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Title: Candles for Elizabeth by Caitlin R. Kiernan ISBN: 0-9658345-8-1 Publisher: Meisha Merlin Pub Pub. Date: 01 May, 1998 Format: Paperback List Price(USD): $5.00 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.27 (11 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: A New Queen of Dark Fiction!!!!
Comment: Candles for Elizabeth is the perfect introduction for anyone who loves supernatural, weird or macabre fiction and still hasn't encountered to poetic work of Caitlin Kiernan. This chapbook contains three fine stories, each one brilliant. And it's a great way to "get your feet wet" before moving on to her collection, Tales of Pain and Wonder. Kiernan's voice carries the influence of William Faulkner, John Steinbeck, Kathe Koja, and Ray Bradbury, but the world she writes of is closer to that of H. P. Lovecraft, Ramsey Campbell, or Thomas Ligotti. She is certainly the most powerful new voice in horror since the appearance of Clive Barker's Books of Blood back in the mid-'80s and is not to be missed. Beautiful.
Rating: 5
Summary: A Chapbook that is worth its weight in gold
Comment: I had never read a word of Caitlin R. Kiernan until this book found its way into my hands. I knew of Kiernan from several Poppy Z. Brite acknowledgements in her books. I liked Poppy so I decided to give Kiernan a try. This book is great. The writings contained in this chapbook are like little holidays. I say this because after you finish reading them you almost feel guilty for enjoying yourself so much. They are definately dark little tales that explore complex emotional and intellectual features that make up the human mind. It is like Kiernan allows you to simply see inside the life and the mind of her characters for duration of the story. The short stories contained in this little book draw the reader into them. I found myseld wishing there were more, yet as I wished this I realized that one of the best features of Kiernans writing is her restraint. She shows you just enough to allow you to form an image in your mind, or a feeling in your heart. Then the stories end--sometimes abruptly, yet perfectly. A great buy. Worth it weight in gold!
Rating: 5
Summary: Just buy it.
Comment: Caitlin R. Kiernan, Candles for Elizabeth (MM Publishing, 1998)
MM Publishing, aka Meisha Merlin Publications, has quietly become one of the driving forces in publishing the cutting edge in fantasy and horror. Fantasy fans will probably recognize the name; the same company put out the painfully expensive (and just as gorgeous) limited editions of George R. R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire novels a few years back, but their origins were not nearly so bold. Candles for Elizabeth, a chapbook-sized short story collection from uberauthor Cait Kiernan, was one of their first offerings. And damn and blast, is it a fine one.
Kiernan is one of the new generation of "horror of absence" authors, a realm populated by such luminaries as Patrick McGrath, Kathe Koja, and Lucius Shepard. While Koja takes her best inspiration from Andre Breton, Shepard worships at the altar of H. Rider Haggard, and McGrath has spent more time ('twould seem) browsing through the works of Agatha Christie, Kiernan's influence is the most logical for a genre like this--Sartre and his contemporaries. The dreck being spewed out by such hallowed authors as Bret Easton Ellis and Jay McInerney is not the new generation of existentialist fiction. Cait Kiernan is.
If Sartre were alive and writing Roads to Freedom today, one could probably find the characters in these three stories in the fringes. They wouldn't be main characters; Sartre was too wrapped up in the petit bourgeois to have given these folks more than a couple of paragraphs of screen time. But he would have been fascinated with them, just as we are today; the homeless, the outcasts, those who live on the fringes of society, taking nothing from it, but willing to give in return if anyone would allow them to. Poppy Z. Brite writes in her introduction to this collection that the characters therein "would still love to believe in magic and happiness, but don't dare let themselves." Indeed.
In "The Last Child of Lir," three homeless twentysomethings, one of them dying of an unspecified disease (Kiernan hints that it might be pneumonia), are referred to an abandoned warehouse by a crack-addicted acquaintance as a place to spend a few days out of the cold. "A Story for Edward Gorey" is also of the homeless-person variety, this one a nineteen-year-old butch lesbian obsessed with a purple curtain in an upstairs window, and the things she finds when she finally is allowed to venture behind it. "Postcards from the King of Tides," the most "traditional" horror story in the bunch (it bears the scars of Bradbury's "Something Wicked This Way Comes," by way of Koja?s The Cipher) doesn't tell us if its protagonists are homeless, as they're on a roadtrip. In all three cases, the events of the stories are designed to give us, though not the characters themselves, insight into their own humanity more than they are to scare. That what they find in their dreams and introspections is not that much different than what the characters in such would-be existentialist writers as Ellis find is beside the point (and, in fact, becomes somewhat admirable given the method of delivery); it?s how they come about the knowledge, and whether they know enough to grasp what they see, that counts.
One of the things that makes Kiernan's characters so attractive in the horror milieu is that they're not your typical horror story protagonist; these are the kids horror fans have been waiting for for thirty years, the ones who grew up in a post-Night of the Living Dead world. They're not scared by the usual mean-and-nasties, as (for some odd reason) most horror story protagonists still are. Kiernan's characters, like those of Koja, McGrath, Thomas Ligotti, et al. before her, are scared by what's inside, not what's outside. And that makes all the difference. **** 1/2
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Title: Low Red Moon by Caitlin R. Kiernan ISBN: 0451459482 Publisher: Roc Pub. Date: 04 November, 2003 List Price(USD): $14.00 |
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Title: Threshold: A Novel of Deep Time by Caitlin R. Kiernan ISBN: 0451458583 Publisher: Roc Pub. Date: 07 November, 2001 List Price(USD): $14.00 |
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Title: Tales of Pain and Wonder by Caitlin Kiernan, Richard A. Kirk, Caitlin R. Kiernan ISBN: 189206538X Publisher: Meisha Merlin Publishing Pub. Date: January, 2002 List Price(USD): $16.00 |
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Title: Silk by Caitlin R. Kiernan ISBN: 0451459008 Publisher: Roc Pub. Date: 01 November, 2002 List Price(USD): $14.00 |
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Title: The Five of Cups by Caitlin R. Kiernan ISBN: 1931081808 Publisher: Subterranean Press Pub. Date: 01 July, 2003 List Price(USD): $40.00 |
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