Silk

Rating:
Summary: Confusing
Review: I read this book as part of a group read...and we were all confused. Many things are never explained and you have no clue what it was supposed to mean or why they did it. I'm not saying the story wasn't interesting, it was, but at the end of the story, I was left thinking "Huh?" Plus, to add to the confusion, the story time line jumps around, add in a few dream sequences and drug freak outs. Not a book I'd recommend.

Rating:
Summary: Brilliant writing
Review: Kiernan hits a homerun with this one. I finally picked up Silk after letting it sit on my shelf for a very long time. Why did I wait so long? I was blown away by Kiernan's writing style--poetic, languid, dreamlike--although it took me a few pages to warm up to the rhythm of her writing. She's very effective at slowly building the tension and supsense without once unleashing a gore-fest in order to achieve a nightmare quality.

Spyder Baxter is the goth-lesbian-store owner-druggie-sometimes mental patient that is at the center of the goings-on in this novel. People who seem to have nowhere else to go are drawn to her. Daria Parker is the ambitious, creative songwriter/bassist for Stiff Kitty, a local Birmingham, Alabama punk group just shy of success. Niki, Keith, Mort, Theo, Byron, Robin, and Walter round out the two groups that become linked by bizarre nightmares and visions of skittering things that manage to avoid being seen directly.

This is perhaps a portrait of the terror that can develop from being abused and outcast. Spyder is a very troubled young woman, and her past not only haunts her but reaches out to haunt those closest to her. Silk is not about blood, gore, and a high body count. Yes, the spiders (and the spider-like things) are creepy enough, but the heart of the story is the loneliness, despair, and purposelessness of many of the characters. This is a great tale of suspense, and Kiernan's writing created a sense of unease, of some creeping terror that couldn't be named. I enjoyed this book a great deal, and I'm glad I finally picked it up to read. Highly recommended!

Rating:
Summary: A genuinely great piece of work
Review: This book has multiple excellent qualities all working brilliantly together for a brilliant whole. It's got complex and interesting characters, a wonderful atmosphere, and pure, good, fantastic ideas. Like all great fantasy fiction, Silk crawls under the skin and feels around. It does the wonderful trick of having you look at the face of something monstrous and alien and seeing something human. A brilliant book by a brilliant author.

Rating:
Summary: A Modern Gothic Novel
Review: Caitlin R. Kiernan's Silk is an amazing book. Anyone who's spend any time in the punk or goth underground will immediately recognize how well Kiernan has captured that subculture. Her characters are by turns moving, infuriating, poignant, seductive, fascinating - all those traits necessary for characterization to transcend the mere cardboard dolls that populate so many contemporary horror novels.

And this is a really scary novel. Not in that hokey, Hollywood Jason-and-Freddy-and-Scream way, but in infinitely more genuine and disquieting way. Treading a fine line between the ghost story and weird tale, Kiernan explores territory all too often ignored by today's writers of the macabre. This is a rare talent and one that deserves our attention.

Rating:
Summary: A Web of Sleepless Dreams
Review: Every once in a while I find a book waiting to be read, and I am not even sure how it got there. While I am not sure why or when I purchased 'Silk', I am very glad I did. Pickings have been slim for good modern horror lately, and this book fills the bill in very satisfying fashion. Caitlin Kiernan chooses an unusual setting and cast to tell a story that is part horror and part social history and in doing so makes the point that it is not always the creatures with claws and fangs that are the real villains of horror stories. Sometimes the real monsters never appear on the stage at all.

The players in this story are drawn from urban America's children of a lesser God. The goths, punk, skinheads and other border subcultures that the mainstream world isn't quite comfortable with, but which fascinate nonetheless. This is the story of Spyder Baxter - goth, storeowner, and lesbian whose sanity is always in doubt, and who is haunted by memories of a traumatic and fatal childhood. It is also the story of Daria Parker - lead singer/writer in the punk band Stiff Kitten, a motley crew who could almost see success if they could just keep it together.

Each of these women and their friends mirror completely the cultures they live in. Even if 'Silk' were not also a horror story, it would be a brilliant talk of life in a subculture, similar in style to 'North Coast Gothic,' which never set out to be a horror story. The participants seem hell bent on snatching chaos from the jaws of rationality, living in stressed out lives of their own creation, always acting in a melodrama. But something much darker lives below, haunting the basement of Spyder's cellar. Memories waiting to be brought to life again.

Spiders haunt this story, black widows and brown recluses hiding just out of sight, hunter/killers waiting for the right magic spell to wake them up. And when the spell is done these eight-legged players perform almost invisibly, in dreams and on the edge of perception. But they take their toll, and people die. In the city of Birmingham, sleepless nights become the only defense.

This is certainly one of the best first horror novels I have read in a while, and the writer has gone on to accumulate kudos and awards. The story develops slowly, but inexorably, but the pace is always sufficient to hold the readers interest. If you are looking for something a bit off the beaten track and easy to read, then add 'Silk' to your list.

Rating:
Summary: Maybe I'm Missing Something
Review: Silk has a permanent home on my bookshelf next to Poppy Z. Brite's Lost Souls. I've read them both twice, to be fair, and don't really intend to read them again.

Perhaps I just don't understand this brand of "horror." Throughout the entire story, I wondered what I was intended to think of the characters. Was I supposed to like them? Was I supposed to care about them at all? If so, then I must have missed something. All I saw were a bunch of boring Gen X-ers in a small town who died in some bizarre, but ultimately inexplicably dull ways for no apparent reason. If there was a point to this book, other than "Some stuff that happened to these people I once knew," I couldn't find it.

Rating:
Summary: Kiernan Rocks
Review: The first book I read by Caitlin R. Kiernan was her short story collection Tales of Pain and Wonder (wonderful), and then I read her novel Threshold. Both won me over. I finally got a copy of Silk and I love it too. She manages to writer horror and fantasy and the real world all at the same time in a way that I've never found any other writer do.

Rating:
Summary: A Book of Whispers
Review: It's great to see one of the best contemporary Gothic novels in a snazzy new trade paperback format. I'm very glad the publisher kept the same cover art, though. SILK received both the Maiden Voyage and International Horror Guild awards for best new novel. If you haven't read it already, SILK is a truly remarkable and supremely effective novel. Caitlin Kiernan is surely one of the current masters of the form, and in this novel she has crafted a wonderfully creepy story of hauntings and insanity. Great characters who never fail to ring true and some of the most stunning prose out there. The soft-spoken ending is one of the novel's genuine triumphs. To paraphrase what Stephen King once said of Shirley Jackson, Kiernan doesn't need to raise her voice to unsettle us. Her whispers are loud and clear, and SILK is, like Jackson's THE HAUNTING OF HILL HOUSE (or classic English ghost stories and the works of Machen), a book of whispers. I loved this book when it was first released in 1998 and I still love it.

Rating:
Summary: Much ado about nothing...
Review: Very disappointing read, and don't get me wrong, I like gothic literature and knew what I was in for. The problem with this particular gothic novel is that it's really only a short story strung out over hundreds of pages. Very slow, but I kept hoping it was going to build into a real crescendo. Unfortunately, even the ending is slow and a let-down. I love Caitlin's writing and the ins and outs of the characters like Spyder and Robin kept me going till the end, but then when it was finished, I was like, what was the point? No monsters...not even a villain to speak of! It's just words on a page. It's like my brother jumping out of a closet saying boo! Not really scary, just kind of there. I give it two stars for writing style, but if you're looking for plot, look elsewhere.

Rating:
Summary: Silk
Review: I rarely read horror, but when I spotted a story involving spiders, I couldn't pass it up. The characters were all quite believable with their own quirks and foibles. Kiernan tells a good story and she does it well with twists and turns leading off in unexpected directions. My only gripe with the story is that the "monsters" are too ephemeral for my tastes, and I thought the ending did not do the rest of the story justice - it was the weakest part of the story.

With that said, I recommend this author to friends and family!