rachelmanija | Entries tagged with author: kiernan caitlin

“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.

My name is India Morgan Phelps, though almost everyone I know calls me Imp.

A gorgeous, intense dark fantasy about mental illness, myths, and memes. Not memes in the internet sense, but memes in the older sense: ideas that get passed around like a virus, taking on a life of their own.

Imp is a sweet, earnest, sheltered young painter with schizophrenia, which is well-controlled with medication. She lives with her girlfriend Abalyn, who is transgender and writes video game reviews. All of this is relevant.

Imp is trying to write the story of what happened when she met a woman named Eva Canning, who might be a siren and is certainly supernatural, on a hot evening in July. She is also trying to write the story of what happened when she met a woman named Eva Canning, who might be a werewolf and is certainly supernatural, on a cold night in November. One of those stories must be wrong, but which one? Whenever it happened or whoever Eva is, meeting her led to the breakup of Imp and Abalyn's relationship, and also to something that Imp thinks was much worse, but which she can't bear to write down.

Imp is not a reliable narrator. But this isn't a "magic or madness" book. It's a "magic and madness" book, and is largely about the commonalities between certain aspects of mental illness and certain aspects of myth. Imp's schizophrenia involves seeing connections between things, intrusive thoughts, compulsive writing, and obsessions. The call of the siren is an intrusive thought consisting of an ear-worm that's a poem about the ocean, and can only be banished by half-drowning yourself. The siren is an urban legend or maybe a real woman who drowned and became a ghost, who inspired a painting called "The Drowning Woman."

Everything is connected in Imp's mind, and reading the book makes you start connecting the dots yourself. As she gets more and more involved with Eva Canning, the connections multiply, weaving a web of urban legends, myth, folklore, history, art, literature, and delusion.

It's extraordinarily well-done and immersive. Imp is very likable, vulnerable, and innocent, which means that I spent much of the book in a state of "don't go in the basement!" The basement is Eva Canning, but it's also her own mind.

The book is often eerie, but not terrifying along the lines of The Red Tree. Except for one bit where Imp psyches herself to keep on writing by telling herself, "It's not like someone's looking over your shoulder," and I immediately thought, "What if someone is?" and promptly terrified myself.

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The Drowning Girl

This just might be the scariest book I’ve ever read. Reading it in January, along with Wylding Hall, makes for a great year of reading horror even if I don’t read anything else in that league for the rest of the year.

The Red Tree is one of my favorite horror genres, the “found manuscript.” This one is especially satisfying in that manner because it involves found manuscripts within found manuscripts within found manuscripts.

It begins with an introduction by the editor of deceased writer Sarah Crowe, explaining that the journal she kept in the last months before her suicide was mysteriously mailed to her. The editor then details her trip to the house in rural Rhode Island that Sarah had been renting when she died; she visits the tree that she says is often mentioned in the journal, but doesn’t dare go into the basement...

Is your skin creeping already? Mine was. But it gets exponentially scarier as it goes along. Similarly to Wylding Hall, this is the restrained, things-glimpsed-from-the-corner-of-your-eye, minimal gore type of horror. Which, to me, is nearly always the scariest kind.

Sarah rented the house on the pretense of finishing an overdue book which she’s completely blocked on, and also to escape from reminders of her ex-girlfriend Amanda’s suicide. She discovers after she’s already moved in that the house was previously occupied by Charles Harvey, a professor who also killed himself; in the extremely creepy basement, she discovers his unfinished work of nonfiction documenting the horror surrounding the red oak growing near the property, and also the typewriter and ream of onionskin paper he wrote it on. Using the same typewriter and same paper, Sarah begins a journal.

Then she learns that her landlord rented the attic of the house to Constance, an artist from Los Angeles. And that’s when things start to get really weird...

The Red Tree is incredibly atmospheric, beautifully written, and with an unusual, vivid main character in Sarah, who is hard to get along with and easy to love. It has the unusual quality of being both an easy read in terms of prose and extremely dense in terms of narrative complexity.

This is an extremely ambiguous book, which deploys multiple possible explanations, along with a total lack of explanation, to paradoxically satisfying effect.

Sarah is, at the very least, depressed. She has seizures, which can cause blackouts, and drinks despite medical advice not to. In her journal, she confesses to a number of lies in the past, in addition to sometimes outright claiming to have made up or fictionalized aspects of things she just wrote about. And, of course, she’s a fiction writer. In other words, she’s an extremely unreliable narrator.

But maybe she’s not that unreliable. There is a ton of local lore about that tree. Maybe it’s all true. But how reliable is the manuscript she finds? Sarah says she can’t find sources for much of what’s in it.

And then there’s Constance. She’s present for a number of the creepy supernatural moments. But there’s reasons to question her reliability, too.

This rundown makes the book sound like a “magic or madness?” type of story, but that’s much too simplistic. The Red Tree resists simple explanation, instead opening up layers and layers of horror, grief, obsession, history, myth, identity confusion, dreams, and art. It rewards close attention, and I’m sure it will reward re-reading, but not to find straightforward answers. There are none.

Huge spoilers below. I’d love to discuss this book and hear others’ thoughts on it!

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This was the first thing I'd read by Kiernan, and now I want to read everything.

The Red Tree

This should win some kind of prize for most inappropriate cover. It looks like a standard urban fantasy, and it is not even remotely that. It needs a cover indicating literary horror. This sort of thing: