In quae miracula verteris?

[sovay]

I spent most of today in recovery from finishing my afterword for Caitlín R. Kiernan's third collection of weird erotica, Confessions of a Five-Chambered Heart. I thought I had budgeted a reasonable deadline for even my current levels of exhaustion, but it ate my weekend and most of my week—if I hadn't been planning on Collaborators since August, I'd have gone nowhere Thursday night. It all sort of runs together. The hour last night at which the afterword was actually done was depressingly familiar to me from the paper-writing periods of my life. But it's been turned in, and it seems to meet with its subject's approval, and apparently it's even in English. Well, except for the bits in Latin. But I knew about those.

There is now a hat shop in Harvard Square. I approve of this development, even if I don't quite have the means to take advantage of it. I also approve of discovering that rushthatspeaks and I just impulse-bought, independently, the same NYRB-reprinted non-Holmes Conan Doyle from used book stores in our respective cities. One of us will have to read it first.

I owe a lot of e-mails to people. I don't owe posts to anyone but myself, but I still feel I'm behind on writing them.

Livejournal is still kind of borked, isn't it?

Comments

[shirei-shibolim.livejournal.com]

If you like Caitlín's other fiction, chances are you will at least be interested by her erotica, since it approaches many of the same themes in differently intense registers.

[Looks left. Looks right.] I have never read any of her work. I know who she is, but somehow none of her compositions have come actoss my proverbial desk. Any recommendations?

[sovay]

Any recommendations?

Depending on how much time you have? The Red Tree, if you're considering any of her erotica and because it is simply an excellent novel: it should have won the Jackson Award it was nominated for. It's about the shape-shifting of stories and their unfinished ends; it's about being haunted, but not necessarily by what you think. (There is also a rather nice online component, including evidence and a flier. The wallpaper is also a much better image of the story than the published cover, which attempts to make it look like the paranormal romance it resembles only in that some of the characters have sex.) Probably it is no longer possible to tell whether you will like her current work from Silk (1998), her first published novel, but it's valuable as both a comparative start point and a striking non-horror story that makes use of horror tropes. (The Stiff Kitten T-shirt I wear, which has been mistaken for an actual band shirt, actually belongs to the fictional Birmingham punk band one of the protagonist plays in.) Her first short story collection, Tales of Pain and Wonder (2000), is excellent; it is actually more like a mosaic novel of fragmentary, radiating storylines, some of which extend into her other fiction. (Make sure to find the third edition, from Subterranean Press; it includes two later stories which are correctly located here, although neither of them ties up any loose ends.) The collection To Charles Fort, With Love (2005) contains one of my favorite pieces of her short-form fiction: the three-story "Dandridge Cycle," which is non-stylistically Lovecraftian and deeply involved with sea-change. Her science fiction, exemplified by the short novel The Dry Salvages (2004) and the collection A is for Alien (2009), should be much better known than it is. And The Drowning Girl is amazing, but it isn't out yet.

Here: "The Key to the Castleblakeney Key." The epistolary form is frequently used in her work, although it is not her sole mode, and several of the story's concerns—especially the authenticity of impossible objects—are touchstones likewise. I can't guarantee that if you like this story you'll like all the rest, or vice versa if it does nothing for you, but at least give it a shot.