular madman of Trinity College", who recently disappeared.
Insectile Ooze
By Michael on 10-26-20
Gateways to Abomination
By: Matthew M. Bartlett
Narrated by: Jon Padgett
Welcome to Leeds, Massachusetts, where the drowned walk, where winged leeches blast angry static, where black magic casts a shadow over a cringing populace. You've tuned in to WXXT. The fracture in the stanchion. The drop of blood in your morning milk. The viper in the veins of the Pioneer Valley.
Bartlett's Awesome - Padgett Makes Him Even Better
By Michael Hicks on 12-18-19
Swift to Chase
A Collection of Stories
Narrated by: Karin Allers
Laird Barron's fourth collection gathers a dozen stories set against the backdrops of the Alaskan wilderness, far-future dystopias, and giallo-fueled nightmare vistas. Combining hard-boiled noir, psychological horror, and the occult, Swift to Chase continues three-time Shirley Jackson Award winner Barron's harrowing inquiry into the darkness of the human heart.
Poor Narration
By Mister Trope on 03-26-20
The Ceremonies
By: T. E. D. Klein
Narrated by: Adam Sims
For graduate student Jeremy Freirs, citified, cynical, yet prone to daydreams, summer is the time to shed a few pounds and finally get some reading done for a course on Gothic literature. He's picked just the right place: the small, secluded village of Gilead, New Jersey, only 90 minutes from Manhattan but, with its antique customs and clannish traditions, seemingly centuries away. For farmers Sarr and Deborah Poroth, young members of Gilead's fundamentalist community, the summer threatens a conflict between their passionate natures and the stern dictates of their faith.
An all but forgotten classic - finally available!
By Dana Minyard on 08-22-19
By: Kathe Koja
Narrated by: Joshua Saxon
Nicholas, a would-be poet, and Nakota, his feral lover, discover a strange hole in the storage room floor down the hall - "Black. Pure black and the sense of pulsation, especially when you look at it too closely, the sense of something not living but alive." It begins with curiosity, a joke - the Funhole down the hall. But then the experiments begin. "Wouldn't it be wild to go down there?" says Nakota. Nicholas says "We're not." But they're not in control, not from the first moment, as those experiments lead to obsession, violence, and a very final transformation.
An Interesting Book of Weird...
By Rachael on 04-21-20
A Lush and Seething Hell
Two Tales of Cosmic Horror
By: John Hornor Jacobs
Narrated by: Almarie Guerra, MacLeod Andrews
The award-winning and critically-acclaimed master of horror returns with a pair of chilling tales - both never-before-published in print or audio - that examine the violence and depravity of the human condition. Bringing together his acclaimed novella The Sea Dreams It Is the Sky and an all-new short novel My Heart Struck Sorrow, John Hornor Jacobs turns his fertile imagination to the evil that breeds within the human soul.
Loved both Stories
By CR on 11-22-19
By: Nathan Ballingrud
Narrated by: Corey Brill, Danny Campbell, Matthew Lloyd Davies, and others
Wounds is a confounding, strange, and utterly entrancing collection of six stories, including one new novella from Shirley Jackson Award-winning author Nathan Ballingrud. From the eerie dread descending upon a New Orleans dive bartender after a cell phone is left behind in a rollicking bar fight in The Visible Filth to the search for the map of hell in "The Butcher's Table", Ballingrud's beautifully crafted stories are riveting in their quietly terrifying depictions of the murky line between the known and the unknown.
The Imago Sequence
Narrated by: Ray Porter
The title story of this collection - a devilishly ironic riff on H. P. Lovecraft's "Pickman's Model" - was nominated for a World Fantasy Award, while "Probiscus" was nominated for an International Horror Guild award and reprinted in The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror 19. In addition to his previously published work, this collection contains an original story.
Agonizingly Dull and Meaningless
By Zachary on 03-14-20
The Beautiful Thing That Awaits Us All
Over the course of two award-winning collections and a critically acclaimed novel, The Croning, Laird Barron has arisen as one of the strongest and most original literary voices in modern horror and the dark fantastic. Melding supernatural horror with hardboiled noir, espionage, and a scientific backbone, Barron's stories have garnered critical acclaim and have been reprinted in numerous year's best anthologies and nominated for multiple awards, including the Crawford, International Horror Guild, Shirley Jackson, Theodore Sturgeon, and World Fantasy awards.
Not happy. Beautiful.
By lf on 04-14-20
The Wide, Carnivorous Sky and Other Monstrous Geographies
By: John Langan
Narrated by: Eric Martin
John Langan has, in the last few years, established himself as one of the leading voices in contemporary horror literature. Gifted with a supple and mellifluous prose style, an imagination that can conjure up clutching terrors with seeming effortlessness, and a thorough knowledge of the rich heritage of weird fiction, Langan has already garnered his share of accolades. This new collection includes nine of his substantial stories.
Great stories!
By Caleb Cotton on 06-08-18
X's for Eyes
Narrated by: David Stifel
Brothers Macbeth and Drederick Tooms should have it made as fair-haired scions of an impossibly rich and powerful family of industrialists. Alas, life is complicated in mid-1950s USA when you're child heirs to the throne of Sword Enterprises, a corporation that has enshrined Machiavelli's The Prince as its operating manual. Consider also those long, cruel winters at the Mountain Leopard Boarding School for Assassins in the Himalayas, or that Dad may be a supervillain, while an uncle occasionally slaughters his nephews and nieces for sport.
Signature dark crazy nastiness plus fun
By Bill on 09-21-16
The Reddening
By: Adam Nevill
Narrated by: Conner Goff
Lifestyle journalist Katrine escaped past traumas by moving to a coast renowned for seaside holidays and natural beauty. But when a vast hoard of human remains and prehistoric artifacts is discovered in nearby Brickburgh, a hideous shadow engulfs her life. Helene, a disillusioned lone parent, lost her brother, Lincoln, six years ago. Disturbing subterranean noises he recorded prior to vanishing, draw her to Brickburgh's caves. A site where early humans butchered each other across 60,000 years. Upon the walls, images of their nameless gods remain.
Wrong Narrator
By Jamie on 01-24-20
The Boatman's Daughter
By: Andy Davidson
Narrated by: Samantha Desz
Ever since her father was killed when she was just a child, Miranda Crabtree has kept her head down and her eyes up, ferrying contraband for a mad preacher and his declining band of followers to make ends meet and to protect an old witch and a secret child from harm. But dark forces are at work in the bayou, both human and supernatural, conspiring to disrupt the rhythms of Miranda's peculiar and precarious life.
I listened to the whole book so you don't have to
By Kaley Faber on 12-14-20
The Keep
The Adversary Cycle, Book 1
By: F. Paul Wilson
Narrated by: Ralph Lister
"Something is murdering my men." Thus reads the message received from a Nazi commander stationed in a small castle high in the remote Transylvanian Alps. Invisible and silent, the enemy selects one victim per night, leaving the bloodless and mutilated corpses behind to terrify its future victims. When an elite SS extermination squad is dispatched to solve the problem, the men find something that's both powerful and terrifying. Panicked, the Nazis bring in a local expert on folklore - who just happens to be Jewish - to shed some light on the mysterious happenings.
At long last, The classic horror novel on Audible
By Shieldslinger on 07-22-20
The Best Horror of the Year: Volume Eleven
Best Horror of the Year Series, Book 11
By: Ellen Datlow - editor
Narrated by: Rebecca Gibel, Charlie Thurston
For more than 30 years, Ellen Datlow has been at the center of horror. Bringing you the most frightening and terrifying stories, Datlow always has her finger on the pulse of what horror fans crave. Now, with the 11th volume of the series, Daltow's back again to bring you the stories that will keep you up at night. With each passing year, science, technology, and the march of time shine light into the craggy corners of the universe, making the fears of an earlier generation seem quaint. This light creates its own shadows. The Best Horror of the Year chronicles these shifting shadows.
Blue chip horror
By man's ruin on 01-26-20
A novel set in the underbelly of upstate New York that's as hard-boiled and punchy as a swift right hook to the jaw, a classic noir for fans of James Ellroy and John D. Macdonald
Isaiah Coleridge is a mob enforcer in Alaska - he's tough, seen a lot, and dished out more. But when he forcibly ends the money-making scheme of a made man, he gets in the kind of trouble that can lead to a bullet behind the ear. Saved by the grace of his boss and exiled to upstate New York, Isaiah begins a new life, a quiet life without gunshots or explosions. Except a teenage girl disappears, and Isaiah isn't one to let that slip by. And delving into the underworld to track this missing girl will get him exactly the kind of notice he was warned to avoid.
At turns brutally shocking and darkly funny, heartbreaking and cautiously hopeful, Blood Standard is both a high-tension crime novel and the story of a man's second chance - the parts of his past he will never escape, and the parts that will shape his future.
©2018 Laird Barron (P)2018 Penguin Audio
"Massive, scarred Isaiah is a thug's thug, but he's also a well-read student of mythology. He's indifferent to stab wounds and generates righteous mayhem in his quest. Fans of violent crime fiction will love this one and will be eager to hear more from Isaiah." (Booklist, starred review)
"Laird Barron's Blood Standard is stylish, witty, and stupendously entertaining, and it gives us a main character - Isaiah Coleridge, head-cracking classics-quoting half-Maori ex(ish)-gangster - who is entirely unforgettable." (Lou Berney, Edgar Award-winning author of The Long and Faraway Gone)
"Rendered in icy strokes of prose, Laird Barron's Blood Standard is a remarkably self-assured crime novel - at once explosive and intimate, with a tightly wound plot and wonderfully realized characters. And then there's Barron's hero, Isaiah Coleridge. He's got a dead dog named Achilles and bits of Beowulf on his breath and in his teeth. Needless to say, there's not too many like him." (Michael Harvey, author of Brighton and The Chicago Way)
Underground Airlines
Lost Children Archive
What listeners say about Blood Standard
Decent First Foray into Crime Fiction for Barron
...but I'd be lying if I said it didn't have it's problems. First off, let me say that I enjoyed this title, and Mr. Barron seems to have a great amount of potential for this type of writing. There are comparisons made in the description to Ellroy and Macdonald, and having read neither (something to correct, perhaps) I think I'd put it in the Walter Mosley/Joe R. Lansdale camp for frame of reference. I mentioned some problems. The first thing I'll point out is the pacing. This one's a slow burner (although there are some pretty good action scenes). People unfamiliar with Barron's work in horror fiction might be surprised by how dreamlike this novel can be. Hard boiled for sure, but also deliberate and ponderous. Indeed, dreams seem to be something of a theme here and dream sequences even move the plot forward a couple of times. I'm a little tempted to call that cliche, but this is Laird Barron we're talking about so most of those sequences are quite good and more than a little haunting. No, the problems come in the form of unexplored (or at least under explored) and kind of dull side characters. They each seem as though they came out of a Crime-Noir-Starter-Kit: The kindly old couple who takes him in, the angsty teen who dislikes our protagonist then vanishes, the bad@$$ ex military sidekick, the father our protagonist hates, the love interest, various and sundry mobsters, crime bosses, gang members, rinse and repeat. And you know what? I was fine with all that. Until the resolution of the mysterious disappearance that drives the whole plot. I won't ruin it for you here, but that kind of blew it for me. I get subverting expectations, but that was just a bridge too far. Don't misunderstand me... it all adds up but just felt...lazy. Okay, so, you've made it through my entire first review. Do I recommend the book? Yep. Yes I do. The main character works. The setting works, and Barron's prose, gift for turn of phrase, knowledge of somewhat geeky topics such as samurai and mobster movies, as well having his Classic myths and legends down pat kept me pretty invested. There are some great lines in there. And seeing as this is the first in what's supposed to be a series, I can't imagine Mr. Barron won't continue to improve his craft even if Book One isn't perfect. PS: William DeMeritt did a fine job with the narration. I thought at first that his voice might get monotonous, but there was more than enough hard edge to it to make it work well with the material. And his character voices were all quite good and distinguishable from one another.
This one was OK
This one was OK, with enough twists and turns to hold my interest. It may have lost a little direction in the latter stages but I'm interested to see Laird Barron's next effort. With a bit more polish he has the potential to reach lofty heights as a story teller.
Well Played
Blood Standard beautifully fits Barron's tone with all the grit and wit of his earlier work while holding on to the air dark mystery that I will always associate with him.
Ia cust
A well paced interesting story. Protagonist is a great antihero who is at his best during the worst situations he finds himself. I would like to see more of this character perhaps even in a prequel as the story hints at an even darker past. Stylized and witty throughout. The excellent narration adds another fantastic layer as well.
Mitchell Strasner
Story was great, there's a lot of depth to the characters and twists turns to keep guessing.... good mystery and in-depth into thug life Narration was so very good.
A Hard Listen
This was hard to listen to for a couple of reasons. In general I liked the narrator's voice and characters but the pauses drove me nuts. I listen at 2x speed normally and adjust based the narration as I can't stand the normal slower than talking speed narration. This however was like read a sentence, pause way to long for dramatic effect and let it sink in, read the next sentence, pause for dramatic effect, read the next sentence, pause for dramic effect, and so on. If you think it was annoying reading that, listen to the book. It's almost as if the author or publishing house said, we need to lengthen the time of this somehow and came up with the decidedly bad idea to lenghten the time between sentences. I don't know if it was due to my faster than 1x listening habits that contributed to the annoying nature of this or not but talk about distracting. The story seemed to have its moments and was interesting but it also sometimes dragged in minutia in description that didn't further anything but probably added to the word count and therefore length. If this was re-engineered to make the narration smooth it would probably be worth the listen. Instead my recommendation is to skip it. I will not be listening to any additional books in this series.
Rich Tate
The next great American mystery author.
If you love an old fashioned mystery and gallons of spilled blood, Laird Barron is your man.