Caitlín R. KiernanBesprekingen

A cryptic, horrific slice of sci fi horror. So, so good.

Fascinating writer, fascinating (with flaws) book.

I came upon Caitlín R. Kiernan when asking for some non-male voices in weird lit; and came upon this book at my local indie bookstore.

I essentially bought it on the name of the author alone, which may have been a mistake... this book is the second in a series, and although none of that is made explicit in the narrative, it does feel like I'm in the middle of a party that's already halfway started.

The narrative jumps across wide swaths of time, from the 60's to some 150 years in the future, and usually a different character each time as well. There may or may not be a struggle between two forces, over either twin sisters or something that those sisters represent. The sisters and a doctor who has some control over them are referred to in most of the vignettes, but usually obliquely.

This means that the actual conflict and dramatic intent of the scenes is always elsewhere than in the scene itself. This can be done to really compelling effect, but it misses the mark here, because it feels as though either I should already know the stakes involved, or that obscuring those details is somehow enhancing the mystery.

The climactic end of the book, and it's denouement, both suffer from this lack of information. I think I know what happened, but I couldn't tell you why it was important, or why all of these shadowy forces seemed to care.

There are also a lot of pop culture and literary references, which don't feel like they add to the story so much as wink at the audience... and an overarching chess motif which again doesn't feel like it adds to the story so much as adopts a genre convention of opposing forces referring to chess. It's even weakened by the characters themselves using it; moments like that drop me out since it feels like no one would refer to 'taking someone's knight' with a straight face, unless we're in a melodramatic genre mode, and we're not. We're in a gritty semi-realistic weird lit mode.

My first impression was that this might be a symptom of an author being just a bit too clever. Leaning on not giving information as a way of making the puzzle difficult, and references to tickle the dopamine part of our brain that enjoys making correlations. Not giving information to the reader doesn't inherently make it more interesting, especially when the characters have the information and we don't. It's a fine line between compelling us to want to figure it out and just frustrating us with too few pieces to be able to intuit the whole... and this book feels like it teeters towards that second result.

After reading it, I read other reviews to see if anyone else was experiencing something similar, and it does seem like I'm not alone here. However, the fans of Caitlín and her work make a good case for a continual re-reading of the text, suggesting that there are more answers to be found in the hints and references. This might be true... and I'm willing to keep reading more of her work and coming back to this.

I will also say that Caitlín can definitely write. The character voices are all distinct and the prose wonderfully reflects the voice and tone of the characters. There are descriptions and scenes that stick with me even now. In that respect, as an introduction to her work and answering the question about reading more, it's done it's job. I'll be reading more of Caitlín in the future, despite my somewhat lacking opinion of this book!

Kiernan is one of those writers who, like Gene Wolfe or CJ Cherryh, affects my thinking process. The syntax structure and delivery of words is just... off... kilter... enough that I have to stop myself and review just what the heck is going on. I love it when a writer can make me do that.

This is the first published Kiernan novel but not the first one I have read. As an early work, it's not quite up to the weirdness of The Tindalos Asset trilogy or the brilliance of The Drowning Girl. Thematically, it is not really much like those works either. I would say it falls closer to The Red Tree in that respect. Regardless, there is more here than merely a glimmer of what is to come later in Kiernan's career. They are a writer that deserves every accolade, in my opinion.

This was great. I could read books made from each of the stories/chapters/times of this collection and still want more.

It's hard to explain though.

It's funny, I don't like Lovecraft's writing all that much. But his concepts are a different story. So many talented writers have taken his world and lived in it for us. Tindalos is a great example. It has tidal waves of salt water in strange places, webbed feet on bipedal creatures and deadly MiB. It also had stellar writing, cool settings and strong characters that kept me entranced to the end.

Also - She better write a follow-up to this. She just can't leave that last chapter/epilogue just hanging like that. Like ... no. No way.

I'm still confused, but less so.

The only sections of this I didn't like were the ones set on the off-world colonies. The characters were so all-knowing and cold that they were unfathomable in a bad way. Like I seriously didn't care about anything they had to say. Plus I don't know any French outside of the few Romance language words that have drifted into English. I suppose I could look them up, but yeah, way too lazy.

Once I got the hang of the rhythms of the other stories, I was good. The characters were really interesting and well fleshed out. The overall mood for most of the apocalyptic stories was despair and longing. The only characters that seemed to flourish were lost to pain and self harm. Paranoia was completely over the top.

I might go back and read the first book now. It might be a good idea. LOL.

I listened to this book on audiotape and enjoyed it quite a bit. The narration was very good. The main character was very interesting.

First time I've come across Dancy, whilst shopping in my local comic book store and deciding to try something new.

This hardback is a collection of the 5 story arc where Dancy is left by her Avenging Angel to face the monsters and Wolves alone (apart from the talking blackbird and the ghost of the werewolf she kills in the first story).

This is not an easy journey for Dancy, feeling alone and angry that she seems to have to do the dirty work for the angel but gets deserted at her most challenging time.

Story is good, graphics and lettering are decent and reflecting the disintegrating world that Dancy finds herself in

This book was a haunting tale of a woman with paranoid schizophrenia slowly devolving into madness. It was very well written and vivid.

It's a good collection, but like a lot of horror and dark fantasy, some of the stories seem to rely more on just vibes than characterization and plot (even those are well done, if sometimes confusing). Of them, my favorites were "The Maltese Unicorn" and "Fairy Tale of Wood Street." YMMV.

Reason read: it was a shared read, involves aliens, TIOLI challenge #7.
A Novella length book, setting Winslow, Arizona. Time 2015.
Structure: narrative hops from one time period and location to another, following three characters on very different (and yet directly related) journeys.
The novella is similar to the classic 1931 short story “The Whisperer In Darkness” of a terrifying alien conspiracy at work in rural Vermont, and the then-newly-discovered Pluto. So may appeal to lovers of Lovecraft.
Characters include a government operative (grumpy), Chloe (occult group), and Immacolata Sexton, outside time and space, also creepy.

There is so much that happens in a few pages and I found myself not really getting into the story. I didn't like it and the amount of profanity was excessive.
Rating 2.2

https://fromtheheartofeurope.eu/ancient-ancient-by-kiini-ibura-salaam-and-the-dr...

It is a queer time-travel ghost story set in Rhode Island (which I plan to visit in September). There’s some vivid reflexive stuff with the protagonist intervening in and rewriting the narrative. Mental illness and gender identity dance through the pages; it’s an intense but rewarding experience

I enjoyed the way it was written (unreliable narrator with a strong voice, confusing backtracking timelines) but the content was not my taste---too horror, way too much murder.

I've liked quite a bit of Caitlin R Kiernan's work but damn, this sucked. Like a bad 90z episode of The X-Files but without the charm.

This should be less a book of stories and more a collection of vignettes. Many of the works here do not follow the traditional narrative structure we associate with "story;" they describe an even, perhaps investigate some problem, but often times go nowhere near any kind of resolution.

This is not meant to be a mark against Ms. Kiernan's work here, as the craft and language of the works is lush, artful, and moving. Every story in this book is worth at least a read, and some are worthy of deep consideration. However, at times (especially in "Shambling toward the city of glass coffins") the language experimentation gets in the way of the reader. In the Author's Notes this is mentioned as a "superficial exploration of linguistic drift" but it is handled in such a way as to give no traction for investigation. In addition, the recurrent ham-handed way she deals with Japanese (a language I know) gives me little confidence in her treatment of Spanish or Chinese (languages I do not know). So.

At the very least, enjoy these as the works of someone who clearly and deeply loves language and the art of writing.

This short novel is an excellent choice if you're looking for good science fiction horror. The story is a bit of a slow-burn, building dread gradually, page by page, then culminating in an uncanny and horrific revelation. Kiernan was able to create a convincing and eerie future Earth with a minimum of words, which I often find more effective than extensive world-building. I highly recommend this.

This collection of stories is not your happy interspecies romps found in a Dr. Tingle novel with a nice hard life affirming morale lesson pounded into you at the end. So, Keep your creature romances confined to your Dungeons & Dragons games because in real life they can only end horribly.

The twist at the end of "Threshold", the novel in which Kiernan introduced Dancy Flammarion, made it almost impossible for stories about the albino girl to be set after that novel. But the novel hinted of a lot of stories worth telling before we met Dancy and even if we heard some of them, a lot of them remained unexplored. So when Kiernan decided to revisit her heroine (who was supposed to be just a one-novel character), she delved into her past and went to tell stories of monsters - both supernatural and human. The first edition of this collection was published in 2006. Its limited edition was accompanied by a chapbook containing an extra story (as Subterranean Press often occasionally do). When the book was reissued in 2020, it added that extra story into the book properly so the second edition gained an extra story.

Kiernan provides an introduction (spoiler-free so safe to read before the book) and two separate tables of contents - one which orders the stories in their publication order (the book is ordered that way) and one which orders them in chronological order inside of the stories themselves (except for that extra story which should be elsewhere in that later order but I suspect that they missed that when they were adding it for the second edition...). The 6 stories are connected not just by Darcy being there but also by characters knowing what happened in earlier events. If you prefer not to get spoiled, you should probably read the book in the alternative order - the publishing order is almost the opposite of the internal chronological one. On the other hand we know that Dancy makes it to Birmingham, Alabama for "Threshold" so we know she would live through all these prequel stories. But that is a problem for any writer writing prequels. And even if you know she must survive, most of the stories manage to keep the tension high enough.

Kiernan's style is a lot more straight forward here than it was in "Threshold". While some of the stories jump around in time, the different sections are actually marked and dated - which is very different from the novel's way of story telling. But let's talk about the stories:

"Les Fleurs Empoisonnées" (originally published in 2002 as "In the Garden of Poisonous Flowers" because the publisher requested a title which sounded less French) opens the collection but is the last of the stories chronologically and it mentions the events of the rest of the stories. Dancy, having earned quite of a reputation as the monster killing albino girl by now, is sent by her angel to a house where a group of women who perform monstrous acts. So how does our teenager get to the house? She hitchhikes of course. Add a dead girl, a talking bear and an actual evil hiding in the house (and a bottle you really don't want to open) and you have a pretty solid horror story. The fact that a lot of people seem to have additional motives for their actions adds to the story quite nicely.

"The Well of Stars and Shadows" is the earliest story chronologically, set almost a decade earlier when Dancy is still a girl, living in the swamps of Florida with her mother and grandmother. She visits an old man - the same way she had done it numerous times before. But this time she is about to see her first monster. In a way, this is the origin story of Dancy although it needs to be combined with Julia's story for all in Dancy's character to make sense.

"Waycross" is set before "Les Fleurs Empoisonnées"(the earlier story in the collection even mentions the end of this one) and after all the other stories in the collection. For the first time we see something that may hint at the monsters not being real - but just as in "Threshold", the reader is almost sure to consider the mundane psychiatric clinic as the nightmare. Dancy is sent after another evil (if you see a pattern, it is because the pattern is indeed there) and ends up having to deal with her own internal demons after the bad guy opens a box (unnamed but clearly designed after Pandora's box and similar myths).

"Alabaster" takes us again back in time, before "Waycross" and just days after the Bainbridge incident and we finally learn what all references about a gas station were about. There is a real evil, there is a wicked old man and there is fire. By now, pretty standard for the stories about Dancy. According to the introduction, the original story was written in 2003 but the one published here is actually an expanded version from 2004.

"Bainbridge" finally fills the gaps in the story of that incident. Her first monster after she burns the cabin she grew up in (the story of that incident is in "Threshold"), it is told in alternating chapters with the story of the near drawing of Julia, Dancy's mother, in 1982. The story manages to complete and tie together all the dangling threads and stories which had been hinted at through the collection and the novel - adding even more to Dancy's backstory.

"Highway 97" is the original opening of "Bainbridge" which for some reason got ejected from the story and then published separately (even Kiernan does not remember why). It is a lot milder than the rest of the stories and has a talking dog which tries to convince Dancy not to go to Bainbridge.

The afterword, titled "Afterword: On the Road to Jefferson" discussed how she got the idea for "In the Garden of Poisonous Flowers". Because it was printed initially when the story was called that way, the afterword keeps referring to it this way even if it named "Les Fleurs Empoisonnées" in the collection. It was mildly interesting but ultimately skippable.

Despite the repetitiousness of the main plots, the details and the language actually make this collection work and not be as tedious as it could have become under other circumstances. Not perfect by any means but pretty readable (although some of the scenes are grotesque and can cause nightmares if one is so inclined. The illustrations by Ted Naifeh fit the tone of the book perfectly and add to atmosphere.½

It is a very hard novel to get into. Between the present tense and the constant jumping in time (you are never sure if you are in the past, in the present or in someone's dreams until you get to something that gives you a clue), the story seems almost jumbled. And yet, once you get used to the constant change and get used to the style, it actually somehow works.

Chance Matthews had just lost her grandfather - the last family member she had left - and all she wants it to be left alone to grieve. What she definitely does not want is an albino girl, who claims to be able to see monsters, and Chance's old boyfriend (and his new paramour) to show up at her door talking about secrets, monsters and evil. But of course the universe does not work on her schedule so she needs to deal with all of them. She is a paleontologist, she believes in science and sanity. All that talk about monsters sounds like someone's mental breakdown and not like something she needs to pay attention to. Although there is this incident in the past and the girl knows things which supposedly only Chance knew.

That's how this story starts. And then it gets weird. Kiernan is a trained paleontologist and she blends her science with some Lovecraftian horror to create something almost unexpected. Add a connection to some old literature and a few deaths and you really want to know where this whole story is going.

It is not a perfect novel - it is an early novel and it shows. It could have used some tightening, especially in the middle parts. The constant jumping around and revelations from the past can get a bit tiring (in a few places I wondered if I missed something or if it really feels as if she needed something in the past for the story to work so it just got thrown into the mix) and more than once I wish she had left some of the characters' self-pity out of the story - by the end it got tiresome.

And yet at the end I liked the book quite a lot. The slow storytelling works well with the time jumps so it almost blends together.

Kiernan wrote quite a lot of stories about Dancy Flammarion, the albino girl who kickstarted the whole story here. She also wrote at least one more novel about Chance. The novel may be flawed but it made me want to read more about its characters. And what more can a writer ask for?½

Didn’t get the first two in the series, just snippets of those, but this one had a more obvious story. Completely original, even though Lovecraft is an obvious source. Questions the nature of reality more than many other books. The language and the images are also great, if sometimes horrific.