Summary
Summary
"Pure genius."-- New York Times
"Lyrically compelling tales that are nearly impossible to stop reading...fans of weird writers like Carmen Maria Machado, Jeff VanderMeer, and China Mieville will be glad to find this volume and thereby discover a writer who inspired them all."
-- Booklist
Caitlín R. Kiernan is one of dark fantasy and horror's most acclaimed and influential short fiction writers. Her powerful, unexpected stories shatter morality, gender, and sexuality: a reporter is goaded by her toxic girlfriend into visiting sadistic art exhibits; a countess in a decaying movie theater is sated by her servants; a collector offers his greatest achievement to ensnare a musician who grieves for her missing sister.
In this retrospective collection of her finest work--previously only available in limited editions--Kiernan cuts straight to the heart of the emotional truths we cannot ignore.
Author Notes
Caitlín R. Kiernan was born in Dublin, Ireland, and raised in the southeastern U.S. She is the author of thirteen novels, including The Drowning Girl , winner of the Bram Stoker and the James Tiptree, Jr. awards, as well as more than two hundred and fifty short stories. Kiernan has written graphic novels for both DC/Vertigo and Dark Horse Comics. She has fronted a short-lived goth-rock band, and worked as a vertebrate paleontologist in both Alabama and Colorado; in 1988, she described a new genus and species of ancient marine lizard, the mosasaur Selmasaurus russelli . Kiernan currently lives in Birmingham, Alabama with her partner, Kathryn Pollnac, and two very large cats, Selwyn and Lydia.
Reviews (3)
Publisher's Weekly Review
This stellar collection of 20 reprints, drawn solely from Kiernan's limited-edition publications, showcases her talent for blurring boundaries and creating distinctive sensory experiences. The Lovecraftian "Andromeda Among the Stones" is set against a writhing, vast seascape, where a young woman inherits a profound and terrifying family legacy. A journalist reflects on his time with a beautiful suicide cult leader who came dangerously close to calling forth something truly monstrous in the prickly, creeping "Houses Under the Sea." The pitch-perfect noir gem "The Maltese Unicorn" is a kinky, twisted take on Dashiell Hammett's The Maltese Falcon. "The Ape's Wife," a genre-defying standout, features King Kong's object of affection, Ann Darrow, who, lost in a strange space called All-at-Once Time, is confronted with the many paths she might have taken. In "A Season of Broken Dolls," a woman confronts her lover's fascination with "stitchwork," an art movement that takes body modification to terrifying new levels, and a young violinist discovers a terrible truth about her sister's disappearance in "The Ammonite Violin." With lush prose, Kiernan finds strange beauty in terrible tableaus, never failing to unsettle and inspire awe in equal measure. This versatile retrospective offers something for nearly every fan of the strange and macabre, and cements Kiernan's legacy as the reigning queen of dark fantasy. Agent: Merrilee Heifetz, Writers House. (Mar.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
Kiernan (Black Helicopters, 2018) is among the most critically acclaimed authors of dark fantasy and horror alive today, but her nonlinear, grotesque, boundary-pushing fiction has not achieved the mainstream success it deserves. This collection, the latest attempt to select her best short fiction from more than 250 pieces, focuses on the harder-to-find works published in long-sold-out limited editions. The result is a volume that presents a mere snapshot of her genius, showcasing the ways she plays with gender, builds nightmarish tension, and crafts stories where beginnings and endings don't matter in the face of such compelling characters. Despite the darkness at each story's core, there is also beauty in these lyrically compelling tales that are nearly impossible to stop reading. Seasoned fans may have read some of these stories before, but not all, and new fans of weird writers like Carmen Maria Machado, Jeff VanderMeer, and China Miéville will be glad to find this volume and thereby discover a writer who inspired them all.--Becky Spratford Copyright 2019 Booklist
Library Journal Review
Drenched in an ocean setting and an atmosphere of corruption and decay, Kiernan's short fiction, published previously in volumes by several small presses, is collected here for the first time. "In Andromeda Among the Stones," Meredith Dandridge has to close the gate her father opened, letting the horrors of World War I into the world. In "Houses Under the Sea," a cult leader ushers her followers into the ocean (readers of Kiernan's The Drowning Girl will be familiar with the group), while "The Prayer of Ninety Cats" features a film critic who reviews a disturbing film covering the life of Erzsebet Báthory. In "A Fairy Tale of Wood Street," the narrator's girlfriend stops hiding the cow's tail that she had all along, and an artist enters the land of faeries in "La Peau Verte." The anthology's lack of explanatory prefaces or afterwords is noticeable, but the stories speak for themselves. VERDICT Bodies, relationships, and the world are all changeable, shifting, and unstable in this collection by a master of dark fiction. Though influenced by Lovecraftian mythos, the work stands on its own and will be essential for Kiernan devotees.-Jennifer Mills, Shorewood-Troy Lib., IL © Copyright 2019. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.