Interested? Some of his fiction is free online here. I highly recommend “Shiva, Open Your Eye” and “The Forest”.
A while ago I wrote a forum post about how Larid Barron uses color symbolism in his stories. My thoughts below directly reference Barron’s stories and sometimes include MASSIVE SPOILERS.
Sigil of the Old Leech by Cody Tilson from The cover and back of The Croning by Laird Barron
Red is most often associated with the totally unnatural. Recall that the pinhole of madness shines with a RED light.
Evidence:
"Jaws of Saturn"
The protagonist observes the Warlock Phil Wary:
"Afternoon bled into red evening and the stars emerged in the silver of sky through the window behind the couch. Franco was in a state of partial delirium when Carol knocked on the door. Mr. Wary smoothed his shaggy hair and quickly donned a smoking jacket. Carol came in, severe and rushed as usual. He took her coat and fixed drinks and Franco slowly strangled, his view curtailed by the angle of the closet door. "
...
"In due course, Mr. Wary shut off the record player and the apartment fell quiet but for Carol's breathing. He said, "Come my dear. Come with me," and took Carol's hand and led her, as if she were sleepwalking, to a blank span of the wall. Mr Wary brushed aside a strip of brittle paper and revealed what Franco took to be a dark water stain, until Carol pressed her eye against it and he realized the stain was actually a peephole. A peephole to where though? That particular wall didn't abut another apartment--it was an outer wall overlooking the rear square and beyond the square, a ravine."
...
" "Your turn," he said upon turning his attention to Franco. He unclasped the belt and led him to the wall, its peeling flap of ancient paper. The peephole oozed a red glow.....
"Vastation"
The peephole
"During my explorations, I discovered a barred door behind a rack of jars and pots. On the other side was a tiny cell full of scrolls. These scrolls were scriven with astronomical diagrams and writing I couldn't decipher. The walls were thick stone and a plug of wood was inset at eye level. I worked the cork free, amazed at the soft, red light that spilled forth. I finally summoned the courage to press my eye against the peephole.
I suspect if a doctor were to give me a CAT scan, to follow the optic nerve deep into its fleshy backstop, he'd see the blood-red peephole imprinted in my cerebral cortex, and through the hole, Darkness, the quaking mass at the center of everything where a sonorous wheedling choir of strings and lutes, flutes and cymbals crashes and shrieks and echoes from the abyss, the foot of the throne of an idiot god."
Red light here is directly referencing Azathoth.
"Hallucigenia"
Before the main character encounters the cursed barn with the unnatural therein, there is red and yellow imagery.
"The crumbling grade almost tripped him. At the bottom, remnants of a fence--rotted posts, snares of wire. Barbs dug a red zigzag in his calf. He cursed, lumbered into the grass. It rose coarse and brown, slapped his legs and buttocks. A dry breeze awoke and the yellow dandelion blooms swayed toward him"
"The Broadsword"
After the protagonists harrowing ordeal with the Children there is this passage:
“It is always hot as hell down here,” Hopkins the custodian said. He perched on a tall box, his grimy coveralls and grimy face lighted by the red glow that flared from the furnace window. “There’s a metaphor for ya. Me stoking the boiler in Hell.”
...
"“ Finish it off. I’ve got three more hid in my crib, yonder.” He gestured into the gloom. “Mr. 119, isn’t it? Yeah, Mr. 119. You been to hell, now ain’t you? You’re hurtin’ for certain.” Pershing drank, choking as the liquor burned away the rust and foulness. He gasped and managed to ask, “What day is it?” Hopkins held his arm near the furnace grate and checked his watch. “Thursday, 2: 15 p.m., and all is well. Not really, but nobody knows the trouble we see, do they?” Thursday afternoon? He’d been with them for seventy-two hours, give or take. Had anyone noticed? He dropped the bottle and it clinked and rolled away. He gained his feet and followed the sooty wall toward the stairs. Behind him, Hopkins started singing “Black Hole Sun.” "
Hopkins appears to stand at the exit between the unnatural Children's world and the real world of the Broadsword hotel. Reverse psychopomp if you will.
"Six, Six, Six"
At the end where the main character is exposed to the unnatural there is the following line
"The family patriarch stood, dressed in a black robe with the cowl thrown back. He was flushed and beaming with paternal joy. His left hand rested upon his son’s head. Her husband made a labored sawing motion and the feet twitched and danced, slapping against the floorboards. The room blurred in and out of focus and began to slide toward the crimson edge of her vision. She made a small sound and the trio glanced toward the stairs. They seemed surprised to see her."
Red and black are often associated with each other, and with the unnatural in Barron's stories.
Evidence:
"The Broadsword"
"He imagined lost caverns and inverted forests of roosting bats, a primordial river that tumbled through midnight grottos until it plunged so deep the stygian black acquired a red nimbus, a vast throbbing heart of brimstone and magma. Beyond the falls, abyssal winds howled and shrieked and called his name."
"Six, Six, Six"
Please see the above Six Six Six quote and note that "black robe" and "flushed" are in adjacent sentences.
"Figures, distorted by the shuddering frames, skulked between the boles of the trees, capered as the light downshifted to red, then black, and when the panel brightened, beneath a conical hat a white, lunatic face with strips of flesh peeled to chipped bone leered at her, twisting a stork neck to get a better view. She screamed even as the ghoulish visage rippled and morphed into a hillock amidst a sea of long grass beneath a too-full moon. More figures loped and gamboled toward the foreground; tall, yet stooped, garbed in cowls and robes, sinewy arms raised in an apish manner."
"The Forest"
"He inhaled to scream and jerked awake, twisted in the sheets and sweating. Red light poured through the thin curtains. Nadine sat in the shadows (ie color black) at the foot of his bed. Her hair was loose and her skin reflected the ruddy light. He thought of the goddess Kali shrunk to mortal dimensions."
"Vastation"
Before murdering the potter and encountering the peephole
"The sun lowered and flatted into a bloody line, a scored vein delineating the vast black shell of the land. When the potter squatted to demonstrate an intricacy of a mechanism of his spinning wheel I raised a short, stout plank and swung it edgewise across the base of his skull"
----
Anyway, Barron uses a lot of consistent color imagery in all three collections (The Imago Sequence & Other Stories, Occultation, The Beautiful Thing That Awaits Us All) to foreshadow the pretense of the unnatural.
I'm not going to cite examples here, but there is similar evidence that the colors blue and green represent normalcy, while the colors yellow and orange represent a warning transitional location or state between reality and the unnatural.
So does Barron simply follow the ROYGBIV spectrum? I don't think so. Violet is more than once associated with "unnatural" passages but I'm not sure exactly what the symbolism is or if there is any.
Also in the Nanashi Novella, the color symbolism other than his consistent use of red/black as unnatural is different than in previous work. I have yet to figure that out.
