Worse Angels by Laird Barron
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
WORSE ANGELS is another exceptional novel in author Laird Barron’s Isaiah Coleridge series. Tasked with determining whether a death that was ruled a suicide might actually be a murder, Coleridge finds himself at odds with yet another shady corporation, the Redlick Group, and their secretive supercollider project that may have a darker purpose than scientific research.
In the course of his investigation, Coleridge runs up against Redlick’s spokesman/enforcer Tom Mandibole, who also happens to be a recurring devilish character in Barron’s horror fiction. (I last encountered Mandibole in the 2015 novella X’S FOR EYES.) It makes for a fun Easter egg, creating a link between Barron’s cosmic horror tales and his more mainstream Isaiah Coleridge novels, and positing, perhaps, that they exist in the same shared world.
I don’t know if more Isaiah Coleridge novels are on the way — as of this writing, I haven’t heard anything — but I eagerly await more. These novels are witty, brutally violent at times, brimming with a barely glimpsed darkness, and highly enjoyable.
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