In the Books

Congratulations to Caitlín R. Kiernan--she's been given the Bram Stoker Award for her novel The Drowning Girl. It's hard for me to imagine a more deserving recipient of an award named for an Irish born writer of the wonderfully and evocatively weird.

I've been reading Caitlin's The Red Tree lately, switching between it and The Arabian Nights. I've been so busy lately I haven't had much time for reading but I have enjoyed the 85 pages of The Red Tree I've read so far. I remember thinking how with some writers the prose is sort of haunted by the author. As in, the author is the spirit whose moods affect everything and in the sort of primal, uncompromising way one attributes to the personality of a possessing spirit. All of her characters seem a little angrier than one might expect in reality, much as Lovecraft's characters tend to seem more anxious. It's an anger that seems tied to an awareness of life having cheated the person horribly along with the awareness that other people, however attractive they may be, can never satisfy that void.

I'm at a scene where the protagonist, Sarah Crowe, is exploring the cellar of an old house and it's a scene that reminds me of the best bits in The Case of Charles Dexter Ward.

I'm not very far into Arabian Nights either, though part of the problem is I also keep finding myself going back and reading bits of Paradise Lost and The Sketchbook of Geoffrey Crayon lately. There are just too many great things in this world to read for a slow, busy reader like me.