Fire, Speed, and Bourbon

The Sirenia Digest returned to-day with a visceral new story from Caitlin R. Kiernan, "The Great Bloody & Bruised Veil of the World".

Juxtaposing a very personal experience of the first person narrator's with a very strange supernatural occurrence, there's a sense of coiled violence, of fevered flight. There's more movement in the story than Sirenia Digest stories tend to have. The protagonist, an unnamed woman, begins the story speeding through the woods, distraught over a conflict with her girlfriend. Caitlin does a nice job in establishing how the narrator feels a kind of separation from herself, in establishing the strangeness in her own violent reaction. The motion of the speeding car comes to a sudden stop with a scene of death, of abundant evidence of recent fire but with a singularly abnormal thing at the centre.

An exceptionally good story and a bit of a new direction for the Sirenia Digest. It's well worth a read.