For the first issue of the weekly digital magazine Unwinnable, Stu Horvath interviewed Laird Barron. The piece includes an extensive discussion of Barron’s short story “Bulldozer,” which was included in Lovecraft’s Monsters, and establishes a connection with a popular TV show.

Fans of HBO’s show True Detective might detect a similarity to Reggie Ledoux’s ominous warning to Detective Rustin Cohle: “Time is a flat circle.”

 “[True Detective’s creator Nic] Pizzolato approached me years ago as a fan,” says Barron. “We’ve corresponded infrequently since. He loved The Imago Sequence and Occultation, and has mentioned them positively in interviews. My work seems to have influenced some of his artistic choices. I’ll take it as a compliment.”

Despite a resurgence of interest in weird fiction thanks to True Detective’s use of references to Robert W. Chambers’ perennial horror collection The King in Yellow, Barron dismisses the notion of his chosen genre’s trendiness with similar language. “The big old wheel keeps turning,” he says. “All there is to it.”

For Barron, this circular theory of time fits right in with the theme of experience absorption. “Time consumes itself, or cycles through itself in an endless loop – from Big Bang to heat death and collapse into a single ultra-dense point that eventually destabilizes with another Big Bang, and so on for eternity.”

For the rest of the fascinating interview, be sure to pick up Unwinnable #1.

For an excerpt from Laird Barron’s “Bulldozer,“ visit the Tachyon tumblr.

For more information on Lovecraft’s Monsters, visit the Tachyon site.

Cover and illustration by John Coulthart.