The first Caitlin R. Kiernan story I ever read was ‘Valentia’, in the Jones/Sutton anthology Dark Terrors 5. That was all the way back in 2000, would you believe. I knew nothing about Kiernan prior to reading the story – this was at a time when I still knew relatively little about who was who in modern horror, and I took a great delight in simply grabbing a clutch of Year’s Bests and diving in. It was a period of great discovery for me, and I learned something from just about every story I read, but (and I think this would be true for every writer) there were a few stories that worked a different kind of magic, that spoke to me in a voice that said: this is the kind of thing you want to be writing.
The Joyce Carol Oates novella The Ruins of Contracoeur was one such story from this period – I am still in love with it – and the Kiernan story was most definitely another. What was it? The language, the oddness, the slow seepage of myth and dark magic into everyday life? All this and more. Put simply, I hadn’t known that horror could be like that, and I ached to write something that good. I read Caitlin Kiernan stories wherever I could find them, bought her first novel, Silk, when it finally turned up as an import in Forbidden Planet (it was so difficult to obtain US books back then – how annoying that was), continued to admire her.
I’m currently reading her most recent novel, The Drowning Girl, which is so skewed and so rich it’s like discovering her work all over again. When people bemoan the dearth of good contemporary horror fiction (as they frequently do), this is one place I would send them. Flawlessly beautiful sentences, a twisted plot thorny as roses. Reading it today I kept thinking how much it reminds me of another great classic of modern horror, Peter Straub’s perennially magnificent Ghost Story. Like Kiernan’s, Straub’s prose and plots have that quality of entanglement that I’d not call abstruse, exactly, but certainly knotty. And knotted. There’s a drowning at the centre of each book of course. And (I realised with a chill) an Eva also.
Last week and before starting on the Kiernan I finished reading the third book in Stephen King’s Dark Tower series, The Waste Lands. I have to admit to a certain disappointment here. The careful interweaving of style and substance that was so much a feature of The Gunslinger is more or less absent from The Waste Lands. What we have instead is ‘just’ story, pure and simple. Because it’s King you’re never bored, which some might argue is achievement enough by itself, but I missed the mystery, sensing instead the inevitable problems a writer faces when trying to progress a series of this scope and length. We have action, but we lose intensity, which is just one of the reasons I’ve instinctively never been a fan of series fiction.
Well, I’m off down to Cornwall tomorrow, a trip that delivers pleasure even before I get there because of the long train journey – time enough to finish the Kiernan, and hopefully to get me started on Nicholas Royle’s much anticipated First Novel. I shall also be taking the book Chris bought for me at the weekend, Joyce Carol Oates’s new collection The Corn Maiden.
In anticipation of five days away I’ve been working hard this week on that third draft I mentioned earlier – more on that soon, I hope.