Kiernan’s densely plotted and atmospheric tales of dread—supernatural and otherwise—make for a memorably unsettling read.
This collection abounds with uneasy psyches, unsettling fauna, and blurred boundaries between the real and the bizarre.
Much of Kiernan’s fiction exists on the border between psychological horror and the same genre’s more supernatural division. Many of the stories in this collection exemplify this: While there are strange rituals, cursed objects, and a tinge of cosmic horror, Kiernan places a strong emphasis on the headspace of her characters. Several of the stories here—including “Untitled Psychiatrist No. 2” and “Untitled Psychiatrist No. 3”—create memorably disquieting scenes as characters recall moments from their pasts that are laced with horror. The use of memory lends an air of ambiguity to the proceedings, which intensifies the feeling of something ominous. “Fairy Tale of Wood Street,” which centers around a woman who may or may not have a tail, takes the book’s psychological elements to their apex. “Fake Plastic Trees,” set in an environmentally devastated world with echoes of Kurt Vonnegut’s Cat’s Cradle, blends high-concept science fiction with a deeply subjective narrative as its narrator grapples with memories and nightmares inspired by those memories as she attempts to document a haunting event that she witnessed. Some of these stories veer into the outright Lovecraft-ian, including “The Cats of River Street (1925)” and “Excerpts from An Eschatology Quadrille.” The latter, set in four different time periods, creates a powerful sense of unease even as it demonstrates Kiernan’s range and command of setting. And the title story makes use of deeply deliberate pacing as the encounter between two travelers whose paths cross in South Dakota gradually becomes something at once charged and menacing.
Kiernan’s densely plotted and atmospheric tales of dread—supernatural and otherwise—make for a memorably unsettling read.Pub Date: Nov. 30, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-59606-882-7
Page Count: 312
Publisher: Subterranean Press
Review Posted Online: Sept. 1, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2018
The story has it all: swords, sorcery, and pure and undying love. (Excellent illustrations, too.) Essential grounding for an...
Frodo-heads rejoice: from the Tolkien factory comes a foundational story a century in the making, one yarn to rule them all.
“I cannot think of anything more to say about hobbits,” J.R.R. Tolkien wrote in frustration to his publisher. “But I have only too much to say, and much already written, about the world into which the hobbit intruded.” The story of Beren, a mortal human, and Lúthien, an immortal elf, resonates throughout the corpus of Tolkien’s work; born while Tolkien was shaking off the horrors of combat in World War I, it figures in The Silmarillion, the first of the major posthumous books, and in other of the Middle-earth books, to say nothing of The Lord of the Rings itself, when Aragorn sings of the fraught love between the two legendary figures. As reconstructed here and presented whole, the saga adds back story to much of LOTR: it explains the mistrust of Treebeard and the other forest denizens for the world of men, and it provides a foreshadowing for the whole of the canonical Rings trilogy, since it describes a kind of ur-Saruman who lusts for both power and magical jewels, setting off a chain of events that implicates Orcs, dragons, humans, elves, and all manner of other beings. Some of the tale here is in verse, done in a kind of Tennyson-esque meter: “Then Sauron laughed aloud. ‘Thou base, / thou cringing worm! Stand up, / and hear me! And now drink the cup / that I have sweetly blent for thee!' " Sweetly blent indeed. Other moments are worthy of Mikhail Bulgakov, such as Tolkien’s conjuring of giant malevolent cats, their “eyes glowing like green lamps or red or yellow where Tevildo’s thanes sat waving and lashing their beautiful tails,” and of Tennyson himself, as when Beren tells how for Lúthien’s love “he must essay the burning waste, / and doubtless death and torment taste.”
The story has it all: swords, sorcery, and pure and undying love. (Excellent illustrations, too.) Essential grounding for an epic cycle that shows no signs of ending anytime soon.Pub Date: June 1, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-328-79182-5
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2017
SEEN & HEARD
Fans will love the second installment of this dark fantasy about very human characters beset by inhuman dangers.
When the world changes, will you change with it?
A boy who takes pleasure in causing pain meets a monster who can teach him to do much more. A Soulkeeper puts his reputation on the line to stop the abuse of soulless humans—while concealing his relationship with an "awakened" formerly soulless woman. A religious woman given unimaginable power over human souls by a monster struggles to determine right from wrong, faith from blasphemy. In a world where mountains walk, prayers can change the physical world, and magical creatures like talking rabbit-soldiers have awoken from a centurieslong slumber, no choice is simple. The Soulkeeper Devin has chosen to befriend creatures like the faery Tesmarie while his spellcasting brother-in-law, Tommy, believes the newly awakened magical creatures have as much right to the land as humans do. In a time when most humans are reacting with fear and anger to their changing world, seeing the world in shades of gray can be dangerous. Meanwhile, Devin’s sister, Adria, finds that her new powers are testing her faith and bringing up questions she’d rather not confront. As new magical threats to the human population arise, all of these characters will be pushed to their limits, and the decisions they make may determine the fate of humanity. Picking up where Soulkeeper (2019) left off, this second book in a planned trilogy raises the stakes for every character, complicating the moral choices they face. The plot rockets along from one magical battle to the next, but Dalglish deftly weaves in rich character development alongside all this action.
Fans will love the second installment of this dark fantasy about very human characters beset by inhuman dangers.Pub Date: March 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-316-41669-6
Page Count: 624
Publisher: Orbit/Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Jan. 26, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2020
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