Partly fish, partly porpoise, partly baby sperm whale

I have a thing for the sea. Anyone who has spent much time with me, or even read much of my work, will know this.* My earliest completed story in college featured a drowned mermaid,** the constantly spiraling novella is a sea-story,*** and I can't even count the number of pieces I have written that involve the ocean one way or the other.**** The only stories I perform with any regularity, "The Grey Child" and "The Woman Who Was Wife to the Husband of the Sea," are both about encounters with the otherworld of the sea. So, as one might imagine, I am always on the lookout for books, films, songs, that do ocean well. (In the same way that there are authors, like Seamus Heaney or Greer Gilman, who get autumn right; I need to feed my obsessions.) My definitive film is almost certainly Splash, which I saw so young that it simply hardwired itself into my brain. For authors, I suppose my benchmarks have always been Patricia McKillip (The Changeling Sea, Something Rich and Strange, the shape-changers in Riddle of Stars), Jane Yolen (Neptune Rising: Songs and Tales of the Undersea Folk), and Jeannelle Ferreira (strange_selkie, whose in-progress The Seal Wife I await with great hopes). And now, to that list, I can add Caitlín R. Kiernan.

Since I discovered her work in 2002,° she has rapidly become one of my favorite writers for her rich and intense style, her stories that are often, narratively speaking, little more than brushes with the unknown world and all the more powerful for it, and her indelible command of characters who are other. Plus, as I am coming to realize, she gets the sea right. (That's not the only draw, you understand. But it never hurts.) "Tears Seven Times Salt," in Tales of Pain and Wonder, is the darkest retelling of "The Little Mermaid" I have ever read, and one of the most effective in its evocation of a character stranded between one world and another. "Postcards from the King of Tides," in the same collection, catches much of the immense and unknowable terror and attraction of the sea: what is under those waves, that we can only sense and shy from and imagine. The hints of Mother Hydra, Father Kraken, in Low Red Moon and Murder of Angels. But it's her work in her most recent collection, To Charles Fort, With Love that has really caught my attention: the hallucinogenic "La Mer des Rêves," which pits one woman's dreams against the spite of the Dowager Oneirodes; and especially the Lovecraftian triptych of "A Redress for Andromeda," "Nor the Demons Down Under the Sea," and "Andromeda Among the Stones," that comprise the Dandridge Cycle: two glancing encounters with and finally the bitter history behind the woman who holds the line, who keeps apart two worlds that never should have rubbed up against one another in the first place, down in a sea-cave on the Pacific coast. Kiernan's evocation of this figure, become more sea-creature than human over the years, is marvelous; as uneasy as it is alluring.

And she puts that same combination, darkened and even more explicitly eroticized, to very good use in the first issue of the Sirenia Digest, to which I suggest you promptly subscribe.°* The lead vignette, "Madonna Littoralis," is what really inspired this post. In something like 2000 words, Kiernan stitches together the fatal magnetism of sirens and sailors' folklore, the transforming potential of sharp edges and the likeness of seawater and semen, into a bloody and beautifully-written fever dream. I cannot detail the characters' relationships to one another, though I can identify I, you, and the mermaid who lives beneath the Annisquam lighthouse. I cannot pinpoint a linear narrative. But I can say that the imagery is breathtaking, and it calls up all the sea. And deserves to be read.

I may be biased. But you should subscribe, and find out for yourselves.

And now, I should get to sleep: I am giving blood tomorrow, and have only recently gotten over a rather vicious cold. I remain amused that "phlebotomist" is still an accepted technical term.

*For further eloquence on this topic, you may read the Bookslut interview: there phrased rather better than I would be able to manage at this time of night. < / shameless self-promotion >

**"The Madonna of the Rock," written in February 2000 and published in the now-defunct Glyph #7 in October 2002. I now look back on the story and think that the language sounds like pastiche Tanith Lee, but at least I can still recognize my own obsessions. Sarah Singleton's lovely and pensive "Ebb Tide" also features a dead mermaid, although not a medieval manuscript illuminator. Hers is probably the better piece.

***"Remember What You Say in Dreams," which I owe to elisem for a beautiful necklace. A drowned man, a woman who has not lost a lover to the underworld, a man with no shadow, a woman intimately obsessed with the sea and its secrets. If it didn't keep getting longer . . .

****Okay, I'm lying: twenty-two. "The Madonna of the Rock," "Shade and Shadow," "Till Human Voices Wake Us," "A Maid on the Shore," "A Ceiling of Amber, A Pavement of Pearl," "Skins on Sule Skerry," "And the Ocean Waves Do Roll," "Sea-Changes," "The Drowned Men's Waltz," "Sedna," "Because the Mermaid Has No Tongue," "Proteus Tells," "Before Leviathan," "Postcards from the Province of Hyphens," "Shirat Hayam," "Intercourse," "Lunacy," "Eelgrass and Blue," "Gintaras," "Salt and No Wounds," "De Profundis," and (with lesser_celery) "The Waters Where Once We Lay." I can only pray that they don't all read the same.

°One afternoon in June, I picked up a trade paperback of The Crow: Shattered Lives and Broken Dreams from a dollar store, read "The King of Birds" on the bus home, and was hooked. I hunted down her chapbook Candles for Elizabeth in Pandemonium a few days later, and by August had obtained both Threshold and Tales of Pain and Wonder. I had an addiction to feed. I never looked back.

°*So, yeah. I suppose this is BookPimpage. But it's for an e-mail service. Does that count?