Kiernan, it is becoming clear to me, walks a very fine line between the "gothic," as in a literary focus on the sublime found within an oppressively dark atmosphere, and the "gothic," as in teenagers who wear black leather trenchcoats and listen to awful industrial rock and get off on freaking out the squares (parents). I think it's clear where my sympathies lie.Either way, we have here a relentlessly grim set of (beautifully written!) stories that infuse a science-fictional setting with a kind of pestilential cosmic dread by way of Lovecraft filtered through H. R. Giger. This isn't just a dichotomy of mood, either: these stories also walk a narrative tightrope between a kind of standard SF mode of "realism" (you know what I mean) and a more surrealist expression of dream logic. This interaction is even further mirrored in the subject matter of each story, all of which quite literally involve the infusion of human bodies with nightmarish alien elements- be they actual extraterrestrials, Lovecraftian demonic entities, or simple human technology.As you might have picked up from the first paragraph, this fixation of Kiernan's on bodies works better at some points than others, hitting rock bottom when (you guessed it) it combines with her "gothic" (the bad kind) "edginess" to produce stories focused on sexual violence as the means to be creepy and shocking. I've said it before and I'll probably say it again: can we have a moratorium on that awful, problematic, tiresome tactic, PLEASE?Riding the White Bull was by far my favorite story in the collection, and incidentally basically a note-for-note transposition of Kiernan's "Houses Under The Sea", which was my first exposure to her writing and what led to me picking up this collection. Both stories revolve around an investigation into some sort of vague disaster, a video recording of which is constantly and hauntingly referred to. They also share a noir-ish tone, but where "Houses" focused on a suicidal water cult, "Riding" deals with the aftermath of some sort of alien plague brought back from Jupiter. This idea of an alien plague that physically deconstructs its victims recurs throughout these stories, as do human-esque androids and machine-esque cyborgs and bio-engineered post-humans, to the point where it isn't entirely clear if they all take place in the same future history or not. Given the similarity of themes and the dreamlike atmosphere of much of this material, though, I guess that doesn't really matter at all.Faces in Revolving Souls: good, but nothing to blow me away. Society has by and large rejected those who have chosen to refashion their bodies with bits and pieces from various animal species (each becoming a "species of one"), but what happens when a woman attempting to join them is rejected by the new technology itself? Actually the more I think about this one the more annoyed I am by its literal approach to "beautiful unique snowflake" individuality.Zero Summer had a lot of elements that I enjoyed but they never really converged the way I wanted or expected them to. Another one told in a kind of fragmentary style, wherein the tale of a pair of astronauts realize that they are actually disposable androids is interspersed with the story of the ex-junky from whom the personality of one of the machines was derived.The Pearl Diver, even more than the previous story, frustrated me with an excellent setup (a woman muddling her way through the day-to-day office drone in a corporate panopticon dystopia) that then disintegrated into a dreamlike experience of salvation (?) ... or something. In View of Nothing: A woman, having failed in some sort of assassination attempt, is being interrogated by her target. Or is having a nightmare? Or is dead? Who knows? This, I think, is where the combination of realism and nightmare worked best, because the character and narrative were actually slipping back and forth between the two, and the descriptions of the city outside of the room where she was confined were truly nightmarish. Buuuuuuuuut this was also the story where weird rape fantasy stuff starts intruding, ruining the other aspects of this story with disappointingly juvenile teenage goth bullshit. I mean, seriously, you think that presenting a woman being sexually assaulted in some sort of "alluring" manner puts you OUTSIDE of mainstream society?Ode to Katan Amano: Ugh. This one is about an android sex slave who becomes obsessed with some sort of doll or puppet as an object of salvation. At the time I assumed this was the story most oriented toward the teenage goth "take that mom and dad!" attitude...A Season of Broken Dolls: ... but I was wrong! This one I didn't even bother finishing, another trans-humanist examination of shocking mutilations and two women living together who actually hate one another and I just couldn't force myself to get through it. Kiernan's tricks were wearing pretty thin by this point.Bradbury Weather: My second-favorite of the bunch, concerning a woman living on Mars (inexplicably inhabited only by women?) who is looking for her ex-girlfriend, who has left to join some sort of cult dedicated to sacrificing their bodies to yet another alien plague/lifeform that incorporates individual humans as disgusting Giger-esque biomechanical organs, or something. Like "Riding the White Bull," this one really skillfully generates a creepy, despairing atmosphere as the reader is slowly fed clues about the looming extraterrestrial threat even while being guided around these desolate (post-apocalyptic?) communities wherein humans themselves were and are the agents of destruction.The first and last stories (and maybe "The Pearl Diver") are worthwhile, skip the rest.

Caitlín R. Kiernan’s short fiction was first published in 1995. Over the intervening decade and a half, she has proven not only one of dark fantasy and science fiction’s most prolific and versatile authors, but, to quote Ramsey Campbell, “One of the most accomplished writers in the field, and very possibly the most lyrical.” S. T. Joshi has written, “Kiernan’s witchery of words creates a mesmerizing effect that we haven’t seen since the days of Lovecraft and Bradbury.”Two Worlds and In Between: The Best of Caitlín R. Kiernan (Volume One) presents a stunning retrospective of the first ten years of her work, a compilation of more than two hundred thousand words of short fiction, including many of her most acclaimed stories, as well as some of the author’s personal favorites, several previously uncollected, hard-to-find pieces, and her sf novella, The Dry Salvages, and a rare collaboration with Poppy Z. Brite. Destined to become the definitive look at the early development of Kiernan’s work, Two Worlds and In Between is a must for fans and collectors alike, as well as an unprecedented introduction to an author who, over the course of her career, has earned the praise of such luminaries as Neil Gaiman, Peter Straub, Charles De Lint, and Clive Barker.

An albino girl wanders the sun-scorched back roads of a south Georgia summer, following the bidding of an angel or perhaps only voices in her head, searching out and slaying ancient monsters who have hidden themselves away in the lonely places of the world. Caitlin R. Kiernan first introduced Dancy Flammarion in the pages of her award-winning second novel, Threshold (2001), then went on to write several more short stories and a novella about this unlikely heroine, each a piece of what has become an epic dark fantasy narrative. Featuring illustrations by Ted Naifeh, Alabaster: Pale Horse reprints all these tales from the original hardcover collection and adds one more, "Highway 97."

An exclusive, profusely illustrated hardcover novella related to CaitlÌn's harrowing new novel, Threshold! Late one night, on a lonely south Georgia highway, a very strange car picks up an even stranger hitchhiker and the fates of all concerned become inextricably intertwined. Meet Dancy Flammarion, an orphaned albino girl who talks to angels and is intent on ridding the world of monsters. But what happens when one of the monsters decides to use her for his own dark ends? In the Garden of Poisonous Flowers is award-winning fantasist Caitlin R. Kiernan's first-ever novella, giving us a glimpse into the life of Dancy Flammarion shortly before her appearance in Kiernan's critically-acclaimed second novel, Threshold. This gritty yet decadent story of ghouls, corruption, and talking bears, draws us deeply into a world of madness and betrayal, forbidden appetites and deadly intrigue, and the light that shines from the most unlikely of heroes. In the Garden of Poisonous Flowers will include a full-color dustjacket and ten black and white interior illustrations by Dame Darcy! The Limited edition will also include "On the Road to Jefferson," a previously unpublished chapbook available only with the novella, with cover art by CaitlÌn R. Kiernan.

From Lovecraft to Borges to Gaiman, a century of intrepid literary experimentation has created a corpus of dark and strange stories that transcend all known genre boundaries. Together these stories form The Weird, and its practitioners include some of the greatest names in twentieth and twenty-first century literature.Exotic and esoteric, The Weird plunges you into dark domains and brings you face to face with surreal monstrosities. You won't find any elves or wizards here...but you will find the biggest, boldest, and downright most peculiar stories from the last hundred years bound together in the biggest Weird collection ever assembled. The Weird features 110 stories by an all-star cast, from literary legends to international bestsellers to Booker Prize winners: including William Gibson, George R. R. Martin, Stephen King, Angela Carter, Kelly Link, Franz Kafka, China Miéville, Clive Barker, Haruki Murakami, M. R. James, Neil Gaiman, Mervyn Peake, and Michael Chabon.The Weird is the winner of the 2012 World Fantasy Award for Best Anthology

The supernatural stories that make up Robert W. Chambers’s classic piece of weird fiction are tied together by a play that brings madness to all who read it: The King in Yellow. It’s a book that draws readers in with an irresistible yet innocent opening act, then drives them insane with the poisonous words of Act 2. It’s a book that cannot be suppressed, spreading like a disease from city to city, continent to continent. An influence on writers from H. P. Lovecraft to Neil Gaiman, The King in Yellow is one of the most important works of American supernatural fiction. In this dangerously unputdownable graphic-novel adaptation, I. N. J. Culbard brings to life a thrilling tale of horror that will make readers laugh and cry and tremble with fright . . . Read at your own risk.

Award-winning author Caitlmn R. Kiernan, best known for her contemporary settings, "gothnoir" tales of pain and wonder, and atmospheric stories of Lovecraftian terror, was first published as an author of dark science fiction. Now she returns to sf with a masterful thirty-thousand word novella, The Dry Salvages.Three centuries in the future, though much of Earth has been crippled by war, pollution, and catastrophic climatic change, man has at last traveled to the stars and even found evidence of at least one extraterrestrial civilization. In a bleak and frozen Paris, at the dawn of the 22nd Century, an old woman is forced to confront the consequences of her part in these discoveries and the ghosts that have haunted her for almost fifty years. The last surviving member of the crew of the starship Montelius, exopaleontologist Dr. Audrey Cather struggles to remember what she's spent so long trying to forget -- the nightmare she once faced almost ninety trillion miles from Earth.

India Morgan Phelps--Imp to her friends--is schizophrenic. She can no longer trust her own mind, because she is convinced that her memories have somehow betrayed her, forcing her to question her very identity.Struggling with her perception of reality, Imp must uncover the truth about an encounter with a vicious siren, or a helpless wolf that came to her as a feral girl, or neither of these things but something far, far stranger...

novelist, short story writer, food writer from the United States

Color Lush Melodic Vast Labyrinthine Circuitous Ephemeral like totally yeah

book

author

music artist

Dedra Eichstedt

List of all things that spring forth from Hagazussa, Fever Ray S/T, Black Hole - Charles Burns, and the like

Color Lush Melodic Vast Labyrinthine Circuitous Ephemeral like totally yeah

More lists by Dedra Eichstedt

Bleak Austere Minimal Monochrome Stark Spartan Monastic