Laird Samuel Barron is an author and poet, mostly of horror, noir, and dark fantasy fiction.In Alaska, Barron raced the Iditarod three times in the 1990s and worked as a fisherman on the Bering Sea. He began writing professionally in 1994. He was the Managing Editor of the online literary magazine Melic Review.He has stated his affection for pulp fiction, westerns, and noir, and his work typically combines one or more of these elements with a horrific or weird supernatural intrusion. Barron has referred to the Bible and the Necronomicon as "the greatest horror stories ever told."[6]Barron's fiction has appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, SCI FICTION, Inferno: New Tales of Terror and the Supernatural, Lovecraft Unbound, Black Wings: New Tales of Lovecraftian Horror, and The Del Rey Book of Science Fiction and Fantasy, as well as in numerous year's best anthologies.Barron received the 2007 and 2010 Shirley Jackson Awards for his collections "The Imago Sequence and Other Stories" and "Occultation and Other Stories." His first novel, "The Light is the Darkness," was published in 2011.