Rating: 
Summary: Fabulous dark mirror of the soul
Review: First off, Silk is an astoundingly written novel. If its only virtue was the genius of the author's poetic voice, it would be an astoundingly written novel, but rest assured, Silk has much, much more to offer us than lyrical prose - flawless characterization, a complex and intriguing plot, frights galore, a fascinating ability to make the most mundane things wondrous - I could go on and on but I won't.To me, the marvelous thing about Kiernan's prose (and it's true of any good writer) is the fact that so much of what we see in the work comes not from anything that's readily apparent on the page, but from what we as readers bring to the novel. Reading is NOT a passive, one-sided enterprise, where the reader should expect to plop themselves down and childishly demand to be entertained. What you get out of any novel depends largely on what you bring to that novel (and this seems especially true of a novel as rich and multi-layered as Silk). I'm not just talking about basic reading comprehension or an understanding of the tradition within which a writer is working - that those things are required is a given. What you see in Silk will partly depend on what you see in yourself. I have a couple of friends who liked the book a lot but found it very bleak and sad. It's true that there's tragedy in Ms. Kiernan's story, but there's brilliant triumph, as well. The best horror fiction is always as much about light as darkness, and the world that Ms. Kiernan has created for us has equal shares of both. But there's a catch. Like one of the book's heroes, Daria, you'll never see the light if you can't face the shadows, and this is a book filled with shadows. But like all shadows, like our shadowselves (to borrow from Jung, who Ms. Kiernan mentions in an introductory author's note), they are ultimately the key to salvation. And understanding that is one of the keys to grasping the delights of this intricate and disturbing tale of the terrors and joys that creep about inside us all, looking for a way to escape. Silk is the sort of book you can throw superlatives at all day long and never truly do it justice. That can only be accomplished by reading it and opening yourself to the dark and shining jewels between its pages.
Rating:
Summary: Evocative and gritty
Review: Ms. Kiernan's writing style can take some getting used to, with the way she combines certain words (used in descriptions like 'ruststreaky'), but they *do* work to create evocative images. In short, it works for me and encountering an author with a new style is nothing to complain about. I *did* have to read it twice to get the full effect. It's a very *visual* book, with very strong imagery. Nothing is prettied up or sugar-coated, but presented from the viewpoint of the book's characters. Ms. Kiernan doesn't flinch from her portrayals of the dark, dirty side of her characters' world--any more than she shies away from their moments of beauty and poetry. What stood out for me was the character of Spyder, a wonderfully complex woman, a very *human* woman. I commend Ms. Kiernan for her skill in portraying an emotionally and mentally disturbed person *wthout* taking the usual cop-outs or cliches. Spyder is a *person* with mental problems. There are no clear-cut heroes or villians, it's a very gray world inside the pages of SILK. But it's a mesmerizing world all the same.
Rating:
Summary: Engrossing and masterful!
Review: Silk is one of those novels that takes you away from your everyday life and forces you to fall in love with the characters so much that you will actually miss them when you have finished the last page. And more than that it is a brilliant literary work that places Kiernan in the august company of Poe, Lovecraft, Rice and King. The ragtag group of twentysomethings that populate this book are not a Generation X cliche but reflections of real people with real lives. That is until they stumble into a supernatural world of rage and sorrow that change them forever. It will change you as well.
Rating:
Summary: A very scary book!
Review: My only complaint about this wonderful book is that it's the only novel currently available by Caitlin R. Kiernan. It left me wanting MORE! I highly reccommend this book to people who like creepy stories that are more than fluff.
Rating:
Summary: Satisfying
Review: I admit that I've become pretty jaded about books with endorsements from famous authors, since those books rarely ever live up to the promise of the endorsements and leave me wondering why these authors said what they said. Silk, however, is a book that DOES live up to the promise of endorsements by the likes of Clive Barker, Peter Straub, Neil Gaiman, and Poppy Z. Brite - in spades!
Rating:
Summary: Drugs and spiders and rock & roll (well, punk)!
Review: Caitlin Kiernan's novel Silk paints a vivid portrait of the punk and goth scenes in a post-industrial Southern city. That should be intriguing enough for any reader, but it gets better. And better. And better. Silk weaves a disturbing and subtle tapestry of psychological and not-so-psychological horror and mystery, in what has to be one of the most intelligent horror novels I've read in a long, long time. I don't often fall this in love with an author. I did with Ray Bradbury, and Kathe Koja, and Thomas Ligotti. William Burroughs and Angela Carter. That's the sort of impact that Silk has had on me. Caitlin Kiernan's greatest strength is the sheer beauty and raw power of her prose, and her knack for inventing characters as alive as her language. This is a dark novel, and silver linings are few and far between, but it's also a breathtakingly honest novel. One of the best books I've ever read, truly.
Rating:
Summary: Brilliant!
Review: The best book I've read in a long time. And I read a LOT. Two thumbs up!
Rating: 
Summary: pretentious, anyone?
Review: The horrible looking cover should have warned me with the dream catcher - but I still thought this would be a great book, I'm a big fan of Poppy Z Brite and everyone said this author would be along the same vein. Well, this book was pretty bad; she can write somewhat, but she tried to jam too many references to random bands and such in. the premise was a little tired, too, why have the goth-y stereotype of spiders? Why not something decidedly un-gothy, like a rabid gerbil? Anyway, besides lack of creativity, clichéd drug use, and pretentious references (PJ Harvey? I'm enlightened, but most people would probably not realize what a complete goddess she is), it's got *some* promise.
Rating: 
Summary: A shocking disappointment.
Review: After reading Kiernan's short fiction (most of which is astounding) and the many good reviews this books has received, I was really very sorry to find Silk near impossible to take. The characters are broadly written caricatures, Goth kid cliches in a Goth cliche universe, interchangeable and utterly forgettable. The writing sways from brilliant to boring, from perfection to slash, sometimes within the same line. The story itself only begins to exist somewhere around the halfway mark, then steamrolls toward an ending neither satisfying nor believable. Kiernan has proven herself a far better writer than this novel indicates. Here, her work falls into a pit of Goth subculture cliches. By page 15, all are present--the strange obsession with hair and hair dye descriptions (each character can be told from the rest by his or her hair color and quality), Tom Waits, The Cure, Nosferatu, boring drug use, and a character named Byron. All of which would be fine had Kiernan raised even one of her characters out of the blandness and made him/her real. Unfortunately, the next two hundred pages are just more of the same. When the story does actually begin, the reader is too sick of the characters to care. Silk - a novel about hair dye, Tom Waits, and spooky posturing; a sophomoric mix of embarassingly overwrought and brilliantly poetic prose; a heartless, shapeless story crammed into a black lace costume; a story Poppy Brite would have written better; a misguided attempt by a writer who is capable of so much more. If you are new to Kiernan, read her short story collections. Their praise, I'm sure, is far more deserved than that of this book.
Rating:
Summary: I really wanted to like this, but...
Review: I've been dipping my toes into Goth fiction a bit recently. Started with Poppy Z. Brite's Lost Souls, which I found reasonably entertaining but not the earthshattering experience others did. I felt her personal obsessions (Goth culture, gay sex, explicit violence) got in the way of her storytelling. So instead of reading another Brite I turned to her friend Caitlin Kiernan. I read most of the reader comments here at Amazon and got the impression that Kiernan's Silk would be a very different kind of book than Lost Souls, indeed, it sounded more immediately appealing. Alas, I'm coming away from this even more unsatisfied than I was after finishing Lost Souls. It's not that it's not well written - for the most part it is. While a bit choppy in spots I found Kiernan's style much more appealing than her buddy Brite's. She mixes her pop culture references in naturally instead of intrusively. She has a strong sense of place with her Birmingham setting, and characterization is obviously a strong point for her. The fact that the first 3/4 of the book are devoted to character development and nothing really happens until, oh, page 265 or so, doesn't bother me in and of itself - it's hardly the first book to do that (hell, if you want to get technical, Anne Rice spent two whole novels doing character development before getting the actual plot started in Queen of the Damned). What bothers me is that I find the characters so enormously unappealing. They're all self-absorbed 20somethings proudly and defiantly wrapped up in their own pain and dysfunction. I couldn't find any sympathy in me, much less empathy, for any of them, not even Spyder, who was horribly abused as a child. Every time Daria lost her temper over her junky boyfriend I wanted to slap her. Every time Spyder evaded the questions of those who wanted to love and help her with vague mumblings I wanted to strangle her. These are people who enjoy wallowing in their pain. God knows when I was in my 20s I rolled around in self-pity as much as anybody, maybe more than most. But now that I'm older and living a life I can't bring myself to empathize with any of these characters. And since I can't really care about them, I can't care about the danger they're supposedly in. When characters started dying I just shrugged and turned to the next page. It's not that I don't still enjoy art that drowns itself in despair - I love Larry Brown's fiction and Mark Eitzel's music unreservedly. But Silk I just couldn't get into. Maybe if I'd read this ten years ago I would've empathized more. So if you're in your 20s and confused and hating life, by all means, give this a shot. You'll probably dig it a lot more than I did.
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