Book Review | A Borrowed Man by Gene Wolfe

It is perhaps a hundred years in the future, our civilization is gone, and another is in place in North America, but it retains many familiar things and structures. Although the population is now small, there is advanced technology, there are robots, and there are clones.

E. A. Smithe is a borrowed person. He is a clone who lives on a third-tier shelf in a public library, and his personality is an uploaded recording of a deceased mystery writer. Smithe is a piece of property, not a legal human.

A wealthy patron, Colette Coldbrook, takes him from the library because he is the surviving personality of the author of Murder on Mars. A physical copy of that book was in the possession of her murdered father, and it contains an important secret, the key to immense family wealth. It is lost, and Colette is afraid of the police. She borrows Smithe to help her find the book and to find out what the secret is. And then the plot gets complicated.

***

Gene Wolfe continues to play with the nature of narrators in his mostly notional new novel, a middling murder mystery explicated from the perspective of a posthumous author pretending to be a detective.

The story starts with Colette Coldbrook: sweetheart teacher, well-spoken socialite and, in the early parts of the narrative, something of a survivor. A year or so ago, she suddenly lost her mother; a little later, her father suffered a suspicious heart attack; and in the aftermath of that latter's passing, her beloved brother was straight-up strangled. She has no-one to turn to, now, and so many questions—not least about the unassuming book Conrad Coldbrook Junior found in Conrad Coldbrook Senior's safe.

Colette believes—with good reason, even—that Murder on Mars may be the key to understanding what happened to her family, and perhaps why, but beyond that, she doesn't have a clue what to do. The thought of reading this fictional fossil doesn't cross her ultra-modern mind for a minute. Instead, she does the other obvious thing: she rents out a so-called "reclone" of the author of the novel, E. A. Smithe, from her local library, and asks him to do the dirty work.

Now it might be that Smithe comes complete with most of his long-dead predecessor's memories, but he doesn't remember much about Murder on Mars—and to make matters worse, he's a copy of a crime writer rather than anything resembling a detective himself:

I was not the man I thought I was, the one whose name I used—whose name I still use right now, for that matter. I was somebody else, a kid who had been grown from that guy's DNA and loaded up with his memories, phony memories of things that never happened to me and never could happen to me. (p.36)

Thus, the investigation into the curious case of the Coldbrooks proceeds in frustrating fits and stuttering starts, regularly interrupted by Smithe's soul-searching and set back substantially when Colette is (apparently) kidnapped. "The more I thought about it the surer I got that there was something funny going on, but I could not even guess what it was." (p.106)

Book Review | Bats of the Republic by Zachary Thomas Dodson

Bats of the Republic is an illuminated novel of adventure, featuring hand-drawn maps and natural history illustrations, subversive pamphlets and science-fictional diagrams, and even a nineteenth-century novel-within-a-novel—an intrigue wrapped in innovative design.

In 1843, fragile naturalist Zadock Thomas must leave his beloved in Chicago to deliver a secret letter to an infamous general on the front lines of the war over Texas. The fate of the volatile republic, along with Zadock’s future, depends on his mission. When a cloud of bats leads him off the trail, he happens upon something impossible...

Three hundred years later, the world has collapsed and the remnants of humanity cling to a strange society of paranoia. Zeke Thomas has inherited a sealed envelope from his grandfather, an esteemed senator. When that letter goes missing, Zeke engages a fomenting rebellion that could free him—if it doesn’t destroy his relationship, his family legacy, and the entire republic first.

As their stories overlap and history itself begins to unravel, a war in time erupts between a lost civilization, a forgotten future, and the chaos of the wild. Bats of the Republic is a masterful novel of adventure and science fiction, of elliptical history and dystopian struggle, and, at its riveting core, of love.

***

In a world where the Powers That Be have deemed any and all secrets illegal, Zeke Thomas must go against the flow he's always followed when he inherits a sealed envelope containing information which could sink the system that's kept humanity alive since the Collapse.

Meanwhile, in the year 1843, Zeke's time-removed relative, Zadock, has to leave his one true love languishing in her sickbed to deliver a highly sensitive letter to a legendary general embedded deep in the disputed territory of Texas.

An incredibly presented "illuminated novel" which, like last year's S., blends form and function with history and mystery to realise a reading experience that amazes from the first page, Bats of the Republic comes from the co-founder of a small press specialising in "strange and beautiful fiction and nonfiction" with a sideline in detail-oriented design, so the unusual shape Zachary Thomas Dodson's debut takes shouldn't be such a surprise.

And yet, the metatextual elements that make this reflexive narrative remarkable are so utterly abundant that they create a state of fantastic stupefaction. In advance of the actual start of the story, we're treated to an exquisite endpaper mosaic, two discrete family trees, a meticulous map charting Zadock's ill-fated flight, a selection of handwritten letters, the first of a few newspaper clippings, and the title page of a whole other novel, namely The City-State by E. Anderson—all of which is as good as guaranteed to make one go um. 

And Bats of the Republic has hardly even begun!

Book Review | Afterworlds by Scott Westerfeld

Darcy Patel has put college on hold to publish her teen novel, Afterworlds. With a contract in hand, she arrives in New York City with no apartment, no friends, and all the wrong clothes. But lucky for Darcy, she’s taken under the wings of other seasoned and fledgling writers who help her navigate the city and the world of writing and publishing. Over the course of a year, Darcy finishes her book, faces critique, and falls in love.

Woven into Darcy’s personal story is her novel, Afterworlds, a suspenseful thriller about a teen who slips into the “Afterworld” to survive a terrorist attack. The Afterworld is a place between the living and the dead, and where many unsolved—and terrifying—stories need to be reconciled. Like Darcy, Lizzie too falls in love... until a new threat resurfaces, and her special gifts may not be enough to protect those she cares about most.

***

As someone somewhen almost certainly said, the story is the thing... and it is, isn't it? Most readers read in order to know what happens next—to these characters or that narrative—rather than out of interest in much of anything outwith a given fiction; assuredly not the particular process of authors, though after Afterworlds, I've begun to wonder whether we mightn't be missing a trick.

A twofold story about storytelling, Scott Westerfeld's insightful new novel alternates between a pair of coming of age tales. In one, we meet Lizzie: a typical teenager, to begin with, who's too busy texting to notice the start of a terrorist attack:

I'd never heard an automatic weapon in real life before. It was somehow too loud for my ears to register, not so much a sound as the air ripping around me, a shudder I could feel in my bones and in the liquid of my eyes. I looked up from my phone and stared. 

The gunmen didn't look human. They wore horror movie masks, and smoke flowed around them as they swung their aim across the crowd. [...] I didn't hear the screams until the terrorists paused to reload. (pp.5-6)

Luckily, Lizzie comes to her senses eventually. As quietly as she can, she calls 911 as the bullets fly by. The operator on the other end of the telephone tells Lizzie her best bet is to play dead, and in lieu of a safer location, she does exactly that.

A touch too well, in truth, because she faints, and awakens in another world. There, in the land of the no longer living—a grayscale place where "the air [tastes] flat and metallic" (p.20)—she promptly falls for a foxy psychopomp:

These terrorists had tried to kill me but I'd gone to the land of the dead and now could see ghosts and apparently had acquired dangerous new powers and this boy, this boy had touched my fingertips—and they still tingled. (p.76)

In the aftermath of the attack, it beggars belief, a bit, that this boy is Lizzie's priority. Not the loss of so much life. Not her own nearness to nothing. Not even the realisation that she can move between worlds at will. Rather, Yamaraj, "a hot Vedic death god" (p.77) "modeled [...] on a Bollywood star" (p.121) by his faithless creator, debutant Darcy Patel.

Book Review | The Way to Babylon by Paul Kearney

Michael Riven has fallen off a mountain. The author is broken in both body and mind, as the fall also claimed his wife and climbing partner Jenny. Readers are desperate to know what will happen next in the fantasy world Minginish, but neither writing, nor living, are of interest to the author as he lies in traction.

But there are others seeking the scribe out. Men—and someone who is not all human—have begun a quest to rescue their blighted homeland, and their road will take them between worlds. Michael Riven will return to his home in Scotland, and accompany a stranger into a place altogether more familiar and terrifying: Minginish itself, a real place stranger even than the world of his novels.

Michael must take up the companions of his stories—Bicker, Ratagan and Murtach—and find a way to mend the sundered world. He may even find that Jenny's existence did not end that day on the mountain.

***

The year of Paul Kearney continues with a reissue of the underrated author's second novel, and if The Way to Babylon can't quite hit the highs of his astounding debut, its expansive narrative nevertheless fondly recalls some of the finest in fantasy.

In the beginning, Michael Riven—the author of a successful fantasy saga himself—is miserable. Months after a tragic climbing accident, we find him broken in body and soul, and not a little bitter. Slowly but surely, he's coming into his own in a home, however he'll never be whole again, as the aforementioned catastrophe also claimed the love of his life: a ravishing lass from the Isle of Skye.

Fans are apparently clamouring for the conclusion of his unfinished trilogy, but our man's imagination is a mess at the moment. Indeed, he decides it's unlikely he'll ever return to writing. "There was something there, something black and futile, which stopped him every time his pen touched paper." Something... or someone.

See, "Jenny was in that world also, in every word he had ever written, as surely as if her picture smiled behind every sentence," and Riven isn't yet ready to be reminded. Instead, when he has most of his mobility back, he heads home, alone, to a broken-down bothy "where the mountains meet the sea." He's hardly settled in when a stranger appears in his porch; a rambler by the name of Bicker who invites Riven into the wilderness with him.

Riven can't resist, particularly given that Bicker's destination is Sgurr Dearg—the same sheer slope he and Jenny fell from. But his travelling companion has other plans. He leads an unwitting Riven through a portal into another plane that proves particularly familiar to our author. Incredibly, he seems to have stepped into the fantasy kingdom of his fiction—and that's when he realises who Bicker is.

"It was mad—crazy and insane. He was treading a non-existent world with a character from one of his own books." By all accounts his situation beggars belief, but Riven's incredulity can hardly withstand the real injuries he receives when a huge hound made of wood and wickedness attacks the party awaiting him and Bicker on the road to Ralath Rorim.

This is just the first of the recreated creatures he sees—beasts intent on ending him, no less—for Minginish is sickening. Since Jenny's death, chaos has overtaken the placid place written into existence by Riven:

You know the gogwolf—though that is the first one we have seen this far south. A bad omen. There are normal wolves also, but bolder than we have ever seen them before. And then there are things such as the grypesh, the rat-boars, and the Rime Giants and the ice worms. All these we have known to exist for a long time, but they stayed in their highland haunts and only hunters and wanderers encountered them, making for a good tale in the winter. But now they terrorise the very folk of the Dales and stalk the hills in between at will, cutting one village off from another; only the hardiest travel far these days, and then only at great need.

It becomes clear that Bicker believes Minginish is finished... unless Riven can come up with a way to save the day.

What follows is "a long story, spanning two worlds and riddled with the inexplicable," but of course "there's more to it than that." Too much more, to tell to truth. Though The Way to Babylon begins in the nursing home where Riven is recovering, this is but the first of a few false starts. A second is promised in the bothy; a third in Minginish; but the story only really gets going after a prolonged pause in Ralath Rorim.

The Way to Babylon's aimlessness is frustrating, as absorbing as these introductory acts are. It may be that they aid our understanding of the narrative's protagonist—a necessary evil given how churlish Riven is initially—but fully half of the whole is over before Kearney finally focuses. Suddenly, the text has direction. A quest takes shape. A goal is disclosed:

It was speeding up. Riven felt incredibly mortal, but at the same time there was a rising restlessness in him. He felt that time was slipping through his fingers. The Greshorns were calling him. And so was Sgurr Dearg. He only wished he knew why. Perhaps the Dwarves would tell him.

The Way to Babylon's second half is leaps and bounds better than its flailing first, in large part because we're almost helplessly propelled through this section as opposed to the previous puttering.

Pace, people. It's important.

Thankfully, the setting is never less than superlative; reason enough to keep reading even at the story's slowest. I'm probably a bit biased, having holidayed on them since I was a sprog, but the Western Isles off the coast of Scotland are one of my world's wonders, and Kearney does a cracking up job of nailing the way beauty and brutality go hand in hand on the Isle of Skye and its fantastical equivalent, Minginish.

On the one hand, "the world was wide and fair, hung over with a haze of sunlight and shimmering with warmth." But this "green and pleasant place, wrinkled with silver rivers" also takes in "great ragged masses of stone rearing up to the sky in twisting ridges and peaked, veined with snow, bare as gravestones." It's a genuine pleasure to see these special spots rendered so remarkably.

As are Kearney's characters. Riven's redemptive arc is inordinately rewarding; Bicker and his beery bodyguards—a blessedly bawdy bunch—keep things lively in the low moments; and Jinneth, a character Riven based on his late ladyfriend, presents a painful problem for our author to solve.

A Different Kingdom's untraditional structure was one of its strengths, in that its frame felt fitting. Here, however, it's a hindrance... but The Way to Babylon is well worth reading regardless of the fact that it puts its worst foot forward. Its setting is simply superb; its central characters are a class apart; and once Paul Kearney is done manhandling his narrative, the immersive quest we're left with is winning as well.

***

The Way to Babylon
by Paul Kearney

UK & US Publication: June 2014, Solaris

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Book Review | Cat Out Of Hell by Lynne Truss

The scene: a cottage on the coast on a windy evening. Inside, a room with curtains drawn. Tea has just been made. A kettle still steams.

Under a pool of yellow light, two figures face each other across a kitchen table. A man and a cat.

The story about to be related is so unusual—yet so terrifyingly plausible—that it demands to be told in a single sitting.

The man clears his throat, and leans forward, expectant.

"Shall we begin?" asks the cat.

***

Fun fact: I do most of my reading with a cat on my lap.

She came into her name, Page, by interposing herself between book and user from birth, basically; by sleeping in, on and under the many novels lying around in the library; and by chewing her way through on a fair few too. This latter habit hardly made me happy, but she's been treated like a Queen in any event. Despite resolutions arrived at when she was a bitty little kitty that I wouldn't make the mistake of spoiling her... well, I have, haven't I? She's irresistible, really.

But with rather alarming regularity, she appears in the periphery of my vision—paws primed to pounce; frenzied eyes fixed on mine; tail wagging to say she's acquired a target; ready, by all accounts, to eat me, or at the very least mistreat me. So I have had call to wonder why even the cutest cats seem to harbour such hatred. In her first full-length fiction for in excess of a decade, Lynne Truss offers a potential explanation:

They get all the best seats in the house, they have food and warmth and affection. Everything is on their terms, not ours. They come and go as they please. Why aren't they permanently ecstatic? Well, now it's explained. It's because they're conscious of having lost their ability to do serious evil, and they feel bloody humiliated. (p.173)

Imagine the following in Vincent Price's voice, for so, it is said, Roger's repartee resembles:

Up until, say, two thousand years ago, all cats had powers unimaginable to the average cat today. The species had been vastly diminished by time and domestication. In the modern world only one cat in a million has the character, the spirit, the sheer indomitable life force to fulfil that universal feline destiny of nine lives as part of a conscious programme of self-completion. I am that one in a million. And if I seem quite pleased with myself—well, so would you if you'd survived the shit I had to go through. (pp.34-35)

Roger is a cat, in case there's any confusion. "The feline equivalent of Stephen Fry," (p.44) at that... which is to say smart, charming, warm and—from time to time—quite, quite wild. Having "travelled romantically in the footsteps of Lord Byron in the 1930s [he] now solves cryptic crosswords torn out daily from The Telegraph" (p.86) when he's not otherwise occupied killing or merely maiming his keepers. So it seems, at least.

Book Review | S. by J. J. Abrams & Doug Dorst

A young woman picks up a book left behind by a stranger. Inside it are his margin notes, which reveal a reader entranced by the story and by its mysterious author. She responds with notes of her own, leaving the book for the stranger, and so begins an unlikely conversation that plunges them both into the unknown.

The book: Ship of Theseus, the final novel by a prolific but enigmatic writer named V.M. Straka, in which a man with no past is shanghaied onto a strange ship with a monstrous crew and launched onto a disorienting and perilous journey.

The writer: Straka, the incendiary and secretive subject of one of the world’s greatest mysteries, a revolutionary about whom the world knows nothing apart from the words he wrote and the rumors that swirl around him.

The readers: Jennifer and Eric, a college senior and a disgraced grad student, both facing crucial decisions about who they are, who they might become, and how much they’re willing to trust another person with their passions, hurts, and fears.

Conceived by filmmaker J. J. Abrams and written by award-winning novelist Doug Dorst, S. is the chronicle of two readers finding each other in the margins of a book and enmeshing themselves in a deadly struggle between forces they don’t understand. It is also a love letter to the written word.

***

S. is not what you think it is.

From the moment you slit open the slipcase — the same slipcase that bears the only explicit admission of J. J. Abrams and Doug Dorst's involvement — and slit it you will, in an act of introductory destruction that implicates us in the worst impulses of the characters we'll meet in a moment — from the second, then, that we see what waits within, there is the suspicion that S. is not so much a novel as it is an object. A lavish literary artefact.

But also an artefact of art. Of passion. Of intellect. Of ambition. Of all these things and so much more, in the form of a metafiction so meticulous and considered and meaningful, finally, that House of Leaves may very well have been bettered — and I don't make that statement lightly.

What awaits, in any case, is an unassuming clothbound book called Ship of Theseus. The author: a V. M. Straka, apparently. On the spine is stuck a library sticker, complete with an authentic Dewey Decimal reference. BOOK FOR LOAN is emblazoned on the endpapers, and on the backboard, below a record of the dates it's been borrowed on — Ship of Theseus has been untouched, we see, for thirteen years — an apocalyptic warning from the library to KEEP THIS BOOK CLEAN; that "borrowers finding this book pencil-marked, written upon, mutilated or unwarrantably defaced, are expected to report it to the librarian."

The title page makes a mockery of all this. Lightly pencilled in is an instruction to return the book to such-and-such a workroom in the library of Pollard State University. Then, in pen, a note from Jen, who responds as follows: "Hey — I found your stuff while I was shelving. (Looks like you left in a hurry!) I read a few chapters + loved it. Felt bad about keeping the book from you, since you obviously need it for your work. Have to get my own copy!"

Suffice it to say she doesn't. Instead, Jen and the other scribbler, who eventually introduces himself as Eric — though that's not his real name either — compare their notes about the novel, making an immediate mess of the margins. See, irrespective of the resulting small caps scrawl, Ship of Theseus is something of a puzzle...

Book Review | Boxer, Beetle by Ned Beauman

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This is a novel for people with breeding.

Only people with the right genes and the wrong impulses will find its marriage of bold ideas and deplorable characters irresistible. It is a novel that engages the mind while satisfying those that crave the thrill of a chase.

There are riots and sex. There is love and murder. There is Darwinism and Fascism, nightclubs, invented languages and the dangerous bravado of youth. And there are lots of beetles.

It is clever. It is distinctive. It is entertaining.

We hope you are too.

***

Eugenics, fascism, entomology and murder most horrid meet in this bravura debut from journalist Ned Beauman, which has - as I understand it - reduced a gaggle of British critics to fits of intellectual and artistic jealousy.

Boxer, Beetle is disgusting in various ways. In its tripartite narrative about a rare genus of coleoptera whose wings, when unfurled, make a Swastika; in its three primary characters - namely a devotee of Nazi memorabilia (but not Nazis), a closeted fascist, and a disabused brute; and last but not least in its inimitable wit and wisdom, Boxer, Beetle quite sickens, particularly coming as it does from a first-time novelist still somewhere in his twenties.

His twenties!

Boxer, Beetle, then, is an routinely unpleasant affair, but if your heart and your head and your gut go the distance, then you will see it is too a daring and oft-intoxicating concoction of fact and fiction, invention and political incorrectness, wonder and horror, and of course boxer... and beetle.

We come to that lattermost and least likely twosome by way of one Kevin Broom - "Fishy" to his "friends" - whose contemporaneous narrative functions as a loose frame for the others. Kevin is a collector, but as he explains:

Among collectors, I am a worm - and particularly so in comparison to Stuart, my best friend. [...] He could afford almost anything: the only child of a hedge fund maestro, he supplemented his inheritance with a considerable legal settlement after an accident with an office coffee machine left him paralysed from the waist down. I often wonder whether I'd give up the use of my own legs in exchange for, say, the gold fountain pen with which Adolf Hitler and Rudolf Hess wrote Mein Kampf, and I'm fairly sure that I would. (pp.4-5)

In lieu of such a happy accident, Kevin does odd jobs for another enthusiast of all things Third Reich in the hopes that Grublock might deign to donate a few items his way for his troubles. The plot thickens when during a hunt for a needle in a stack of haystacks Kevin stumbles upon a body, and with it a note from Hitler, circa the mid-1930s, thanking one Philip Erskine for his "kind tribute" (p.9) to the party and to the then-Reichschancellor in particular. What follows is a fictionalised account of his Kevin's subsequent investigations into the specifics of this unholy offering, beginning with how the first clue to this murder mystery came to be in a dead man's chest freezer.

Our boxer is Seth Roach, or Sinner, a bisexual Jew in the midst of establishing for himself a toehold in the fighting community... or not. Sinner is a deeply self-destructive young man, you see, prone to explosions of extreme physical and sexual violence and with a genetic inheritance - a small stature nevertheless in possession of incredible strength and endurance - which seems as much a curse on Sinner as a credit to his dubious DNA.

Speaking of genes, our beetle is arrived at by way of the aforementioned Philip Erskine, a proponent of eugenics based in large part on the German collector Oscar Scheibel who applies his fascist science in theory on Sinner, and in practice on a species of eyeless beetle Erskine discovers in a Polish cave, from which he breeds "a strain in which every undesirable quality is eradicated and yet every desirable quality is amplified. No compromises, no sacrifices. Do you begin to understand now?" (p.116) 

Boxer, Beetle is as morally repugnant in the abstract as it is at times physically and spiritually repellent, so it stands as a steadfast testament indeed to the cunning of Beauman's craft that one comes - to a certain extent - to care about all three of his vivacious first novel's principle protagonists, whatever their horrible foibles. The mystery, meanwhile, though it meanders here and there, and pauses on occasion to indulge in itself - admittedly not my favourite aspect of the thing - proves quite compelling in the end, and neatly circular.

Some books are so clever you feel stupid reading them, and there were moments of Boxer, Beetle when I suffered exactly that syndrome. They were, thankfully, few and far between, and outnumbered in all but the last act by other moments - of beauty and insight, clarity and hilarity even in the face of the unspeakable, the unknowable - which more than made up for them. For instance:

...a city is just whatever happens to accrete around the intersection of a million secrets: a fox in your garden is a stolen kiss is a pirate radio station is a dead detective is a Welsh Ariosophist with a gun is an ounce of skunk with your greasy chips is the collection of Nazi memorabilia that my employer, Horace Grublock, keeps upstairs in his penthouse flat. (p.43)

Such phrases sound out like strains of sweet music, and these, I think, will remain with me rather longer than my memories of the cloying diatribes and meaningless metafictions which slightly mar the entire. Boxer, Beetle is thus an energetic if imperfect text about inheritance - whether genetic or physical or spiritual - and the preservation of ideas, objects, identities, and so on. Beauman's first novel is by turns fascinating, impassioned, irreverent, and utterly, utterly ugly. But the question on everyone's lips should be: has it a heart, besides all that? And beauty too?

And I should say so, yes. Yes it does.

***

Boxer, Beetle

by Ned Beauman

UK Publication: March 2011, Sceptre

US Publication: September 2011, Bloomsbury USA

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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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Recommended and Related Reading

Book Review: The Angel's Game by Carlos Ruiz Zafon

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"In an abandoned mansion at the heart of Barcelona, a young man, David Martín, makes his living by writing sensationalist novels under a pseudonym. The survivor of a troubled childhood, he has taken refuge in the world of books and spends his nights spinning baroque tales about the city’s underworld. But perhaps his dark imaginings are not as strange as they seem, for in a locked room deep within the house lie photographs and letters hinting at the mysterious death of the previous owner.

"Like a slow poison, the history of the place seeps into his bones as he struggles with an impossible love. Close to despair, David receives a letter from a reclusive French editor, Andreas Corelli, who makes him the offer of a lifetime. He is to write a book unlike anything that has ever existed --- a book with the power to change hearts and minds. In return, he will receive a fortune, and perhaps more. But as David begins the work, he realizes that there is a connection between his haunting book and the shadows that surround his home."

***

When writers write about writing, it's usually a safe bet to avert your eyes. In The Angel's Game, however, a standalone narrative with a few satisfying ties to The Shadow of the Wind, bestselling Spanish export Carlos Ruiz Zafon demonstrates once again how to do metafiction right.

Too often, pseudo-biographical books about books descend into a self-referential quagmire of ego and indulgence, but however many authors Zafon tips his hat at over the course of his second novel for mature readers - Dickens being the most singular influence amongst them - The Angel's Game retains the clarity of voice and purpose that made its 2004 predecessor such a standout.

In the opening few chapters of this, his second novel for mature readers, Zafon sketches a memorable portrait of Barcelona in the early 1900s. The cast of characters who inhabit its extravagant streets and seedy alleyways are wonderfully drawn, but the first flourish of The Angel's Game is the city itself. The ominous Barcelona this author presents quickly and effortlessly evokes the tone and the atmosphere that pervade the entire remainder of the text in question.

When David's strange benefactor, Andreas Corelli, offers the sick and struggling writer an escape from his woes that seems heaven-sent, the reader soon understands exactly what an insidious deal with the devil has been struck. It takes our protagonist rather longer to see the light, but in The Angel's Game the journey toward that belated revelation is of no less significance than the destination - and it's a great trip. As soon as Zafon has set the pieces in motion, the reader can only hold tight as the layers of intrigue and suspense build inexorably towards a destructive climax.