The Wind Began To Howl - by Laird Barron, the fourth story in the horror author's series about Isiah Coleridge, former mob enforcer now working as a PI in upstate New York, with some horror hinted at in the first couple of books, while in the third book,
Worse Angels, the horror was somewhat more explicit.
In this new story, Coleridge is contacted by an old-school gangster, Marion Curtis. (“We were frenemies, as the kids say”). While Curtis knows Coleridge from his days as an enforcer, he wants to employ Coleridge as an investigator for what should be a "benign case". Curtis owns a production company/money laundry that specializes in indie films and is financially backing a new venture, the titular movie, and it's run into a snag. Director Gil Finlay needs permission to use a track in his movie from The Barnhouse Effect, a cult favorite band that's sort of "out there", consisting of two enigmatic brothers.
Gil and I were acquainted these past couple of years primarily because of our overlapping social circles. Curtis informed him I was a fellow one stored in his rolodex for a rainy day. We’d kibitzed at parties, waxing poetic over a mutual adoration of Clark Ashton Smith and Kurosawa. Tonight was our first meeting in my official capacity.
I arrived near sundown and found him at a corner table, studying his phone. Stocky. Middle-aged white boy. Buzzcut, jeans, and a Star Wars T. He was unlike the show biz types I’d met while breaking skulls for the Outfit; not Hollywood at all. More of an erudite comics nerd who somebody occasionally handed a bag of cash to make an arthouse flick. He appeared perpetually bemused by his good fortune.
It should just be a legal thing that could be settled with some phone calls or a meeting, but the Barnhouse brothers have been missing without a trace for three months. Still, it should be routine case, but Coleridge and his ex-Marine sidekick Lionel find themselves running into some weird characters as they try to locate the brothers, and end up going down some strange, sinister paths.
