Caitlín R. Kiernan

What can I tell you about the Dear Sweet Filthy World I have returned from?

I could tell you it is a land bordered by dangerous women prowling the interstates of America; one has a head stuffed with visions of conflagrations at Dresden and Hiroshima and Peshtigo and Chicago; two are incestuous twins in a roving church of murder and sex, orgasmic rites with knives and pliers.
Should I tell you of the caged woman unsure if she was once a dragon?

Should I tell you of lovers found in the liminal show more lands between earth and sea, one a demon from the sky and one a creature of the Earth?

Should I tell you of the women who give themselves in orgasmic embrace to giant trilobites and Cthulhoid monsters and giant orchids and dragons, willing lambs to ecstatic slaughter?

Should I tell you that I saw Mr. Lovecraft’s shoggoths and heard howling werewolves? That I saw the savage art of the Black Dahlia murder?

Should I tell you of the names I heard whispered: Dickens and Shakespeare, Giger and the Campbells Joseph and Ramsey, Neko Case and Charles Fort, T. S. Eliot, C. S. Lewis, Robert Frost, and Rob Bottin?

Should I tell you that in the abyss of this world’s seas are vampires and dryads?

Should I tell you of the cities of this world, a coal-blackened, fairyland London or something like a New York City where fairies and goblins trade amnesia for art?

Should I tell you of the woman filled with microscopic cities?

Should I tell you of a dildo disappearing into an invisible lover or of the artist cursed and bound by his model?

Should I tell you of all the women sacrificed in future carnivals and future forests and on seashores?

Should I tell you of woman wishing to be cocooned like an insect?

Should I tell you of the echo of this world’s sea in the blood of so many, of the terror and transformation it brings?

Should I tell you of the Hell of regret and guilt and its shadowy guards?

I could tell you of these things, but I would be telling you only about the bones of theme and imagery, the ligament marks of plot. You would be as close to understanding as a Victorian paleontologist and his chunky reconstruction of a T. Rex. He would not know the grace and the movements of the monster. You would not know the grace and movement and articulations of the Dirty Sweet Filthy World.

I could suggest that these fervent couplings with the Other, whether sterile mergings or consequential in birthing monsters to devour our future, these exchanges of bodily fluids, human with alien, are artesianal oozings from a dark and bitter and deep human well seeking racial extinction

I could suggest that the weaving streams of narrative, the fault lines where universes grind against each other in dislocations of setting and persona, where the boundaries between observer and participant crumble and mix, where stories end in sheer cliffs of insinuation or playfulness, are traces of Kiernan’s mind birthing this world under pressure of deadlines, jagged and raw orogenies not always covered by accretions of revisions and convention or eroded by editorial suggestion.

Should I tell you these things? Should I suggest these things?

I have told you these things. I do suggest these things.

But I cannot tell you if you should enter the Dear Sweet Filthy World.

It's a variegated land. I cannot tell you if you will find beauty or obscenity, verities of destruction and creation, or nacreous decadence. show less

‘La Joven Ahogada’, de la irlandesa Caitlín R. Kiernan, es una novela que puede encuadrarse dentro del gótico contemporáneo, es decir, que no nos vamos a encontrar castillos en ruinas y espacios lúgubres y misteriosos. Puede que lo más llamativo sea la inteligente estructura narrativa, que incluye recortes de periódicos, extractos de poemas, fragmentos de llamadas telefónicas, y algún cuento dentro de la propia novela escrito por su protagonista. Todo, hay que reconocerlo, show more bastante caótico, que en algunos momentos te llega a sacar de la historia. Pero también hay que tener en cuenta que la narradora es una esquizofrénica paranoide, y por ello poco fiable, que reproduce sus delirios en forma de relato novelado. La historia no hace más que avanzar y retroceder constantemente y no puedes confiar en absoluto en los recuerdos de la protagonista, como ella mismo llega a admitir.

La historia está protagonizada y narrada por Imp, una joven que vive en Providence (la tierra del Maestro Lovecraft; ¿casualidad?), cuya profesión a tiempo parcial es la pintura. Se trata de una chica con una fuerte personalidad, que te engancha enseguida. Padece esquizofrenia paranoide, enfermedad que hizo suicidarse a su madre y a su abuela, y que mantiene a raya mediante medicación y periódicas visitas a una psiquiatra. Hay que mencionar el cuadro del siglo XIX La Joven Ahogada, que ejerce una extraña fascinación sobre Imp. También tiene su importancia Abalyn, con la que mantendrá una relación. Pero la parte más interesante es la que tiene que ver con sus fantasmas, ya que esta es una historia de fantasmas, y una manera de exorcizar los extraños sucesos que le acaecieron en relación con Eva Canning, una misteriosa mujer de la que recordará dos encuentros con ella, pese a que parezca un solo encuentro. Eva Canning, cuyo parecido con la joven del cuadro es perturbador.

‘La Joven Ahogada’ resulta una novela interesante, fascinante en algunos momentos, y una lectura que no deja indiferente. show less

[This a review only of the title story]

I am beginning to appreciate Caitlin Kiernan a great deal as a writer who can explore dark fantasy and horror in an elegiac, subtle and even leisurely way that never bores. This story ['The Ammonite Violin'] is no exception. The art is in the writing and not the incident.

A serial killing aesthete meets his two worlds of collecting - ancient ammonites and the body parts of suffocated young women - in an act of attempted 'perfection'.

The story is really show more that simple but Kiernan lulls you into the killer's world until a denouement that may or may not be obvious according to your own imagination. It doesn't matter. There is also a pale reflection of Lovecraftian horror in the references to the sea off New England. Fine stuff! show less

This one is dark and haunting, half a tribute to falling into art so deeply that it makes love to you and murders you, and half a deep treatise on madness and skirting the far edges of normality, all while feeling very much in one's own skin.

Most of the fun is simply trying to figure out whether it's a ghost story, a Ghost Story, or the ghost of a story, disjointed and cast adrift in time and faulty memory.

It's quite the interesting maze. Parts of the later novel is dreamlike and calls on us show more to reimagine all that had gone on before. It requires a bit of reflection, honestly, but even though this appears, at first glance, to be a quick and easy haunting of a novel, the truth is a bit more murky. Like looking into a disturbed pool of water and seeing yourself in the muddy swirls.

Then again, perhaps the wolves are real, Miss Riding Hood.

There's lots of symbolism and analysis in the novel, but no worries, almost all the work is done for us. It's the threads snaking in-between that require effort. :) show less