From Weird and Distant Shores

Rating:
Summary: Excellent, but not her best work.
Review: Caitlin R. Kiernan, From Weird and Distant Shores (Subterranean Press, 2002)

I can't really say anything about Cait Kiernan's delicious storytelling that I haven't already said before. If you haven't yet discovered the gothically beautiful, barren world that is the mind of Caitlin R. Kiernan, all I can do is wish that, soon, you will. Kiernan's short stories are the literary equivalent of Edward Gorey's drawings; witty, somewhat Victorian in their scope, but with an ineffable sadness behind them that changes from piece to piece, beckoning the reader ever farther down the road to perdition.

That said, I ended up not rating From Weird and Distant Shores as high as Candles for Elizabeth. This is (for the most part) a collection of "shared-world" stories Kiernan wrote during her fledgling years for various anthologies. And while everything she says in the introduction about the attraction of writing shared-world stories is true, all the pitfalls of doing so loom before even the finest writers. Investing your breath of life into someone else's creation doesn't always work; it ends up either being their creation looking right, but moving with an odd, amateur-puppeteer-style jerkiness, or looking like your creation and making the original author say "what the hell is THIS?" Which obviously happened to Kiernan more than once, judging by the acid words she has for certain copyeditors in the afterwords of some of these tales. (Needless to say, of the shared-world stories here, those, presented in their original drafts in this collection, are usually the best.)

There are exceptions, of course. There are three very early tales from an abandoned short-story cycle towards the end of the book, and while science fiction is not nearly as much my bag as is dark fantasy, what was in them begs for more fleshing out. Hopefully, more readers of the book than I will be thinking very hard at Kiernan "when do we get more of 'Between the Flatirons and the Deep Green Sea'?" Also, some of the shared-world collections were far less restrictive than others, and the book's most haunting tale ("Two Worlds, and In Between"-a much better title than the original, because it gives nothing away) comes from one of them.

Highly recommended, especially if you can't find the now-out-of-print Candles for Elizabeth. ****