Newman & Kiernan Reviewed at SFFWorld

Vampires (Mark) and ghosts (me) are the theme of this week’s reviews, appropriate enough one week or so away from Hallowe’en.

Mark is a professed fan of Kim Newman’s Anno Dracula series and he checks in with the reissue of the third installment, Dracula Cha Cha Cha:

Old Vlad (Count Dracula) is still around and at the start of the book due to marry again – this time to Asa Vajda, Princess of Moldova. Kate Reed, vampyrric super-reporter and erstwhile secret-agent for the mysterious Diogenes Club, is in Rome to meet old friend Charles Beauregarde, now-dying ‘warm blood’ and his vampire lover Genevieve Dieudonne as well as cover this select event.
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The writing is as lively as ever, the culture references throughout. You don’t have to have read the earlier books to get a gist of what’s going on but I found I did enjoy reading about characters met before and what happens to them here. It is a tale of three women and how events have led to this. It is also a book with a great deal of closure. Originally the last book in the series, there are major developments here, with the death of some key characters and the consequences of those deaths clearly impacting upon the others. This highlights the need to move on and to change, in a world that was rapidly changing anyway. The point is made that the elder vampires are finding this faster, brighter world with global media coverage difficult to live in.

Caitlín R. Kiernan is a writer admired greatly by many, including myself. She weaves stories that blend the dark fantastic and the real seamlessly. Her latest novel, The Drowning Girl, (March 2012) is a tale of haunted people:

To say that Imp is an unreliable narrator is an understatement and settling down into the novel is not an easy task. Imp writes her stories, tells them to us, but occasionally a person will argue with her about whether or not certain elements of what she wrote should have been included. It isn’t clear to the reader who this argumentative person is, initially, which further enhances the fractured sanity of Imp. The bulk of the story is told from Imp’s point of view; she relates her past, her family all the while moving through a period of her life where she takes in a woman thrown out by her roommate, meets a ghost/mermaid/wolf-girl, and continues to paint. Kiernan also intersperses stories written by Imp into the main narrative.
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Kiernan explores many heady themes in this novel; perception of reality, gender identification, hereditary legacies, art & the creation of story, the nature of sanity, modes of narrative, and accepting one’s place in the world. The Drowning Girl is a multilayered novel that is by no means linear despite Imp’s attempts to convey her story as such. It isn’t a novel that can be or should be taken at face value.

The Red Tree by Caitlín R. Kiernan - Rob's Final SFFW Review for 2009

Well folks, here it is, my last official SFFWorld review of 2009. Throughout this year, I’ve managed to post at least one new review per week, and in some cases, I’ve posted more than one of my reviews in said week.

That’s 52+ reviews and I don’t think … check that, I know I won’t be maintaining that pace in 2010. I’ve got too much of a backlog of books I’ve been acquiring that I want to read that have slipped while I’ve pushed review books to the top of the pile. More on that in a later blog post.

This week’s review is a complete 180 compared to last week’s book, The Red Tree by Caitlín R. Kiernan. That isn't a bad thing because I very much liked Kiernan's novel.

One of the things Kiernan points out through her protagonist early on is how unreliable narrators can be. With only a few pages per day of a diary by which we can know Sarah, it is difficult to get a complete handle on her. We don’t see how other characters react to her, only how they interact with her, and these interactions themselves are from Sarah’s recollections of the events. One of these events in particular, is a black cloud over Sarah’s entire presence in Rhode Island – the death of her former lover Amanda. While Sarah recounts how the two met in her diary, she does not fully or explicitly disclose the manner in which Amanda died until later in the novel.

The death of Sarah’s former lover becomes a bone of contention between Sarah and the unexpected boarder in the attic, Constance who happens to be an artist … just like Amanda was. A tension that vacillates between expected sexual tension, resentment, trust, and anger exist at multiple times, and often at the same time, between Sarah and Constance. One of the other major bones of contention between Sarah and Constance is the manuscript Sarah finds in the basement and Constance’s continual desire to read it firsthand.