In some ways ToPaW (which is the collection we have, and I really can't decide how I feel about it) fits the aesthetic I'm talking about; in some ways it doesn't. Kiernan has always seemed to me to be a quintessentially goth sort of writer, and the aesthetic I'm talking about is more punk. Now, I use those words differently than many people do, but what I see in goth fiction and music tends to be a very innerspace-centered sort of way of thinking about things, with the rules of society and/or people in general not so much having a negative impact on the viewpoint character/speaker as barely having an impact at all. Society is irrelevant, or an annoyance, and other people are dealt with on a person-to-person level. Punk, on the other hand, tends to have a very utopian-centered social-action focus deep, deep down, which is expressed by a desire to tear down the rules and works of the present society completely and can hence slip very easily into nihilism (where there is nothing to put in the place of what has been torn down). At its best, punk attempts to question the innate assumptions that people have internalized and taken for granted without knowing that they have, and this kind of questioning produces a reaction of laughter, shock and terror.

And so you get this sense of vanished glories in both aesthetics, and the attempt to build with or further destroy the wreckage, but there's sort of an introvert/extrovert difference between the two genres-- the goth reaction being 'God is irrelevant, what does that do to my life/art/loves?' and the punk reaction being 'God is irrelevant, what does that do to everybody's lives/art/loves?' And I think both are necessary, really, and would place Kiernan firmly in the goth camp. This is probably why I can't decide what I think about her stuff, because she's working with innerspace elements that don't parse into personal meaning for me, but I can tell there must be something there for her and probably quite a lot of other people, so it nags at the back of my mind.