News | Not the End of Alabaster

Never mind for a moment the surprise bashing I got on her blog for being glib about Blood Oranges whilst trying to raise readers' awareness of it in some small way: Caitlin R. Kiernan has been a font of fantastic fiction my entire adult life, and I admire her work immensely.

Silk was a formative reading experience for me, and over the years, Kiernan gotten better and better. With The Drowning Girl: A Memoir in early 2012, she hit yet another new high, and though her current prose projects aren't up my alley, exactly, I can't wait for her to get back to writing the dark fantasy I desire in my heart of hearts.

In her own time, obviously. I'm not even the boss of me; I wouldn't presume to tell anyone else what they should do!

Anyway, oddly enough, I'd read a whole lot of Kiernan's work without even realising it. I speak here of The Dreaming, DC Comics' superb Sandman spin-off, which she scripted from 1996, which I bought from that point on. I've followed her work with particular interest ever since I put two and two together a few years later.

Long story short, Kiernan's return to comic books last year was a dream come true for yours truly, and I've adored Alabaster so far. I own the hardcover collection of Wolves, and I've been buying single issues of Dark Horse Presents solely to keep up to speed with the further adventures of Dancy Flammarion in Boxcar Tales.

Alas, the dream looks to be over for the moment. According to a post on Aunt Beast's blog:

"Last week I spoke with my editor at Dark Horse and told him that it was time for me to step back from both Dancy and comics for the foreseeable future. That, after almost two years of pretty heavy involvement on this project, it was time to refocus my attention on my prose work. It felt a lot like I was tendering my resignation, like quitting a job, though it doesn't truly amount to quite that. It just means that, for the time being, I'm choosing to concentrate on other projects. In a lot of ways, working in comics is far more stressful than prose publishing, and, right now, I've got to decrease the stress in my life. 

"That said, working with Dark Horse has been a marvelous experience, and I thank everyone I've worked with – Rachel, Jemiah, Daniel, Shantel, Mike, Steve, Greg, Rachelle, Augie, and Spencer – for making Alabaster: Wolves and Alabaster: Boxcar Tales happen. I'm not an easy person to work with, and you've all shown admirable patience. I especially thank the many readers and reviewers who've believed in the books. Thank you. And if you are a fan, don't be sad.  

"There will be additional Dancy material from Dark Horse, but I'm not yet at liberty to announce what it will be or when it will be released. I'll make those announcements when I'm told that I can."

I take heart in the suggestion that this is not necessarily the end, however much it sounds like one. Still, I'll miss dear Dancy in the months or years between the forthcoming conclusion of Boxcar Tales and the beginning of whatever's next.

If you haven't already read an Alabaster book, I'm sure you know what to do.

Coming Attractions | Blood Oranges by Caitlin R. Kiernan

Caitlin R. Kiernan has ever been awfully forthright about the publishing process, and brutally honest about the act of writing too. So going into her masterful last novel - that's The Drowning Girl: A Memoir for those of you who missed it - we knew in advance that it marked the end of an era.

Sad, but true. And some might say overdue.

Anyway, as in the tarot - not to speak of The Smashing Pumpkins' back catalogue - the end is the beginning. The beginning, in Kiernan's case, of a series of three all-out urban fantasies published under an open pseudonym. 

You must be wondering: why the half handle, when Kiernan's own name is so critically (if not commercially) credited? Well, here's her explanation:

"I do not hate this novel. It's this novel's sequel, Fay Grimmer, that's giving me fits. [...] But this book, Blood Oranges – though it's nothing even remotely like The Red Tree or The Drowning Girl: A Memoir, it's fun. Mostly, it was fun to write. It's a popcorn book. It's funny. It's a satire with an undercurrent of bitter disillusionment. It's candy bars with razor blades hidden inside them. It gives the middle finger to 'paranormal romance' and its corruption of urban fantasy. So, yeah."

This description puts me in mind of nothing so much as The Mall and The Ward. The work, you will recall, of another invented personage: the great S. L. Grey.

Here's the cover, in any event:

Hmm.

Then again, given what Kiernan's trying to do with this book - namely break into the mass market for urban fantasy - it fits, I think.

And Amazon has a blurb to boot!

My name’s Quinn.

If you buy into my reputation, I’m the most notorious demon hunter in New England. But rumors of my badassery have been slightly exaggerated. Instead of having kung-fu skills and a closet full of medieval weapons, I’m an ex-junkie with a talent for being in the wrong place at the right time. Or the right place at the wrong time. Or... whatever.

Wanted for crimes against inhumanity I (mostly) didn’t commit, I was nearly a midnight snack for a werewolf until I was “saved” by a vampire calling itself the Bride of Quiet. Already cursed by a werewolf bite, the vamp took a pint out of me too.

So now... now, well, you wouldn’t think it could get worse, but you’d be dead wrong.

A moreish premise, no? Here Kiernan appears to be baking all the genre's essential ingredients in a single tray. What the resulting concoction will taste of is anyone's guess - my money's on something bittersweet, like treacle - but typically this author's work is deeply, darkly delicious.

So I have hope.

There's no UK publisher in place to date - nor would I expect there to be one, unless Jo Fletcher jumps in (on you go, Jo!) - but Blood Oranges is coming out in North America from Roc next February 5th.

The Scotsman Abroad | True Lies Untold in The Drowning Girl

At long last, it's time to talk about one of the best books of the year!

We'd have hit it somewhat sooner - excepting a couple of corrections, the review was good to go more than a month ago - but what with all the incredible guest blogs and everything else, by which I mean buckets of beer, I hardly had the opportunity to attend to it during my American absence.

Tell you what, though: six or eight weeks on from my initial read-through of The Drowning Girl: A Memoir, the latest from Caitlin R. Kiernan - and I do believe the final novel of its kind to come from the aforementioned author - has lost none of its power. If anything, it's gained certain shades in my imagination.

You could call The Drowning Girl: A Memoir a ghost story and not be terribly far off the mark, but it's a ghost story only Caitlin R. Kiernan could have written. She's among the most unique voices in genre literature today, and I am, I confess, more than a little mixed in the feelings department to hear that she means to appeal to the YA market with her next novel, Blood Oranges.

Whether it's the last of its line or not, The Drowning Girl: A Memoir is a truly virtuoso piece of work. A masterful feat, even considering Kiernan's standard caliber. If indeed it is time for her to move on, from one world to another, then I can't conceive of a book that better represents all that she's achieved since Silk. 

In any case, Strange Horizons published my review of The Drowning Girl: A Memoir yesterday, so here's a snippet of it:

India Morgan Phelps — Imp to everyone she and we come to care about over the course of The Drowning Girl: A Memoir — is insane. Probably. Maybe. Possibly. But in any case "there's crazy and then there are crazy people who believe in mermaids and werewolves and unicorns and fairies and shit" (p. 228), a decent distinction which, indecently, leaves Imp doubly damned, because she's a disorganised schizophrenic from a longish line of asylum attendees, tormented in the interim by lunatic visions of a spectre in the skin of a girl.

So what's her word worth? In all likelihood, not a lot. Perhaps nothing. Or else, equally, everything. Assuredly it's all we have to go on in the ninth novel from one of dark fantasy's most masterful artists. This is Imp's memoir, after all — her suggestively subjective account of certain incredible events — and though there are other characters sewn into the road of needles she takes, she is the author of each and every one; we only ever see them through her uncanny, meandering eye. Thus, the question is, was, will always be: is Imp's fly-by-night narration enough to unpick the enigmas within this eminently telling text?

The simple fact is, it isn't. But the truth is, it is.

(continue reading)

You can read the rest of my review over at Strange Horizons, and I really would urge you to. If you're a fan of fine dark fantasy - and amongst us, who isn't? - The Drowning Girl: A Memoir is not a book you can afford to overlook.

Meanwhile, on The Speculative Scotsman tomorrow, we'll touch on another of the early year's best. I don't want to give the game away as to its identity just yet, but if you've been paying attention to my tweets this past week... you'll have an inkling, I think.

Book Review | Two Worlds and In Between: The Best of Caitlin R. Kiernan (Volume I)

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Caitlin R. Kiernan's short fiction was first published in 1995. Over the intervening decade and a half, she has proven not only one of dark fantasy and science fiction's most prolific and versatile authors, but, to quote Ramsey Campbell, "One of the most accomplished writers in the field, and very possibly the most lyrical." S. T. Joshi has written, "Kiernan's witchery of words creates a mesmerizing effect that we haven't seen since the days of Lovecraft and Bradbury."

Two Worlds and In Between presents a stunning retrospective of the first ten years of her work, a compilation of more than two hundred thousand words of short fiction, including many of her most acclaimed stories, as well as some of the author's personal favorites, several previously uncollected, hard-to-find pieces, and her sf novella, The Dry Salvages, and a rare collaboration with Poppy Z. Brite.

Destined to become the definitive look at the early development of Kiernan's work, Two Worlds and In Between is a must for fans and collectors alike, as well as an unprecedented introduction to an author who, over the course of her career, has earned the praise of such luminaries as Neil Gaiman, Peter Straub, Charles De Lint, and Clive Barker.

***

I can recall recommending no author so often as I have recommended Caitlin R. Kiernan. To friends and friendly readers and friends with friendly readers of their own... to all those folks with a hankering for something different – something unlike anything else – I have commonly promised the world of her work, to which, I think, there is no better introduction than Two Worlds and In Between: The Best of Caitlin R. Kiernan (Volume 1), and no worse.

A retrospective collection of her short fiction from the period of 1993 through 2004, Two Worlds and In Between gathers together some 26 tales – including several novelettes and novellas, not a few award-winners, and a career-best collaboration with absentee NOLA novelist Poppy Z. Brite – from one of dark fantasy and science fiction’s most accomplished yet least acknowledged authors. Many will find it an indispensable edition: coming in at just shy of 600 pages, it is an exclusive and beautifully presented behemoth of a book destined to become a collector’s item all too soon, in the mode of all of Kiernan’s earlier assemblages. But the value of Two Worlds and In Between as an object is of course roundly dwarfed by its worth as an artistic endeavour, for as a chronicle of the incremental progress of an author whose work was stunning from word one – in Silk, if not before, so long ago – it is crucial.

Other readers, however, may find Two Worlds and In Between less rather than more than the sum of its many and various parts, because this, like George R. R. Martin’s Dreamsongs: A RRetrospective before it, is a retrospective in not just name but also nature: a compilation demonstrating the development of the work of a particular author or artist over a given interval in terms of time. Even auteurs, after all, begin as amateurs, and inasmuch as the lattermost moments of Two Worlds and In Between portray Kiernan approaching the pinnacle of her powers – at her most mature, restrained and refined – there are also those moments (and rather a proliferation of them in the collection’s first third) which represent the author’s prodigious body of work in largely less flattering light. For instance in ‘Emptiness Spoke Eloquent,’ the dubious Dracula fan-fic this retrospective inevitably begins with, as in the attention-seeking non-starter ‘Salmagundi (New York City, 1981)’ and the dry run that is ‘Breakfast in the House of the Rising Sun’ – of which the author notes that “I was just beginning to find my voice here, my first voice, which would serve me well for a few years.” (p.99) – there is in evidence a certain awkwardness indicative of Kiernan’s initial inexperience. However sophisticated and ineffably artful her first few conjurations might seem on the surface, indeed however many times she might tweak or rework or overhaul these ultimately amateurish early efforts – Kiernan being stringently of the opinion that an author’s work is never truly done (see p.572) – sometimes beneath the black there is only more black; layer upon layer of lustrous look-at-me prose evidently its own reward, or if not, only overwrought:

And then the bones do break apart, a silent tear or slit in the side facing him, jagged mouth or vagina; thick liquid squirting out, dark and syrupy gouts like a punctured carotid, and two or three people sitting right up front move back a little, wiping at their clothes or faces or hair with fingers reluctant to touch the substance, yet curious to know, disgusted and excited by disgust. The howl is fading now, growing distant or imploding, and it leaves behind a dull-heart thump-thump-thump that’s more metal than flesh, steam-hammer pound in air raped into stillness, into vacuum, by sound. (p.129)

There is an ostentatiousness to a fair few of Kiernan’s first fictions I dare say some readers are like to find practically repellent: an eye and an ear for details untold in other stories – often for good reason, because here they are ever a mire for already fitful narratives to fall afoul of – and a resolute determination to endear itself to those readers with panda eyes and a penchant for torture porn. Navels are needless to say gazed, and the self is routinely indulged and oft-congratulated, yet even during this first period, this least period with which Two Worlds and In Between can but start, there are moments of exquisite beauty, too. From the final unfurling of a fallen angel’s ripped and ragged wings in ‘Estate’ – the first of Kiernan’s shorts to make the year’s best anthologies, and easily the most memorable of all these early doors cracked open to other worlds and times – to the suitably unsettling if comparatively crude Lovecraftian homage of ‘Postcards From the King of Tides,’ the author gives voice to a strain of pained but wondrous dark fantasy to which there are in this day and age few, if any, equivalents.

This beauty, though, is only an intermittent murmur, there and then gone in the first phase of Two Worlds and In Between. And one senses that Kiernan is herself cognisant of the missteps she made as her career was coming together. Cutting if abrupt afterwords affixed to each tale, whether wholly retold or no, tend to delve into the good, the bad and the ugly without distinction; an lop-sided imbalance between the 150 pages of this retrospective concerned with stories composed between 1993 and 1999 and the 400-some sides devoted to those published from 2000 to 2004 seems particularly revealing – and results in several odd or otherwise notable omissions, among them early favourites ‘Persephone’ and ‘A Story for Edward Gorey.’ Most telling of all the author’s allowances as to the questionable quality of her initial endeavours is an admission buried in the publication history appending Two Worlds and In Between, wherein Kiernan notes that:

[...] the text for each of these stories, as it appears in this collection, will differ, often significantly, from the originally published texts. In some cases, stories were revised for each reprinting (and some have been reprinted numerous times). No story is ever finished. There’s only the moment when I force myself to stop and provisionally type THE END. (p.572)

Though these revisions seems somewhat at odds with the implicit purpose of a retrospective –misrepresentations, I would go so far as to suggest – the copious edits Kiernan confesses to making to these stories on this and those other occasions they have been canonised have in the majority of cases resulted in texts more tolerable and tasteful than they may have been before. Rendered as they are in Two Worlds and In Between – absent, then, a tiresome tendency towards tortured prose, some clumsy dialogue and contrived character development – these tales are at times as representative of Kiernan’s inimitable talents today as they are of her necessarily less practiced craft circa yesteryear.

Not a moment too soon, in truth, we leave the noisome 90s behind to transition into the second and markedly more remarkable phase of this collection, wherein this idea about the essential arbitrariness of “THE END,” as Kiernan puts it, come fully to the fore. Many of the stories in this far larger part of Two Worlds and In Between touch on this periodic motif, whether merely by ending at what appears an arbitrary point – though appearances are indubitably deceiving – or by incorporating, as in The Dry Salvages, the aforementioned methodology into the very characters or components of a given fiction. In ‘Spindleshanks (New Orleans, 1956),’ ‘The Road of Pins,’ ‘Onion’ and on, the ends the reader expects prove elusive: these stories seem poised to continue beyond the point that Kiernan calls a halt, but that, perhaps, is the point, for far more discomfiting than a full-frontal of some unspeakable evil is the sinister shade of “the figure of a woman in the middle distance, lean and twisted as the blighted limbs of the trees… looking apprehensively over her shoulder at something the artist has only hinted at, shadows of shadows crouched menacingly at the lower edge of the canvas.” (p.192) This pointed refusal to pay off on one’s expectations – to give form and voice and weakness in turn to the ghastly, ghostly grotesqueries prowling around and around the periphery of these untold texts – to do anything other than Kiernan does, or does not, would be to do these nightmares and the imaginations with which we would behold them a dreadful disservice.

In the short fiction of Caitlin R. Kiernan, as documented in the second part of Two Worlds and In Between, “There are no answers. There is no truth. There are only terrible questions containing ever more terrible questions, an infinite regression of improbably unlikelihoods leading nowhere at all.” (p.530) But if nowhere is not a place, strictly speaking, then it is certainly a feeling – an anxious, creeping, crawling sense of wrongness or unease – and there are few authors better positioned to evoke its inconceivable image than Kiernan. Nevertheless, her patent-pending habit of stopping short of a complete narrative – even a single cohesive fragment of narrative – has in the past and will continue to rub some readers, and some critics, the wrong way. And some of Kiernan’s shorts are unquestionably more satisfactory in that incomparable fashion of hers than others. ‘Spindleshanks (New Orleans 1956),’ say, simply stops, leaving one feeling more cheated than is usual, particularly given the momentous promise of the spectre raised just moments before it is rudely interrupted. In ‘Houses Beneath the Sea,’ on the other hand – a left-behind lover’s yearning elegy to the leader of a suicide circle with designs on the abyssal plain, and the last (and the most recent) of the stories brought together in this extensive retrospective – Kiernan’s repudiation of the end is substantially more meaningful, in that though the precise character of “that darkness spread out before and behind and around us” (p.471) is never entirely exposed, there is at least the suggestion of thematic and narrative closure. And that, I think, is enough. Your mileage may vary.

Now the best of Aunt Beast (for so she is known) will of course be of immeasurable appeal to those subscribers to the cult of Caitlin R. Kiernan – a no-brainer buy that will see this limited edition sold out in short order, I’m sure – but Two Worlds and In Between could and should reach far further than the outer reaches of that inner circle, because at its best, how truly, madly, deeply, darkly marvelous this fiction is; what perfect poisonous flowers these fragile fragments are! Yet in the years she’s been a published author, there is no question that Caitlin R. Kiernan has had her moments – good and bad – as even I have had mine with her work.

I am, it follows, in two minds about Two Worlds and In Between, but I would wager the compromise lies somewhere between these two minds: thus, this double-disc greatest hits is in the end – if not “THE END”, for it is to be followed in 2014 by a second, no doubt superior volume – a magnificent, malevolent, momentarily middling thing. And what with its sequential arrangement, Two Worlds and In Between does not put its surest foot forward first; it graduates, come to that, from worst to best instead of the reverse. But that is the nature of the chronological compilation, and I would not hesitate to recommend the essential second part of this collection to any and all comers, whether they be die-hard Kiernan devotees or only the passing curious. That it comes complete with a selection of lesser texts – though do not mistake me: there are highlights even amongst these – should be no reason at all not to seek out this fairly faithful and endlessly fascinating retrospective of the work of an author whose finest fiction dwells in the impossible space betwixt the deep blue sea and the dark black sky. 

***

Two Worlds and In Between:
The Best of Caitlin R. Kiernan (Volume I)

US Publication: November 2011, Subterranean Press

Buy this book from

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 IndieBound / The Book Depository

Recommended and Related Reading

Book Review: The Red Tree by Caitlin R. Kiernan

[Buy this book on Amazon

in the UK / in the US]

"Sarah Crowe left Atlanta, and the remnants of a tumultuous relationship, to live alone in an old house in rural Rhode Island. Within its walls she discovers an unfinished manuscript writter by the house's previous tenant - a parapsychologist obsessed with the ancient oak growing on a desolate corner of the property.

"Tied to local legends of supernatural magic, as well as documented accidents and murders, the gnarled tree takes rook in Sarah's imagination, prompting her to write her own account of its unsavoury history. As the oak continues to possess her dreams and almost all her waking thoughts, Sarah risks her health and her sanity to unearth a revelation planted centuries ago."

***

More than a decade ago, after an arc on The Dreaming - DC Comics' hypnotic spin-off from the pages of The Sandman - Caitlin R. Kiernan came to the attention of many a dark fantasy fan with her stunning debut novel Silk, an endlessly lyrical fable of spiders, dreams and darkness which bewitched, besides a legion of readers, the likes of Clive Barker, Peter Straub and Poppy Brite. Three years on, the "poet and bard of the wasted and lost" (as Neil Gaiman so aptly describes her) conjured up a second story at least the equal of the first: for all the wonders of Silk, and there were many, it was, at times, perhaps a little self-indulgent. The nightmarishly twisted Threshold, by comparison, pared down the navel-gazing and marked a vital stage in the continuing evolution of Kiernan's mesmeric prose.

There have been sequels to each tale since, with the author juggling two memorable casts of characters in two fantastic universes through Low Red Moon, Daughter of Hounds and Murder of Angels. Like a good fan, I've followed them loyally - and enjoyed every one, I should say - but I'll be the first to admit: I'd begun to long for another original narrative from the inimitable Kiernan's pen.

Thankfully, The Red Tree is exactly that, and short of a few foibles, it's every bit the equal of the most startling works in this reclusive writer's back-catalogue. The unforgettable story of Sarah Crowe serves to wipe clean the slate upon which Kiernan has been scribbling addendums since her last truly innovative work; gone are the tiresome black-clad twentysomethings who have populated the majority of her pages to date; there's no need, this time out, to be familiar with the ins and outs of the characters of Silk and Threshold; and while the impressionistic leanings of those novels and the like are certainly present in The Red Tree, they're not so central to its narrative that readers who were dissuaded by the hallucinatory realities of Kiernan's previous fiction need fear.

The Red Tree is a departure, then - certainly it represents the greatest leap forward this criminally underappreciated author has made since her striking second novel - but not such a one that those of us who have enjoyed Kiernan's work in the past should approach it trepidatiously. The mindfuck of motifs and themes she has mined so successfully before are in full force throughout The Red Tree. There are dreams and drugs within its pages; there's sex, suicide, tunnels and trilobites.

There are problems, too, regrettable moments where Kiernan indulges her narrator too much - foremost among them a transparent rant about bad reviews on Amazon that the author has herself eschewed. If I could level only a single complaint at The Red Tree, however, Kiernan wouldn't be on the receiving end of it, but rather the brainless marketing executive who in one fell swoop spoils what would otherwise have been a lovely cover by slapping a mean-looking brunette over Gene Mollica's evocative artwork. Truly, if any of Kiernan's novels has deserved a lavishly illustrated edition from the geniuses at Subterranean Press... but I digress.

>> EDIT TO REFLECT THAT: The author seems to be as disgusted by the pandering cover art as anyone else; Kiernan has even gone so far as to offer an alternative illustration for anyone brave enough to glue it over their copy of The Red Tree. A high-res version of the image seen directly to the right can be downloaded here.

Kiernan acknowledges a great deal of film and fiction as inspiration for The Red Tree in her afterword: a touch of The Blair Witch Project in her evocative choice of setting and an increasingly foreboding atmosphere sure to put you in mind of Edgar Allen Poe is the least of it. Lovecraftian monstrosities are glimpsed but never seen, Lewis Carroll is quoted repeatedly in the last act as the refreshingly middle-aged protagonist tumbles ever further down her own rabbit hole, but the tale of Sarah Crowe - an increasingly unreliable narrator as time and terror wears on the waning writer - resembles nothing so closely as Mark Z. Danielewski's incredible House of Leaves.

The Red Tree is metafiction at its finest: purportedly composed of a journal found by Crowe's long-suffering editor after the author's inexplicable disappearance, a onionskin of intertwining, even contradictory narratives soon unravel from the core of Crowe's troubled diary entries. To begin with, an introduction from her editor sets the scene for the literary equivalent of found footage in the vein of Paranormal Activity, but within the journal Crowe relates, amongst other things, a short story she may or may not have written, passages from works of fiction and fact alike, even the transcription of selected sections of a manuscript she finds in the basement of the Rhode Island cabin she has resigned herself to.

Crowe, unlike Kiernan, is an author searching desperately for an identity. She has rented a room with a view of the titular tree about which so many horror stories are told in large part as inspiration; she comes to the great red oak in search of the voice she fears she has lost, but finds much more beneath its boughs than her muse. Kiernan, meanwhile, has rarely seemed so confident, so self-possessed, as she does wending from what amounts to a creepy tree this remarkable, bone-chilling dark fantasy.

***

The Red Tree
by Caitlin R. Kiernan
August 2009, ROC: New York

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in the UK / in the US]

Recommended and Related Reading