Caitlin R. Kiernan is one of many living authors who have taken up the mantle of weird fiction from some notables as Poe, Lovecraft and Bradbury with enough expertise and originality that I think she may someday be properly counted among their number. While she embraces the themes of tragedy, cosmic horror and lyrical strangeness that made all of those authors so memorable, she brings her own sensibilities to the table. These being, to name but a few, a focus on counter culture, female and LGBTQ protagonists, a fascination with scientific minutiae and in particular loving descriptions of fossils (which makes scene considering Kiernan’s background in paleontology)…and, perhaps most notably, a centering of the narrative around pained, crumbling and at times even abusive relationships. Her novels, most successfully THE RED TREE and THE DROWNING GIRL, are less tales of horror than they are descriptions of a person’s struggle with problematic love, while the backdrop is…erm…well, ‘absolute sinister weirdness’ is a pretty vague term, but I’ll go with it for now, cos DAMN do things get peculiar in these books.
So how do her short stories stand up?
Pretty good…though there are a few caveats that I’ll get to later.
There are a number of excellent stories in this collection, and while some aren’t up to the same standard, I’m hard pressed to call any of them a waste of time. There are a few dozen here, so I’ll only mention a few. “A Child’s Guide to the Hollow Hills” stands out to me for it’s utterly nightmarish concept: a fairy, eaten by a kind of sentient evil plant, slowly digested while still sentient. The fairy pleads and begs, only to be withered down to a husk of her former self. It’s relentless and harrowing, and the story stands as a ghastly commentary on the holocaust of the soul engineered by a toxic partner. “The Ape’s Wife” is a lot of fun, sorta a phantasmagorical memoir by Fay Wray as she recollects her encounter with the mighty King Kong (not mentioned here by name for reasons of not wanting to get sued, I ‘d guess). Then there’s “Bradbury Weather”, a novella that owes a lot to detective and SF pulp, as a woman chases down an ex across a blasted alien planet. The ex has joined up with a cult whose members worship an immense alien entity and…uh…well, without giving too much away, let’s say Kiernan combines Lovecraftian monstrosity with a deep understanding of the biological eccentricities of certain deep sea fish, and the results are none too pretty.
Kiernan’s prose and character work are both top notch here, and this collection is an easy recommendation. I would not recommend it above her novels, however, simply because while Kiernan explores her favourite themes exceedingly well, she does love circling back on them just a bit too often. In the space and time afforded by a novel’s length, her characters and control of atmosphere become vivid enough to distract you from the fact that a lot of these ideas…and even the characters themselves…have been visited before. In a boss rush of her short fiction, I couldn’t help but find repetition setting in as a bit of a problem. She returns to the character of the abusive ex enough times I was reminded of Philip K. Dick’s exceedingly irritating habit of featuring his wife as an antagonist in, like, most of work from the 1960s. Which was a lot, just so you know.
Still, if you dip your toes into this languid forest pool of fiction from time to time rather than diving right into its cold waters, I think you’ll find the experience unforgettable. Me like books.
Me Like Books 