Rating: 
Summary: Go Buy Now
Review: Bone, gristle and blood. That is all that Ms. Kiernan has put into this book. Which is why you should eagerly pour your hard-earned into it as soon as inhumanly possible.A story that bleeds off the page, characters who whisper in your ear, and an undefined sense of unease that will keep you up all hours will be your reward. Your only chance for disappointment will be eventually leaving these people, these characers, behind. Someday you may resume your normal life functions. No guarantees. It's only your eternal soul, after all. dethbird
Rating: 
Summary: WORDS TO DANCE WITH
Review: C R. K's sentences wiggle into your brain like big juicy worms through rich soil. There are images within LRM that gnaw with sharp teeth. It is a tale of monsters, dripping blood, rotted houses and rotted minds. The characters, like most real people, may not be to everyone's liking but they are fully formed. I was highly impressed with the portrayal of stress in the relationship between the parents-to-be, Chance and Deacon. There is a raw authenticity between them that I don't find in many horror novels. I would finish the review with some acknowledgment that C R.K is becoming the new so-and-so but that would be an injustice. She is simply---herself. p.s.---I only give the book four stars `cause I live in the rust and rot of Birmingham. I have been down many of the streets and inside many of the locations she writes about. I dropped a star in fear of being a bit biased.
Rating:
Summary: WORDS TO DANCE WITH
Review: C R. K's sentences wiggle into your brain like big juicy worms through rich soil. There are images within LRM that gnaw with sharp teeth. It is a tale of monsters, dripping blood, rotted houses and rotted minds. The characters, like most real people, may not be to everyone's liking but they are fully formed. I was highly impressed with the portrayal of stress in the relationship between the parents-to-be, Chance and Deacon. There is a raw authenticity between them that I don't find in many horror novels. I would finish the review with some acknowledgment that C R.K is becoming the new so-and-so but that would be an injustice. She is simply---herself. p.s.---I only give the book four stars 'cause I live in the rust and rot of Birmingham. I have been down many of the streets and inside many of the locations she writes about. I dropped a star in fear of being a bit biased.
Rating:
Summary: Haunting Fiction
Review: Caitlin Kiernan has outdone herself yet again! Low Red Moon is a perfect example of her surreal, yet gritty and earthy, fiction. Each character of Low Red Moon is finely etched, so that you *feel* what they feel as the story progresses and the horror mounts. The reader is drawn quickly onward into the madness, never quite sure *who's* madness it is. Deke shows us that our flaws are what make us human, and the reader loves him for that. The tension builds as things unseen are seen, and you fear for each character's fate. The conclusion of this story is heartbreaking, yet uplifting in its humanity. Five Stars for Kiernan's best work to date! If you've never read her fiction before, or want to give a book to someone as a gift, this novel is a great place to start.
Rating:
Summary: Unearthing Treasure
Review: Caitlín R. Kiernan has spent a decade writing more engaging fiction than a great percentage of writers currently publishing. By that I mean not to slight other writers but to imply her fiction is not created from formulas that can be browsed casually for entertainment. The reader is engaged. The reader must actively read. The payoff is the richness and depth and detail of the work which is nothing short of astonishing. LOW RED MOON is no exception. It is a superior work. In a line of great works it is her best to date. Chance and Deacon Silvey are married with a baby on the way. Chance is a paleontologist who works hard to keep her life grounded in reality. Deacon is an ex-alcoholic grounded in nothing more than survival and struggling to build a foundation with Chance. Deacon is troubled by migraine-inducing visions he doesn't want that seem to help everyone but himself. Chance has chosen to distance herself completely from this, to believe these visions are no more than a product of Deacon's self-induced afflictions or something else equally easily explainable. Until she begins to experience hallucinations of her own. This alone gives the novel plenty of room for character exploration. The interaction between these two and a small host of minor characters crackles with intensity. But the pivot of the novel is Narcissa Snow. A someone, or more precisely some *thing,* hunting them with a personal agenda that makes the marriage growing pains seem trivial by comparison. Narcissa is a well developed evil that appears to be unstoppable. And if you have read any of Ms. Kiernan's works you know nothing is guaranteed and the price for survival is high. The characters are well drawn and their interaction is a tightly stretched high-wire as each fights personal battles from within and external battles forced upon them. The last one hundred pages are dynamic, gut-wrenching, and emotionally exhausting. It is impossible to finish this book and not be affected by it. Ms. Kiernan's research and attention to detail are well known to anyone who has read any of her previous work. Here in LOW RED MOON she displays this hard work in the most accessible novel she has written to date. If you have yet to read anything by her and were looking for a place to start, this book is your golden opportunity to be introduced to a writer of spectacular talent. If you are familiar with Ms. Kiernan's work it will be hard to not see she is a writer becoming more sure, more solid with each publication.
Rating:
Summary: Unearthing Treasure
Review: Caitlín R. Kiernan has spent a decade writing more engaging fiction than a great percentage of writers currently publishing. By that I mean not to slight other writers but to imply her fiction is not created from formulas that can be browsed casually for entertainment. The reader is engaged. The reader must actively read. The payoff is the richness and depth and detail of the work which is nothing short of astonishing. LOW RED MOON is no exception. It is a superior work. In a line of great works it is her best to date. Chance and Deacon Silvey are married with a baby on the way. Chance is a paleontologist who works hard to keep her life grounded in reality. Deacon is an ex-alcoholic grounded in nothing more than survival and struggling to build a foundation with Chance. Deacon is troubled by migraine-inducing visions he doesn't want that seem to help everyone but himself. Chance has chosen to distance herself completely from this, to believe these visions are no more than a product of Deacon's self-induced afflictions or something else equally easily explainable. Until she begins to experience hallucinations of her own. This alone gives the novel plenty of room for character exploration. The interaction between these two and a small host of minor characters crackles with intensity. But the pivot of the novel is Narcissa Snow. A someone, or more precisely some *thing,* hunting them with a personal agenda that makes the marriage growing pains seem trivial by comparison. Narcissa is a well developed evil that appears to be unstoppable. And if you have read any of Ms. Kiernan's works you know nothing is guaranteed and the price for survival is high. The characters are well drawn and their interaction is a tightly stretched high-wire as each fights personal battles from within and external battles forced upon them. The last one hundred pages are dynamic, gut-wrenching, and emotionally exhausting. It is impossible to finish this book and not be affected by it. Ms. Kiernan's research and attention to detail are well known to anyone who has read any of her previous work. Here in LOW RED MOON she displays this hard work in the most accessible novel she has written to date. If you have yet to read anything by her and were looking for a place to start, this book is your golden opportunity to be introduced to a writer of spectacular talent. If you are familiar with Ms. Kiernan's work it will be hard to not see she is a writer becoming more sure, more solid with each publication.
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: A moody novel that must be endured to be enjoyed
Review: Caitlin R. Kiernan is one of the rising stars of horror, and her literary prowess is once again on display in her novel Low Red Moon. Not only is the story a most unpredictable of sequels to her highly acclaimed novel Threshold: A Novel of Deep Time, it is streaked with deadly slashes of originality. Whereas Threshold was rooted in a neo-Gothic Lovecraftian universe, Low Red Moon is a more conventional tale brandishing a fascinating, intriguing, yet slightly incomprehensible source of evil. We first meet murderess Narcissa Snow sitting in a hotel room that she has remade into a bloody chamber of horrors, arguing with the voices of a lifetime of victims as she waits fervently for a phone call. We are given strange glimpses of a dark fellowship which Narcissa is determined to join, and it soon becomes clear that whatever horror she will unleash in these pages is done in pursuit of that one goal, a desire to belong in a group of indefinable monsters somewhere in a yellow house in Providence. After dipping our toes in the bloody pool of this sadistic killer's persona, the scene shifts to Birmingham, Alabama, where Deacon Silvey and Chance Matthews, the primary characters in Kiernan's earlier novel Threshold, are married and expecting a child. Theirs is a most unconventional of partnerships: Chance is a learned paleontologist and Deacon is an unemployed recovering alcoholic and reluctant psychic. Against his wishes, Deacon finds himself being consulted by the local police on a series of recent murders. Not only can Deacon "see" the murders as they were committed, he in turn can be seen in those visions by the killer and is made to understand that she comes seeking him. A strange man and teenaged girl only thicken the plot, for they come to Deacon in search of the woman they know is searching for him. Deacon is never sure whom to trust or believe, but he does know that his pregnant wife is in danger as long as this killer is on the loose. I have to admit I found several aspects of this novel confusing, and my enjoyment of the story was limited somewhat by the fact that I simply did not like a single character in these pages. Deacon is an inscrutable man, keeping secrets from the police, his wife, and (when he can do it) himself, and he is constantly on the verge of giving up and retreating back into alcoholism. Toward the end of the novel, some of Deacon's actions and thoughts struck me as remarkable if not incomprehensible, further damaging the rather low opinion I already had of him. His wife Chance is far less complicated but even harder to like, constantly nagging Deacon about his involvement in psychic matters she puts no stock in; if there is love in this relationship, it is not easy to find. As far as the plot goes, I feel as if I'm missing a few pieces to the puzzle. Narcissa Snow is a fascinating, truly disturbing murderess, yet her reasons for all the bad things she did never made complete sense to me, and one possible aspect of her identity felt completely out of place in the context of the novel. The conclusion, for its part, works pretty well, maintaining the darkness which seems to brood over the entire novel. The epilogue does not completely succeed in pulling together some of the disparate storylines of the preceding pages, but it does make an honest, appropriately subtle attempt. Low Red Moon seemed to hang over my imagination like a death shroud, mimicking in some small way the effects of Deacon's constant migraines on his well-being. This is simply a dark tale that likes to skip rocks across the lake of hopelessness. A sense of gloom and doom is appropriate to the tale being told, but a cast of characters who do not, in my perception, share a single spark of life among them made this otherwise compelling read something to be endured as well as enjoyed.
Rating:
Summary: haunting gothic urban fantasy
Review: He's a gifted psychic who gave the police the break they needed to find Mary English, a serial killer who killed fourteen children. Deacon Silvey solved many cases for the Atlanta police before the ugliness he subjected himself to finally wore him out. He was an unemployed drunk living in Birmingham when he met Chance, a young woman on the right side of the tracks who wanted Deacon but only if he gave up the bottle. They eventually married, the geology professor and the recovering alcoholic and they expect their child to be born in a matter of weeks. Their happy life shatters when serial killer Narcissa Snow enters their lives first through a vision and then in physical form. She wants their child to offer up to the monsters in the hope that they will make her one of their own. When she kidnaps Chance, days before the birth Deacon must rely on an otherworldly being to track Narcissa before she can have his wife and child. Caitlin R. Kiernan will appeal to readers who like the works of Poppy Z. Brite. She writes dark fantasy where happily ever after is never guaranteed. The protagonist is a dark and brooding Heathcliffe who can act the hero when the need arises and has the inner fortitude to handle the tough breaks fate throws at him. LOW RED MOON is a haunting gothic urban fantasy that will not easily be forgotten. Harriet Klausner
Rating:
Summary: Wow!
Review: I just finished Low Red Moon, and all I have to say is wow! I thoroughly enjoyed Silk, and thought that this one was even better. Kiernan's command of the English language and her skill in description are amazing. I'm not sure what the writing process was like, but I can say how I felt about the reading of this book. It's like a fever dream, and there's always something coming up around the bend. With Kiernan's books, I find myself itching to read the whole thing all at once. I can't wait to see what the next work holds.
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