Caitlín R. Kiernan - Confessions of a Five-Chambered Heart

My review of Caitlín R. Kiernan's latest short story collection, Confessions of a Five-Chambered Heart, came out at Strange Horizons last Friday. The stories inside it live up to the incredibly high bar that everything I have read by Kiernan has set, including that from its predecessor collection, The Ammonite Violin & Others, even if my favorite of her stories likely remains "Onion" from Wrong Things.

2012 in Review

I read 136 books in 2012. Not many of them, I must admit, were new releases. Those that were, I discuss in my part of this Strange Horizons yearly sum up article. Not so surprisingly for readers of this blog, my picks of the year (or at least of the limited slice of it I've so far gotten to) are: Caitlin R. Kiernan's The Drowning Girl: A Memoir, K.J. Parker's Sharps, and Felix J. Palma's The Map of the Sky.

As for the books I read in 2012 that were either a handful of years or more than a few centuries older, twelve in particular seemed worthy of note...

Beginning this list with a sixteenth century epic poem was not something I expected to be doing. Ariosto, however, writes with such sheer style that the poem’s age becomes irrelevant, that its gargantuan length becomes a blessing that simply promises more lines to love. The knights that we meet here are larger than life. They battle heroically, engage in fantastic (in every sense of the word) quests, and dish out truly stunning amounts of sass. (Many of these strengths are wonderfully brought out by David R. Slavitt’s translation… which also wanders away with barely a nod to the poem’s second half. Goal for the new year: figure out how it ends!)

The Company Man is a novel about lost causes. It has a noir hero navigating a steampunk world that is gradually subsumed by the cosmic. Its gaze is unflinching and far-reaching. And its marvels are manifold. I talk more about Bennett’s powerful novel here.

Like Lovecraft, Blackwood was a writer of Weird tales from the early part of the twentieth century that has now, decades later, received the hallowed status of a classic in the genre, even if he has never received Lovecraft’s wider acclaim. To view Blackwood as simply a contemporary of Lovecraft, however, is to do a great disservice to this venerable practitioner of the cosmic. Blackwood writes with insight and great skill of the shallowness of our world and perceptions, and, amidst his frequently naturalistic settings, he uses a mixture of the subtlest signs and the most powerful and building climaxes to ram home the majesty of what is beyond. I wrote about this particular collection of his at great length here.

Drawing Blood is the story of Zach and Trevor, and those two young men are some of the strongest and most alive characters I’ve ever encountered. Brite binds their every feeling inextricably with the readers', dragging us along as they live their bizarre lives. And, when they hurt, we feel every bit of their pain. I reviewed the novel here.

There has never been an evocation of shame like this. Nor has spite ever come forth like this from the written word. The Underground Man is a genius, and he is a hateful and loathsome beast, and his every utterance stabs deep. He begins: I am a sick man… I am a spiteful man (p.1). When reviewers and writers and instructors yammer on about having a voice, it is this that they are wishing for.

Goodis writes noir of the most downbeat, hard-hitting variety, and The Burglar shows him at its best. The novel has a gripping plot packed with turns, characters struggling with their all, and the world poised to take them down regardless. I talk about the novel, and others, at greater length in my review of the Goodis collection Five Noir Novels of the 1940sand 50s.

In her second Mathew Swift novel, Kate Griffin takes everything that worked about A Madness of Angels and improves it. This is a wildly creative book stuffed with gripping pyrotechnics, writing that forces you to see, and an apocalyptic villain that few can match. I reviewed it here.

Dune vividly demonstrates the heights that Science Fiction can reach. It has a truly epic plot, a world that is both consistent and wondrous, and interacts with the most profound philosophical ideas. The rise of Paul Atreides works on every level, an arc that is half messianic and half simply badass.

This may be one of Haruki Murakami’s early novels, but it is the one of his that has most stuck with me. Here, Murakami is wry, surreal, imaginative, and more than a little brilliant. I reviewed the novel at some length when I reread it at the beginning of this year, to which I will just add that, as it nears its climax, Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World also boasts the best evocation of melancholy I’ve ever seen in fiction. Pressed to name a favorite novel, I would quite possibly go with this one.

More than a few moments in Lolita had me holding the book as far away from myself as I could as if trying to avoid contact with some hideous contagion or foul mess. This is a sickening read. It grabs you and shoves you up against the darkest corners of our collective morality. There is no way to not confront its issues when reading it. And there is the little fact that Nabokov’s prose is simply peerless:

Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta (p. 1).

To call Nabokov’s prose beauty amidst filth is to sell it horribly short. Alas, we would probably need Nabokov’s own skills to devise a suiting panegyric for it, so we shall have to be content with that.

The inclusion of The Lord of the Rings on a list like this probably isn’t so surprising, but I must admit that I actually was rather surprised when I reread the trilogy this year for the first time since my childhood. Tolkien’s work may have been picked at by generations of scavengers by this point, but it still possesses a strength that almost none of them have been able to match.

Each of the three stories in Wrong Things is packed with heart and, as the characters might have it, weird shit (p. 98). Despite the high standards of all, Kiernan’s “Onion” is still the clear winner. It’s the aftermath of a Weird Tale, a painful look at the human suffering left in the wake of the cosmic. I discuss it and the others at more length in my review.

SOME GENERAL STATISTICS

The above, though, doesn’t say much about my reading for the year as a whole, being the cherry picked highlights of it. As for the rest, well, I’ve kept lists of all books read for a few years now, but this is the first time I’ve sorted them into (childishly simple) piles. The results rather amused me, and I figured they might amuse some longtime readers as well. Needless to say, books can be in more than one category, some were not in any category, and the whole tallying is a tad inexact:

Fantasy: 15 books read

Science Fiction: 27 books read

Horror: 19 books read

Crime: 7 books read

Literature: 31 books read

Nonfiction: 26 books read

History: 16 books read

Not (originally) in English: 27 books read

For class: 45 books read

By female authors: 24 books read

The spread of genres did not wholly surprise me. Ordinarily, I certainly don’t read primarily Science Fiction, but the Warhammer binge over the summer (thirteen books total, read almost straight) pushed it over the edge. Literature’s winning overall was not unexpected, as it not only had the greatest number of reads from classes but also got to suck in many of the non-genre reads that I had no idea what to do with, such as the aforementioned Orlando Furioso.

The other significant figure up there is the last number, that of books by female authors. Twenty-four out of one hundred and thirty-sex is not very impressive there. Actually calculating out the numbers rammed home how unbalanced my reading is, and I would like to swing the total back the other way a bit next year.

Caitlin R. Kiernan - The Drowning Girl

“I’m going to write a ghost story now,” she typed.

"A ghost story with a mermaid and a wolf,” she also typed.

I also typed. (p. 1)

There are, indeed, ghosts in the pages that follow those fantastic opening lines. As well as a mermaid and a wolf, and the sharp dividing line between the two that can also blur. There're also the narrator's first person digressions and conversations, her wrestling with herself and her inner demons in dialogue and in open view. Before any of that, though, before even the first page of the novel proper with the promise of a mermaid and a wolf, Kiernan warns us that: This is the book it is, which means it may not be the book you expect it to be. Oddly enough, the warning's not so unexpected. After 2009's acclaimed and award nominated The Red Tree, Caitlin R. Kiernan's become the kind of writer with the reputation of doing the unexpected, the unexplainable, and the darkly, beautifully brilliant. The Drowning Girl shares some of that prior novel's techniques – its intertextuality and its particular style of first person narration, to give just two examples – but its results are quite different, abandoning the strong sense and confines of place that dominated The Red Tree, taking on a farther reaching and harder to pin down mantle, a story about need and change and our reality and our escaping it.

When delving into something so multifaceted and amorphous, it's probably not a good idea to begin by admitting I don't understand the book I'm reviewing. But, as I seem to have done just that, I should explain what I mean. In an interview with Jeff VanderMeer, Kiernan said: Over and over, I get the “But what happened?” people, and I think it causes me actual physical pain that they’ve so missed the point. Most of the time – and this is the truth – I don’t know what happened! I don’t want to know what happened! As I’ve said again and again, one good mystery is worth a thousand solutions. I don't think that The Drowning Girl is meant to be understood. It's meant to be experienced, of course, to be delved into and wrestled with, to creep into our psyche and twist and smash what it finds there, to make us think and feel – but not for something so simple and pat as understanding.

Imp, as the main character's friends like to call her, is schizophrenic. This is not, though, solely a story about schizophrenia, containing insights only applicable to those afflicted. No, as Imp says: There's always a siren, singing you to shipwreck. Some of us may be more susceptible than others are, but there's always a siren. (p. 101) Still, Imp's schizophrenia is vital to the tale, allowing and forcing her to face the mermaid, the werewolf, and the reality that binds us. Early on, she draws a sharp distinction between what is true and what is factual (p. 6), and so discerning what actually happened and what's impossible, what's real and what's fantastic, is wholly beside the point. The Drowning Girl is a narrative of thoughts and emotions, desires and implications, and not at all one of concrete occurrences.

Separating true and factual, though, is a difficult thing, and Kiernan often mines the gap between them, spinning out inconsistencies that we and Imp can become mired in if we don't keep our thoughts on what really matters. Imp, too, can play the game. This is her story, as she types it out on her grandmother's typewriter, and the doubts and hesitations of Imp the Storyteller are right there alongside those of Imp the Character. The distinction between true and factual is a double edged sword, and, in the scenes that cut too deep, Imp often retreats into a barrage of dates and trivia and facts that obscures all possible truth.

I won't be blowing your mind if I tell you that The Drowning Girl is a story here, but it doesn't stop there. This is a narrative of stories within stories, art within art, and layers folded tight and wrapping round their kin. Innumerable artists and writers, bits of legend and of history, are described, quoted, and alluded to within these pages. There's Phillip George Saltonstall and his haunting painting The Drowning Girl, Albert Perrault and his explorations ofviolence and the mythology of Little Red Riding Hood, Seichō Matsumoto and his suicide-invoking novel Kuroi Jukai, the grisly murder of Elizabeth Short that was later called The Black Dahlia Murder but first the Werewolf Murder, and even Imp's own stories and paintings.

These mentions of and creations of real and unreal art are not hollow pretension. The clues are scattered in each of these sources, and the truth at The Drowning Girl's heart lies somewhere where all of this art meets and blends. Art, here, is a source of spreading ideas. And of spreading ghosts. Hauntings are memes, Kiernan writes, especially pernicious thought contagions, social contagions that need no viral or bacterial host and are transmitted in a thousand different ways. A book, a poem, a song, a bedtime story, ad grandmother's suicide, the choreography of a dance, a few frames of film, a diagnosis of schizophrenia, a deadly tumble from a horse, a faded photograph, or a story you tell your daughter. Or a painting hanging on the wall. (p. 12) And, of course, it doesn't end there. The Drowning Girl itself contains a haunting, and it seeks to spread itself beyond the 336 pages of its binding. It is an infected document, just waiting to spread its load of plague. (p. 88)

As all of this has no doubt made clear, Imp's story is not a straightforward one, and neither is its telling. Midway through the novel, Imp says: I didn't set out to appease the Tyranny of Plot. Lives do not unfold in tidy plots. (p. 171) Imp is full of digressions, often advancing through the past by sliding from one isolated event to another in a path that will only make sense afterwards if it ever will. That our narrator is a character, a human and very much at the center of all the misery she must unfold, is never lost, and she skirts around the most difficult parts before darting back to confront them head on. At times, when the connections are particularly obscure and when the climax of the chapter or incident is held away for one approach too many, this approach can grow irritating. At others, the easy shattering of chronology unmoors the events of the story from their specifics, leaving them feeling timeless and all around us.

The Drowning Girl is very much a work of Weird Fiction, that strange subgenre of horror and fantasy and more crystallized by H.P. Lovecraft (who Imp is "distantly related" to (p. 169)) that shows how the world is so much larger than what we see. It is not at all, though, a typical work of that genre. The world is vaster than we can grasp here, yes, greater than can be glimpsed through our "counterfeit sanity," (p. 285) and all the impossibility beyond may be damaging and deadly and potentially destructive, but characterizing it as simply malevolent is a hopeless oversimplification. Roles are reversed here, what's beyond the pall often being savaged by us and our world. It's not Elizabeth Short's murderers but the victim herself who is, in five stages, turned into a werewolf here, and its's not the siren but Imp who is the "author of abrasions" (p. 282) on that siren's perfectly soft skin.

Imp remembers Eva Canning coming to her twice, once in July and once in November, once as a mermaid and once as a wolf. Only one of these recollections is true, but, not knowing which is, she has no choice but to tell both tales. These two appearances, of the siren and of the predator, of seduction and of violence, are often sharply differentiated in the novel, with memories of one eventually coming clear as a manufactured self defense mechanism against memories of the other. But, like most such dividing lines in the novel, the mermaid and the wolf, the women walking into the water and the women slain by claws, come together.

All these come down to changelings, don't they? (p. 158) Imp writes, and so much of it does. The Drowning Girl is a novel about change, or at least the desire for it, a novel about mutability and collapsing boundaries, about being held prisoner by flesh and wanting to be free so badly that death finally becomes an option. (p. 151) These transformations play into every part of the novel, from transsexuality to the wolf in a girl's skin, but it's the border of reality that's most frequently railed against, cowered behind, and penetrated. Normal is a bitter pill that we rail against, (p. 65) Imp tells us, and insanity becomes a siren (p. 101), but things aren't that easy.

Insanity and the supernatural is here countered with Imp's humanity, both in its greatest aspects and also in its least glamorous. I pissed, she writes, and so I knew I must be alive, because I don't think dead women piss, do they? (p. 292) It's not, of course, limited to piss. Abalyn is Imp's girlfriend and lover, and the relationship between the two of them is one of the novel's strongest aspects. Their history together is meshed in with Imp's uncertainties about Eva and the world, but the two's interaction is rich with personality, hesitation, and, eventually, love. Besides which, showing Imp's vulnerabilities outside of the context of the purely impossible – showing how, after just meeting Abalyn, she wanted her to say yes so badly I probably had my fingers crossed. (p. 19) – goes a long way towards humanizing Imp.

Kiernan achieves all this with excellent prose that lives up to her reputation as a peerless wordsmith, but that's not to say that it, like the story, is exactly what you'd expect from her. The majority of the writing here is somewhat similar to that found in The Red Tree, at least insofar as it is as conversational as it is erudite, a mixture of insightful and vulnerable, traumatized and cutting. In marked contrast to the all out assault on every sense that defined so much of Kiernan's earlier prose, many of The Drowning Girl's descriptions and scenes read with the easy fluidity of dialogue, the unnatural rendered ethereal with suggestions and self examinations. All of that only adds to the impact of the barrage of images and emotions when it does come at the peaks of Imp's madness and the impossible's hold. The seventh chapter is the height of this, made up of pages of long paragraphs that snake and twist every which way and filled to the bursting and beyond with meaning and absolutely stunning writing, like: Dead wolves are sin-eaters. She was nailed with iron spikes to a smokehouse wall and gawkers came from all around to bear witness to laid low Christ Wolf in her mock Calvary tribulations. (pp. 210-1)

As I said in the beginning, I can't claim to fully understand The Drowning Girl. Then again, I'm not sure if such questions about sanity can ever be properly understood. I was, though, totally enthralled by this book. This is a novel about a haunting and about hauntings and about telling the stories of hauntings, and its characters and images, its words and power leave its page and haunt you as you read. But, though it hits you hard, The Drowning Girl is not a book of one note doom. It is a book about drowning, but it's also a book about learning to swim.

Poppy Z. Brite & Caitlin R. Kiernan - Wrong Things

Released in 2001 in a limited edition by Subterranean Press, Wrong Things is a collaboration between Poppy Z. Brite and Caitlin R. Kiernan, two writers of Weird and disturbing horror known for their powerful prose. The slim volume contains a story solely by each author – The Crystal Empire and Onion – and then their combined piece. All of it operates at the level of the incredibly high level each has established in their solo work.

Things kick off with Brite's The Crystal Empire, a tale that is, like the stories in Swamp Foetus/Wormtongue (which I loved but did not, alas, get a chance to review), of the purest emotions perverted and of the darkest settings. Zee, Susan, Mathew, Jenifer, and a few other scarcely named and scarcely described low lifes occupy a rundown building. Zee, our narrator, is in love with Mathew. I don't mean ordinary love, like the kind between equals, though. Their relationship is more one of supplicant to messiah. But their world is about to shatter. "Remember the way I look now," Mathew says. "Something huge is going to happen – something huger than you can conceive of, Zee. It will change me." (p. 11)

That change comes in the form of music. The band is the Isle of Man, the singer Anthony LaGuerre, a man who sings with a sound so desperate, so lovely that every hair on my body prickled in sympathy and whose voice is a waterfall jumble of notes. (p. 16) He's something that they need and want, though Zee admits that she didn't know what kind of wanting it was; whether it was wanting to make love or to talk soul-deep with LauGuerre or to shut hum up in a little jeweled box and let his voice escape when Mathew turned the key, like a golden clockwork nightingale. (ibid) LaGuerre is, if you'll pardon the cliché, too good for this world. Too perfect and too beautiful. Mathew and Zee go to him, later, and, in the story's horrific climax, either soil or free his gift.

It's rather difficult to tell where the story is going when it's in motion, but the dark atmosphere, reeking of filth and desperation from start to finish, is still more than captivating. The characters, too, are powerful. Zee's twisted out of shape by her love and need for Mathew, but that doesn't make her unrecognizable. It's her vulnerability amidst the horror that makes all of it so affecting. At the end of the story, it's hard to tell just what, if anything, has indeed changed, and that's despite the tumult, violence, and death of the ending.

Kiernan's Onion, though, is the masterpiece of the collection. It is the aftermath of a Weird Tale. Think back to Lovecraft. In stories like The Call of Cthulhu and At the Mountains of Madness, he showed us ordinary men who saw behind the veil, saw their own insignificance and the incomprehensible and impossible nature of the universe, and that's where we closed, with that apocalyptic revelation. But Onion takes place years, even decades, afterwards, a story set in the shattered remnants of sanity. Frank and Willa are two such visionaries. It's clear from what we see that they truly do care for each other from what we see, but, nonetheless, Frank can't even remember the last time he saw "her smile, really smile, not just a smirk or a sneer." (pp. 70-1) The two work at soul crushing, dead end jobs. Though they decided to quit before the story's start, Willa is smoking again, now running low on cigarettes and money, on health and will.

Trying to cope, those who've seen and those who know hold meetings where they eat stale donuts, drink bitter coffee, and try in vain to make "sense" (p. 68) of what's happened to them. The meetings, needless to say, accomplish nothing. It's obvious throughout this slow slide from mania to something worse, something unimaginable that such experiences can destroy, but it's not obvious until the very end that they might also be defining, that, just maybe, a hint of something more – no matter how cataclysmic that hint or how awful that more – might be all that makes life worth living.

Of course, Kiernan is not Lovecraft but for the place she starts her story. First, there's the question of demographics. In Lovecraft's The Statement of Randolph Carter, it's two educated and erudite men that find the staircase waiting within the tomb, a scientist and an occultist that disappears down. The same stairs are found in one character's inexplicable experience here in Onion, but the two characters are young girls, not seeking knowledge but rather escaping the confines of home and looking for a smoke. The biggest difference, though, is certainly the prose. Kiernan's writing is rich and lush, dark and twisting, and, above all, alive, close to home, sweaty and virulent. It's excellent when describing the weird, but is no less so when making the ordinary alien, as when a subway ride is described as: Rumbling along through the honeycombed earth, the diesel and dust and garbage-scented darkness, and him swaddled inside steel and unsteady fluorescent light. (p. 77) Tied with that is Kiernan's constant tendency for oddities in phrasing and structure, little things that keep the reader perpetually off balance like a surfeit of fragrant or combined words like "raincool" or "angrysharp," (p. 68) a tactic that could surely be ruinously distracting in lesser hands but is just another part of Kiernan's spell here.

And so we come to The Rest of the Wrong Things, the collaborative piece, set in Brite's setting The Missing Mile. The story's opening switches between two scenes, one of which shows our main characters – Terry, Vic, and a girl whose name we learn is Tyler – at the vandalized Sacred Yew. Amidst the scrawled swastikas, the characters speculate on what outsiders might have done this until Tyler says: "Well, that's what everyone always wants to believe, isn't it? […] The bad shit always comes from somewhere else. From outside us. outside our world. at least, that's what we'd like to think. That's why Dracula has always been so much more popular than Jekyll and Hyde. But werewolves are a lot scarier than vampires, even if no one wants to admit it. (p. 103) Sounds like a set up for a story that shows us that we're really the monsters, or that they're among us, or something like that, right? Not at all. If that – quite good – quotation's any thematic or plot-based connection to the rest of the story, I just don't see it.

But none of that matters once we get to the Mill, scarred by fire and now inhabited by something strange and foreign, something profoundly other. Their descent into it is an exercise in, as Kiernan puts it in the collection's afterword, "urban archaeology," a vividly described and pitch black maze of rusted machinery and decay. And, waiting at the bottom, is the entity itself, something maybe even risen from that so-damaging flame. As Tyler says: Sometimes things pass too close to us. […] Things from other places. Machineries of blood and starlight. Wrong things. (p. 107) Our three protagonists venture to very edge of that other reality, and then Terry and Vic fall back, disoriented and disturbed, while Tyler advances forward and is gone. At the end of the action, those that're left stumble out to the silent, brooding hulk of the Central Carolina Cotton Mill and the indifferent carpet of stars spread out overhead. (p. 114) In the course of the tale, Tyler, and then Terry, each say a quotation from Alice in Wonderland: "Down, down, down […] I wonder how many miles I've fallen by this time? I must be getting somewhere near the center of the earth…" (p. 112) It doesn't matter that, come the end, Terry and Vic have survived and will not be troubled again. They've been forever altered by what they've seen and experienced.

In the aforementioned afterword, Kiernan says that the role of The Rest of the Wrong Things in the collection is "more a starting point than a centerpiece." (p. 129) As such, I can't help but make connections. In that final tale, we're told that: One dry, onionskin layer of the night peeled back and this is what was buried underneath. (p. 100) Is that what this is, the story a close up and in-depth manifestation of the extra dimensional and life-altering experiences of Onion? It's certainly true, after all, that each of the stories manages to show us something other, something outside ourselves and absolutely awful, even if Brite manages to show us her Wrong Thing without ever needing to depart the confines of our reality and emotions. In any case, regardless of interpretations, this collection is fantastic. The second piece is my personal favorite, but there is not one of these that isn’t filled with mood, feeling, style, mastery, and, as Terry says at one point, "weird shit." (p. 98) Highly recommended.

Best Reads of 2011

Largely, I think, due to reading so many magazines and so many parts of various books for classes, I read the fewest books in 2011 that I did in any year since I started keeping track in 2009. Still, I've ended up with the at least somewhat respectable total of one hundred and nine volumes conquered, and, needless to say, quite a few of those were rather excellent. And so the time has come for the eight best of them, presented in alphabetical order. We begin with…

Reviewed here.

The Wounded and the Slain isn't an exciting book. It's downbeat, instead, not to mention depressing, dejected and dispirited, filled with character and heart and written with a kind of rough poetry. Though there is a crime at the book's center, it's very much a crime with a small c, not a jumping off point to adventure but a tortured, haphazard, regrettable, and, above all, pointless thing. The descent into darkness thing is an inexorable crawl, not a glamorous leap. I don't think you could ever call this a pleasant book, but it's one that'll hit you hard, and it's a damn good one.

Reviewed here.

As stark as it is focused, as streamlined as it is jagged, Red Harvest embodies much of what interests me about the noir genre. Though wholly concerned with matters of justice, this is a compassionless novel, maybe even a(n intentionally) heartless one. Morality here is a brutal force, and the idea of right is relegated to strength and violence. But, in this nigh lawless place, even the lawman, the only one standing up for us, might be corrupt to the core. This is a fast novel, a fun novel, and a damn disturbing one.

Reviewed here.

Like Red Harvest, The Ammonite Violin is disturbing and raw, but here those qualities don't come from bare language, harsh violence, and a lack of emotion but rather from a series of stories that are almost unutterably rich in their composition, filled with overwhelming and enveloping language and positively overflowing with feeling. The longing shown here is the kind of calculated, unbearable, and revelatory longing that might come gushing forth from an excised heart with all the force of the heavy, dark blood that comes with it.

Grimscribe is horror extraordinaire Thomas Ligotti's second collection, and it takes place wholly within nightmare, on the edge of utter dementia itself. Its stories toy with that border, giving glimpses and tantalizing, horrifying hints, leaping across for brief moments where sanity howls before falling back. Amidst it all are several of Ligotti's best tales, including Nethescurial, an insidious and Lovecraftian beast of a tale that can actually be read for free (albeit with an annoying formatting issue or two) here. In my personal rankings, Grimscribe is roughly tied with the author's Songs of aDead Dreamer and Teatro Grottesco for the overall prize of his best work. Suffice to say, this is a brilliant collection.

Reviewed here.

I knew I'd like Sandkings going in, maybe even knew I'd love it, but I didn't know how much. The Stone City is a Science Fiction Weird Tale in every sense of the word, and an absolutely brilliant one at that, fiction that probes the limits of human understanding and strangeness with as much skill as Lovecraft himself brought to the table. This isn't, though, a collection with one centerpiece. Every tale here is filled with breathtaking images and audacity, entire worlds and some of the best characterization you'll ever come across. I know a lot of readers view Martin's older works as a now-done sideshow compared to A Song of Ice and Fire, but doing so is a dire mistake.

Reviewed here.

Embassytown is the rare Science Fiction novel that is not only alien in its choice of colors and its number of tentacles. The aliens shown here are convincingly inhuman, but it's the aspects of language that Miéville uses them to explore that are stranger and more intriguing still. Those concepts are explored in full, taking the humans in the narrative to and past the breaking point, twisting and shattering and reinventing every aspect of their world. Miéville's as skilled as any with coming up with brilliant and challenging ideas, has the ability to ride them for all they're worth, and the talent to present the whole with his fantastic prose. Though it's very different from his early work, Embassytown is no less excellent.

The Dream of Perpetual Motion builds a vivid, colorful, and fascinating world and populates it with larger than life, well explored, and somehow believable characters. I think it says a lot about the novel that I chiefly remember two scenes, one the thrilling, grand, and inventive climax and the other an unimportant scene where the main character eats some rather unpleasant food in a diner. Try as I might, I can't decide which of those I liked best, or which felt more real, and, amazingly enough, the two fit so well into the same narrative that, looking back, they really don't seem all that different in importance at all.

Review to come.

A Fire Upon the Deep operates on a scale so much vaster than what can be easily conceived that the reader's practically pummeled with awe as they turn the pages, and turn them they will. The central plot of A Fire Upon the Deep is a gripping adventure story that takes place amidst an unimaginably complex and fascinating universe, a story filled with grand ideas and with a cast made up in large part of some of the best made and most convincing aliens I've ever seen. A Fire Upon the Deep isn't only one of my favorite books of this year: it's one of my favorite Science Fiction novels ever and even one of my favorite novels.

(THE DUBIOUS HONOR OF) WORST NOVEL

Review here.

Though it also had its fair share of excellence, 2011 packed in more than a few disappointing novels: Boneshaker, If You Could See Me Now, and even the legendary Frankenstein among them. But the latter two had some good ideas, if a fumbled execution, and even Boneshaker was more formless mush than actively bad. Only Wicked Things managed to truly and genuinely piss me off, not because it hadn't met my expectations (though, needless to say, it hadn't) but because it was simply an awful book, one that rambled about aimlessly, setting up numerous hints and clues, and then oh-so-cleverly keeled over dead before resolving anything. Ha ha. Wicked Things tries to be a stylish, plot-based read, but the ending reveal leaves it a thriller that forgot to thrill, a horror novel whose only real horror moment is a and unsubstantiated cheap shot, a novel whose characters are stick figures then jerked out of their unremarkable paths, and a book with nigh no redeeming features.

Reading in May

I've mentioned my love of Daniel Abraham a fair few times on this blog, and reviewed his short story collection from Subterranean Press, and so I dove into The Dragon's Path as soon as it crossed my doorstep. I can't quite say that the novel possesses as much depth or power as The Long Price at its height, but The Dragon's Path is an interesting and enjoyable book that serves to set up many an interesting thread for future volumes. Review coming.

 The White Luck Warrior, the second volume in the second of Bakker's three connected trilogies, can be easily compared to the middle volume of the first trilogy, The Warrior Prophet. As there, here we focus on an army on the move dealing with supply problems, and so on – but this book lacks the galloping pace of actions and revelations that made that first trilogy such an unforgettable experience. This is not, however, a weak book by any stretch of the imagination. Though I wish more ground had been covered, and less retread, the writing here is powerful and resplendent with metaphors and hidden meanings, and the thematic and philosophical ideas explored are as insightful as the standard that Bakker has set for himself.

Though I enjoyed many of the stories in The Martian Chronicles, I'll admit that, come the collection's end, I still wasn't convinced that Bradbury deserved his legendary status. Now, having read Something Wicked This Way Comes, I'll gladly admit that I was wrong: Bradbury most certainly deserves his praise. Something Wicked This Way Comes is a story about danger and change, but it's also – and most of all – a story about childhood. The exuberance of its characters and the skill of its prose is mesmerizing, and, though the novel does occasionally verge on the saccharine, there are six moments of awe and majesty for every half stumble. This is required reading for anyone interested in our genre's greats.

 Spurred on by my Breaking New Ground challenge, I began Moon Called and found a fast paced and enjoyable Urban Fantasy book with well drawn characters and a generally quietly believable approach to world building. Though Briggs has yet to show herself exceptional in any way, Moon Called is still an enjoyable novel that promises better things ahead.

 Like Hard Man, Savage Night is crime so bleak and brutal it's impossible to react to with anything but a terrified, strangled laugh. Guthrie reacts to the borders of sanity and general taste like most of us view finish lines, and his characters are slammed together so hard and fast that the gruesome mess that's left is likely to leave you as sick as you are satisfied. This is a roller coaster ride of cleverness and tension, but, like all the best four hundred foot drops, it's best to brace yourself before going in.

 Dashiell Hammett's debut is noir writ large, a single amoral detective pitted against an immoral city. Like Savage Night, this isn't a novel that will win any points for restraint, but the laconic honesty of its telling and force of its words is impossible to ignore. Review here.

 Kiernan's Subterranean Press collection, The Ammonite Violin & Others, weaved nightmarish and erotic tapestries out of lush language and surreal descriptions. The Red Tree mesmerizes the audience in a way as different as can be. Here, Kiernan's speech is unadorned and honest, crude and raw and vulnerable. And the image that she paints is both vivid and disorientating, at once horrific and run through with desire.

 I think it's rather well established that I liked Nevill's first two novels, Banquet for the Damned and Apartment 16 a fair bit. I even interviewed the man here.  After all that, I went into The Ritual with damn high expectations – and the book's first half blew even those away. Here Nevill displays excellence in atmosphere and character, creating a taut and terrifying adventure that rivaled anything in Nevill's first two books. And then, alas, the book's second section began, and the characters were gone, and the pacing was gone, and the atmosphere was gone. Review coming.

As I read the first hundred pages of Stone, I was deeply in love. Roberts writes with all the penetrating honesty of a confession and the intricacy of a carefully considered narrative, and his ideas are fresh and riveting. Alas, soon after the imprisoned protagonist wins his freedom, narrative momentum grates to a meandering halt and never returns in force. Still, the ideas that Roberts explores are interesting, and the prose fantastic throughout. I'll be reading more of Roberts in the future for sure, though I hope that his other novels maintain a more even pace throughout.

Caitlin R. Kiernan - The Ammonite Violin & Others

In the dream, I'm standing alone on the little stone bridge, standing there stark naked, and the park is washed in the light of a moon that is either full or very near to full. I have no recollection of getting out of bed, or of having left the house, or of the short walk down to the bridge. I'm cold, and I wonder why I didn't at least think to wear my robe and slippers. I'm holding the bridle from the trunk, which is always much heavier than I remember it being. Something's moving in the water, and I want to turn away. Always, I want to turn away, and when I look down I see that the drowned boy floating in the water smiles up at me and laughs. Then he sinks below the surface, or something unseen pulls him down, and that's when I see the girl, standing up for out near the center of the pool, bathing in one of the fountains. (p. 33)

The Ammonite Violin & Others is a collection of crystallized longing. Caitlin R. Kiernan’s characters are people filled with desires and loneliness and lust, and their dreams are as decadent as they are magnificent. These are stories so emotional that they are often agonizing to read, tales made of as much desperate hope as tortured despair.

Kiernan’s writing is not easily digestible. Hers are tales woven of tightly knotted imagery and internal monologues, dense tales either utterly unaware that they are being told or obsessed with the obfuscation of their own creation. Easy dialogue is almost nonexistent, here. When conversation does play a major role, it’s often through shifting viewpoints and timelines, through second person tales told to both a lover and a demon while tenses shift.

The title story – my favorite of the collection – exemplifies every one of Kiernan’s elements, even if no part of it is directly supernatural. A collector of ammonites and strangled women melds his two passions – the beautiful and the horrific – into a single perfect instrument and invites a struggling virtuoso to come to his secluded seaside home and play it for him. The music created is spellbinding – a typhoon gale flaying rocky shores to gravel and sand, and the violinist lets it spin and rage… (p. 101) – and the tale’s mixture of the beautiful and the grotesque is nothing short of devastating.

It’s the two Metamorphosis tales – A and B – that are probably the collection’s heart laid bare. Metamorphosis A shows us two distant lovers. One watches, unable to take the next step, while the other reaches out and transforms into something either far greater or far lesser than what they were. The transformation is revolting, and yet it is voluntary. It’s something lusted after, something desired, something needed. It fills a primal and erotic need, and it’s the only thing that can bring the two lovers together.

Metamorphosis B, on the other hand, happens after a character has been changed, after a mermaid has been taken from the sea by a sailor’s lust. In many ways, Metamorphosis B shows the long after consequences of Metamorphosis A, even if the transformations and characters of the two tales are, on the surface, unrelated. B brings forth the darkness inherent in such relationships, the resentment and hatred built up by the imposed change of interaction, the after effects of a love so dark and twisted, so – perhaps – necessary.

The Lovesong of Lady Ratteanrufer brings us to the edge of society. A woman lives at the edge of the river, forgotten and abandoned by the world. Her only companion is the rats, the rats that waited huddled together in the void, the endless nowhere place where there were not yet stars or planets or gods or angels, but only the nothingness before creation and only the rats. (p. 103) Alone with herself and the rats, she becomes their greatest ally, and yet she can do nothing as men destroy them. For One Who Has Lost Herself follows a similar path despite its different circumstances and tone. The narrator is a seal who has lost her skin. Her skin, the core of her being, waits for her at a shop across the street, but she can do nothing but watch it from the other side while, day after day, people jostle by oblivious. When she finally does cross, when she finally does enter the store to reclaim her soul, she learns that the center of her world is irrelevant to those around her. Her most precious position is detritus at the core of a donated chest, unimportant. Amidst such civilized surroundings, her quest for herself seems bizarre and, perhaps, even dangerous.

Many of Kiernan’s stories bring to mind another writer I’ve mentioned often enough on here, Thomas Ligotti. The dense imagery of the two writers is similar at times, and the despair rampant in many of Kiernan’s conclusions is certainly another similarity. That being said, Kiernan reaches those depressive depths (when she chooses to) through very different means.

Ligotti shows us a world where connecting to one’s fellow beings is impossible. Kiernan, on the other hand, is all about those connections and their costs, all about humanity distorted due to its need for companionship. The similarities are perhaps most prevalent in The Dreamtime of Lady Resurrection, a tale of someone journeying beyond and the costs and ramifications of doing so. The Voyeur in the House of Glass, too, is an interesting counterpoint to Ligotti’s work. In the story, a man desperate to plumb the depths of interaction leaps from vision after vision of humanity without truly connecting with any of them. The man’s quest is a carnival exhibit, and his dreams are exploited by showmen even as we experience them. It’s a testament to Kiernan’s skill that a story with almost no plot or character change can be so engrossing, and it does so through some of the most potent imagery and vivid scenes in a collection resplendent with potent imagery and vivid scenes:

The girl lies at the edge of the sea. She is not a mermaid, not yet, but this very morning she has come upon the oily carcass of a tiger shark, nine feet snout to tail, stranded in the seaweed and sand and shell litter. All she has ever wanted, this girl, a strong heterocercal tail, pectoral and anal and pelvic fins to carry her down into abyssal gloom that she might finally take her place in Neptune's lightless halls. She's hacked away the head and jaws a few inches above the gill slits and buries it in the dunes. Then she returns to the shark and slips herself inside, wriggling unwanted legs deep into the slimy, decaying gullet of the monster fish, burying herself to the hips. And with an upholstery needle and fine silk thread she begins to stitch herself to the dead shark, sewing her own pale, insufficient flesh to its sturdy predator's trunk. (p. 143)

You’ve no doubt noticed many similarities in my summaries of these stories. That’s not (or at least, not wholly) from my own stunted ability to summarize. Images and motifs reappear in tale after tale, reinforcing the collection’s dreamlike feel. Many of these stories seem like prior tales glimpsed from a different angle, and yet those often feel wildly disparate while seemingly unrelated tales course through the same emotional channels. Characters across the collection have needle-filed teeth or perfect ivory triangles of feldspathic porcelain, saw-toothed carinae (p. 159) bestowed by dental students and others, and circles and enveloping seas crop up again and again, recurring to permeate our imaginations with their power.

Unfortunately, the same repetition that strengthens the collection’s most remarkable stories can make the weaker tales blend together. There’s no story here that can be considered a failure, or anything even approaching a sane definition of a failure, but some don’t succeed in leaving nearly as much of a mark upon the reader as others. This is, perhaps, a result of the format. Everything in the collection was written to appear, two stories at a time, in Kiernan’s monthly fiction journal, the Sirenia Digest. When compiled, the similarities can, at times, impair an individual tale’s chance to stand on its own.

The Ammonite Violin & Others is a collection to be savored and examined, not quickly devoured. These stories are almost never easy to digest, but they are almost always worthwhile. Caitlin R. Kiernan has the ability to take her readers into the darkest of places, and, when the last page is turned, the reader gets to discover that leaving those places is far more sorrowful than entering them.