Low Red Moon

Rating:
Summary: Darkness Can Be Dazzling
Review: Caitlin R. Kiernan is a writer whose gift of words often leaves me breathless in both wonder of her skill and envious hope that I could one day possess even half of her poetic brilliance. Low Red Moon is a novel that bewitches the reader from the start with glimpses of the darkness that lurks just beyond the fringes of our world. It takes the reader on a realistic journey of the unreal. Though the soul of the book lies not in the journey itself, but in the characters who take it. Low Red Moon is peopled with bluntly realistic characters who fight to survive in both their everyday world -- Deacon's fight to keep his sobriety is painfully articulate, and Chance and Deacon's marriage under pressure nearly snaps at the breaking point in countless places in the story but their underpinning love always shines through to smooth the jagged edges -- to the fight of the characters to understand and survive a dark world which ensnares them all as the story unfolds. Narcissa Snow is a deliciously evil character, yet poignantly frail at times, giving the book and its inhabitants a realistic balance against its stark and foreboding dark backdrop.

Kiernan is an author whose voice rings like the crisp tolling of a bell in an otherwise muddled and bland wasteland of predictable and soulless stories nowadays. Low Red Moon is what storytelling is all about. It is books like this that make me remember just why mankind has the gift of words and communication.

Rating:
Summary: Excellent
Review: I tried to take my time and savor this book. The writing is lucid and streamlined, easier to get lost in than some of Caitlin's other writing (for whatever that's worth). I'd recommend reading Caitlin Kiernan's other work first, simply because numerous tidbits from other books make cameo appearances and I always enjoy that sort of thing, it adds another dimension to the story. Not to say that Low Red Moon doesn't stand on it's own- it certainly does, and I'd say this is probably the best novel from Caitlin Kiernan so far.

One of the most interesting facets in this book is the portrait of Chance and Deacon's relationship. Their marriage is one of those that seems quite incomprehensible- they hide things from each other, are short with and unpleasant to each other frequently, and generally behave in a extremely believably human fashion. It's the sort of marriage that makes you start psychoanalyzing the two people in it. Why does Chance marry someone who she clearly doesn't respect- and doesn't have much reason to? Why does Deacon stay with someone who denies a huge chunk of his life? It's all quite interesting, and just like life, there are no concrete answers. I might speculate that they're both terrified of being alone, and that Chance kind of enjoys feeling superior to her semi-deadbeat husband, but who knows?

Really, the depth of characterization and wonderfully literate writing style make this a must read.

Rating:
Summary: "HEY PRETTY! WANT TO TAKE A RIDE WITH ME?"
Review: The moody and impressionistic "Low Red Moon," is Caitlin R. Kiernan's third, and best novel yet. This time out she brings back many of the Southern Gothic Birmingham characters from her previous novels and introduces them to an escapee from Lovecraft country, serial killer and psychotic Narcissa Snow. She wants to please and appease folks you would definitely not want to invite to your place.

But Narcissa, arrested adolescent that she is, wants to be in with this ghoulish in crowd (they apparently are headquartered in a strange house in Providence) and so she sets off Southward to Birmingham on a killing spree (all the while listening in her head to the voices of the people she killed), and an attempt to steal the baby of eight-month-pregnant Chance, from "Threshold," who's now married to recovering alcoholic Deacon Silvey. Narcissa wants to give the baby over to the in crowd as a ticket of admission. After many surprises, the chilling finale takes place back north in Lovecraft country as the sun sets and that low red moon rises on Halloween Night, 2001 a night when, as Ms. Kiernan assures us in her note in the front, the moon actually was full.

The author expertly blends standard slasheriana (Don't go out for a cigarette, Alice! Why isn't there a police car at the rear entrance? Will you just hear the guy out before punching him in the nose, Deacon? A dark and stormy night? Oh oh!) with her own unique visions and her intoxicating prose style (she writes of "old-fashioned lampposts along the street, gaslights with electric hearts") and brews up something rich and strange, fresh and piquant. She knows the concoction calls for certain required elements, but her garnishments are what make the difference. Its flavor will leave you spellbound.

Notes and asides: On p. 18 you'll learn why Ms. Kiernan has abandoned her trademark technique of running words together. The Low Red Moon, occurring as it does on the last day of the month, was also a blue moon. Not for children under 13.

Rating:
Summary: Oh What Is The Land Of Dreams...
Review: When a psychic tracks down a serial killer and saves a victim most would call it a job well done. But for Deacon Silvey it turns into a nightmare. Asked to do a favor for the Birmingham police, Deacon becomes the target of a dark hunt, facing both the revenge of the old ones and the hopes of another killer to fulfill a dream of ascension. Had he been the only target, Deacon might have been able to stand firm, but the demon with yellow eyes has a ritual to perform - on those that Deacon loves.

Deacon is an ex-alcoholic, trying to start a new life with Chance, his very pregnant young wife. When he seeks help with the dark visions that have begun to plague him, death follows his trail. Chance is a practical woman and a scientist - a paleontologist. She barely believes in her husbands powers and now finds she is having visions of her own. She is torn between her own bloody nightmares and her fears that Deacon will succumb to his own demons. A deep wedge is being driven between them and only catastrophe can follow.

My first encounter with Caitlen Kiernan was Silk, her freshman novel. While chilling and interesting in its own right, Silk pales beside Low Red Moon, Kiernan's third. The events of this novel would be terrifying on their own, but Kiernan has learned to blend subconscious fears and a modern mythology with echoes of Lovecraft into a concoction as suspenseful and doom-filled as anything I've read in years.

Dream and reality crisscross in splashes of blood, characters refuse to follow any stereotype, and the Southern gothic horror story gets an infusion of new ideas. Kiernan displays a command of language that transcends her chosen genre. The reader, of course, is the beneficiary, nose buried in a book that is both too chilling to read and impossible to put down. If this is your introduction to Kiernan, brace yourself, you will soon be hunting up everything she has written.