I first stumbled across Caitlín R. Kiernan in a 2005 collection of satisfyingly nasty short stories (Outsiders: 22 All-New Stories From the Edge, now out of print), and she keeps cropping up in different collections – most recently in one I reviewed in 2017.
This year Tachyon Publications has released a book collecting Kiernan’s best work, twenty stories across fifteen years of her writing, all of them close to horror, very much dark fantasy, a little bit of science fiction and one film noir pastiche featuring a cursed dildo made from a unicorn horn (no seriously). There’s literally nothing out there quite like Kiernan’s stories, and they’re dazzling. I came up from most of these blinking and disoriented and not at all sure what I’d just read.
What you should probably know before jumping into this one is that Caitlín R. Kiernan’s stores are anything but straightforward. Most of the ones in this book are closer to vignettes – or character studies, or psychological experiments – than they are to something with a defined beginning-middle-end. Timelines jump randomly, song lyrics wander in and out, the scenery echos (or infects) what’s going on in the narrator’s mind. The author will spend as much time on the narrator’s description of that comforting yet vaguely uneasy smell you get in old cinemas as she does on the entire (very sweet) relationship between the hitman/cleaner and the man he’s been shacked up with for the last two years.
You’ll finish many of these and think “But then what happened? or “Wait, that’s it?!” Because these stories aren’t about an ending or a reveal, or god forbid a moral. They’re about the character’s attempts to find out what the meaning is, or if there’s a meaning to any of it at all. Or it’s about how a person can throw away everything they’ve made of their life because they can’t let something go. The point isn’t what happened, it’s the endless spiraling around it.
Keeping in mind that it’s pretty hard to describe what these stories are about, here’s some highlights of the ones that stuck with me the most.
At least five entries in this collection have something to do with the ocean. “Andromeda Among The Stones” features a house by the sea, a terrible price to be paid, and something horrible in the locked room at the end of the hall. And “Fish Bride (1970)” is an odd little vignette, a strange love-affair with a woman who may not be human. Or survivable.
“Houses Under The Sea” is told from the point of view of a journalist drinking himself to death while trying to write down everything he knows about a mass suicide that may (very likely) have been caused by a former lover. I love how Kiernan twists sentences back on themselves, like the obsessive circling of grief and regret going on as the journalist jumps from news articles to memory to a blackmarket tape of something awful filmed by a deep-sea submarine.
Orpheus’ mistake wasn’t that he turned and looked back towards Eurydice and Hell, but that he ever thought he could escape. Same with Lot’s wife. Averting our eyes does not change the fact that we are marked.
I’m still trying to figure out what “The Mermaid of the Concrete Ocean” is trying to say. Something about a dead artist who made a life’s work out of his obsession with a body on the beach, and an explanation that doesn’t really explain anything, as told by his favorite model from her wheelchair in a dark and dusty apartment.
The way art will get into your brain and start knocking things around comes again up in”A Season of Broken Dolls”. Yet another journalist, the artwork that she can’t get out of her mind is never fully described, except to go into detail about how the…materials of the art installations are all carefully drugged. Because otherwise that would be horrible. More horrible.
Another kind of art – specifically film – features in the story “The Prayer of Ninety Cats”, a summary and parts of a screenplay for a film about the Countess Bathory. And”The Ape’s Wife” is one of my favorites, told in a completely non-linear fashion, with interlocking realities almost like a series of nested dolls, all the what-if’s and never-were’s of a silver screen story.
Then there are the ones that actually freaked me out.”A Child’s Guide to the Hollow Hills” is a short and terrifying tale of fairy child being slowly devoured by the Queen of Decay. Charlotte and Em are dealing with a cosmic accident in “Tidal Forces”, another one that was particularly scary not just because of what’s happening to Em, but that oncoming horror that she and Charlotte go through as they realize exactly what’s happening.
There are things worse than blank spaces on maps.
I first read “Interstate Love Song (Murder Ballad No. 8)” in the collection Dear Sweet Filthy World. The stream-of-consciousness prose holds up really well, although this time around I didn’t get the sense that the end was inevitable for the two serial-killing sisters/lovers, but that somehow the ending was never going to stop.
Kiernan keeps returning to theme of the stricken former lover, like she does with “Bradbury Weather”. I’m a huge Bradbury fan, so I enjoyed the heck out of this one this one, set on a Mars with Sci-fi slang and animated tattoos (“kinetitats”), slums set under pressure domes next to dormant volcanoes, a series of nightmares about something inhuman in the wastelands, and a cult devoted to a parasite that causes something worse than death.
The cursed dildo that I mentioned in the intro (and I’m sure you were all wondering when I’d get around to that) appears in “The Maltese Unicorn,” an homage to (but definitely not an adaptation of) The Maltese Falcon that takes place in a 1935 New York with demon brothels and magic-using mob bosses. The Macguffin would be silly if it was written by anyone else, but here it’s believably frightening. And I don’t know if the author based the main character Natalie on the nameless, savvy, spectacle-wearing Acme Bookshop girl from “The Big Sleep”, but I’m going with it anyway because she makes for one hell of an alternate-universe Humphrey Bogart, dealing with the dame who betrayed her.
“You played me for a sucker,” I said and picked up the pistol that had been lying beside the grimoire.
After everything I said about appreciating Kiernan’s work for being non-linear and breaking boundaries, I still have to pick the story with a very traditional beginning-middle-end as my favorite: “The Ammonite Violin (Murder Ballad No. 4)”. (Yes, she has an entire series of the Murder Ballads, and now I have to go find all of them.) It’s not just my favorite because it’s about a violin – which I happen to play – but because it’s about something being crafted. It’s irresistible, the idea of that kind of collecting, and careful design, and using found materials to make art. It’s a sign of just how seductive Kiernan’s writing is that she can create a character that’s truly horrible, and then make the reader just a tiny bit envious that he can take elements from his two great passions and use them to create something…perfect.