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The Croning
- Narrated by: Emily Zeller
- Length: 10 hrs and 51 mins
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Publisher's Summary
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.
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What the critics say
What listeners say about The Croning
Average Customer RatingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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Overall
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Performance
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- Jake
- 2022-02-12
Second listen
Really enjoyed this book, especially upon second listening. If you like cosmic horror, Laird Barron doesn’t disappoint. I’m far from a literary expert but I’d put The Croning high on the list of excellent cosmic horror novels. Definitely worth a listen if you love horror beyond the stars, and just remember, the children of old leech love you.
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Overall
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Performance
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- Amazon Customer
- 2023-01-20
Certainly Lovecraftian
This is the type of novel you really have to pay close attention and may be better read vs audio. In addition to being surreal and existential, there are three main sections. The first chapter builds a history, the second tells of a specific time period involving two main characters, and the third is the main characters experience later in life (as it relates to the first two chapters). It is very Lovecraftian, surreal at times. I enjoyed the protagonist, an older gentleman with a polite vocabulary (you scoundrel!!!). Lastly, I understand there was rationale with the disjointed and inconsistent narration, and the ending was clever, yet... the story overall felt condensed and incomplete, and by the end was not satisfied nor filled with dread.
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
- Amazon Customer
- 2021-07-31
Worth Listening To
It's tough to find modern Lovecraftian Horror and it's even tougher to find good Lovecraftian Horror. this was a great read and the final chapters were really worth the journey. It had some pacing issues and this is a book that actually requires your focus. I had to listen to some sections multiple times to understand what was happening but it was definitely worth it. I narrator was fantastic.
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Overall
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Performance
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- Kaler Jonson
- 2023-12-10
Solid cosmic horror marred by erratic narration
The book was fine, nothing particularly memorable but worth the read.
The narrator is awful, but only in very specific ways.
Every single older male voice sounds like a coked up Muppet bursting with good will, regardless of the situation.
The narrator only has maybe four total voices she can do, which leads to very hard to parse conversations which leave me confused as to who said what.
Most bafflingly, the narrator is incapable of pronouncing basic words, making the mistakes I associate with children not adult professional voice actors.
The poor narration really took away from the book for me.
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