Book Review: The Red Tree by Caitlin R. Kiernan

Book Review:  The Red Tree by Caitlin R. Kiernan

The Red Tree

Somewhere in the vastness of her internet musings, or perhaps in an preface to short story collection (I cannot now find the find passage, though I have tried), Caitlin Kiernan remonstrates with a reader who complained that he “could not find the story” in her stories.  In a way, I see this unnamed critic’s point.  Kiernan’s writing is notoriously short of both incident and resolution.  For example, her story “Standing Water” consists entirely of two bookstore employees getting freaked out by an especially deep, water filled pothole in the alley behind the shop and deciding, wisely no doubt, not to fuck with it.  It’s a far cry from “Nightmare at 20,000 Feet,” and a bit of a shock if you don’t know what you’re getting into.  Throughout her career, Kiernan has consistently refused to stay within the lanes of genre boundaries, explain the origin or “rules” of supernatural manifestations, or to banish evil with a shotgun and a cross in the final chapter.  (The aborted showdown at the climax of Threshold is a marvelous example.)  It is these carefully fostered ambiguities which draw me to Caitlin Kiernan’s writing, though I see how they might drive more conventional readers crazy.  Such people would not enjoy Kiernan’s latest novel.

The Red Tree purports to be the journal of one Sarah Crowe, an Atlanta novelist who has fled to rural Rhode Island after the suicide of her lover, whom she refers to as “Amanda.”  (Suicide and its aftermath are recurring topics in Kiernan’s work.  Chance Matthews of Threshold has lost both her best friend and the Grandmother who raised her.)  Plagued by guilt and unable to write her next novel, Crowe finds a manuscript left behind by the previous tenant of the aged farmhouse she rents.  The manuscript, written by Charles L. Harvey, a sociologist from the local university, details the grisly folklore surrounding a massive red oak on the farm property.  As Sarah learns, Harvey took his own life by hanging himself from the oak five years previously.  Sarah is soon joined by Constance Hopkins, a local painter recently returned from Los Angeles.  Together, they descend into madness and mutual suspicion as they experience or imagine various spooky goings-on.

Threshold

Compared to the grandiose shootouts and choreographed mutilations of modern horror films, the major incidents of the book seem small.  Sarah and Constance get lost on their way to visit the red oak, less than a hundred yards from their back door.  Later, Constance explores the cavernous farmhouse basement, only to emerge naked, covered in mud, and speaking in tongues.  (Her first coherent words in English are, to me at least, the most frightening in the book.)  Sarah reaches the oak on her own, only to find a sacrificed rabbit.  Woven in and around these events are Sarah’s guilty dreams of Amanda, tales of mass murder, cannibalism, and lycanthropy from Harvey’s manuscript, and the growing distrust between the two women.  The handling of this last is one of the novel’s great strengths.  Kiernan portrays Hopkins as sympathetic, though increasingly wary.  Nonetheless, there are hints that the artist is not what she seems to be.  Perhaps she is a werewolf, or a suicide’s ghost.  Or maybe just a figment of Crowe’s imagination.

In the end, what the reader gets is not so much a narrative as a bouquet of dark hints, strange moods, and suggestions of the intolerable.  The Red Tree leaves a lingering aftertaste of fear, but that fear has no object, no single definite cause.  We learn in a prologue by her supposed editor that Sarah Crowe dies, that she takes her own life shortly after the book’s final lines.  Not only is the evil in The Red Tree not vanquished, it is never clearly defined.  We are left with more questions than answers.  We are not allowed, as at the end of most horror stories, to shake off the taint of evil and live again.

Dave Hurwitz

Buy The Red Tree from Mysterious Galaxy.
Buy A is for Alien from Subterranean Press.
Visit Kiernan’s Red Tree website.

A is for Alien

Small Press Spotlight: Centipede Press

As you have no doubt gathered from previous posts, when I am not teaching or suffering from strange medical problems, I read.  A lot.  I try to read a book a week, or fifty-two books a year.  I don’t always manage that many, but I usually come close.  I also tend to read obscure books.  This is not to say that I deliberately set out to read out-of-print books or little known authors in order to impress credulous bohemians and annoy my bookseller.  It just tends to work out that way.

Centipede’s luxury edition of Frankenstein

Over the years, I’ve become dependant on a number of small press publishers to supply me with both old and new books by some of my favorite authors.  Today, and in occasional future posts, I’d like to tell you about a few of these publishers, all of which deserve a wider audience.

For many collectors, Centipede Press is the Rolls Royce of horror publishing.  Centipede’s luxury editions of classic horror novels are justifiably famous in certain circles.  Personally, I’ve been drooling covetously over their edition of Frankenstein—oversized, lavishly bound and illustrated—for years.  But with a price tag of $225, such things will remain forever beyond my reach.  So I was very pleased to learn that Centipede had decided, under its newly created Millipede imprint, to begin publishing affordable trade paperbacks.

I have enjoyed all of Millipede’s horror reprints that I have read so far, including Some of Your Blood by Theodore Sturgeon (a Matheson-like account of a psychiatrist’s struggle to evaluate an insubordinate soldier), Fallen Angel by William Hjortsberg (the basis for Alan Parker’s infamous film Angel Heart), The Other by Thomas Tryon, and The Face That Must Die, a masterpiece of psychedelic horror by Ramsey Campbell.  Though these books explore different themes, they share one common characteristic.  They all deal with characters that are dangerously insane.  They also share very high production values:  great cover art and endpapers, elegant interior design, bonus stories and critical content, plus recycled acid-free paper bound in individual signatures.  Better still, prices range between $12 and $17.

Jim Thompson’s Child of Rage

Unfortunately, I’ve had less success with Millipede’s crime books.  I made it through John Franklin Bardin’s The Deadly Percheron without sustaining permanent brain damage, but it was close call.  I quit a couple of chapters into both of their David Goodis reprints, as well as Fredric Brown’s Here Comes a Candle.  Noir devotees might love these titles, but they just didn’t do it for me.  In fact, the only Millipede crime book I still own is Jim Thompson’s Child of Rage.

Which leads me to another issue.  Go to the Centipede website and check out the price tag on Child of Rage.  That’s right.  Sixty bucks.  I only paid it because I know that I like Thompson and this particular title has been unavailable for many years.  That, and I’ve always wanted to own one of Centipede’s deluxe hardcovers.  While this is not the most I have ever paid for a single book, it comes awfully close.  Had there been a trade edition of this title, I would have bought that instead.  Alas, there wasn’t.

And that’s a problem.  Recently, Centipede seems to have abandoned their affordable trades in favor of increasingly expensive hardbacks.  While I was willing to plunk down $17 to replace a ratty mass market favorite or try an obscure reprint, I’m not willing or able to pay for Centipede’s deluxe books.  And the prices just keep getting higher.  For instance, I would love to own Centipede’s recent edition of Ramsey Campbell’s The Influence, but $150 is far too rich for my under-oxygenated blood.

The $150 print of Ramsey Campbell’s The Influence

All whining aside, the point here is that Centipede Press has already made and continues to produce some truly beautiful books.  Not all of them will be affordable to every horror fan, but many will.  I strongly recommend them.  I would also suggest that you order directly from Centipede, as finding their titles on the shelves, or even ordering them through your local bookstore, can prove difficult.  One more thing.  Though Centipede’s current website is a great improvement over previous incarnations, it does not always accurately reflect what titles are available in what binding.  (For example, the trade edition of The Other is not listed on the site.)  If you want to know if a particular title is available in a trade edition, it’s best contact Centipede and ask.

Small Press Spotlight will return with more recommendations.  In the mean time, happy reading.

Dave Hurwitz

Kindle versus Kindling

Amazon's Kindle

I see Amazon is coming out with a newer, larger edition of the Kindle reader.  While most of me loathes the very idea of electronic books, a small part of me would very much like to own one.  This is the part that is continually selling, trading, and giving away books to make room for yet more books.  While my collection is in a perpetual state of turnover, the overall number of books has increased over the years.  I have two bookcases in the living room, not to mention the plank shelf above the front window.  I have books in the kitchen, books in the bathroom (for those moments alone), and books under my bed.  There are graphic novels in my clothes closet, and oversized books on an Ikea shelf in the bedroom.  And those are just my books.  I share my tiny home with two more voracious readers and their collections.  Suddenly, storing dozens or even hundreds of books on one small electronic device doesn’t seem like such a bad idea.

Without a doubt, lack of shelf space will force me to surrender to Kindle eventually.  My jazz CDs have already reached critical mass.  These days, I buy music in disc-free download form whenever possible.  For now, though, the disadvantages of electronic books outweigh my logistical difficulties.  What are these disadvantages?

Buried alive in my books

Start-up cost. The new Kindle DX will set you back nearly five-hundred bucks.  The paperback sized version is somewhat cheaper, but the price has not decreased now that a sexier version is on its way.  This is a significant investment for what is, essentially, a very fancy blank book.  The books themselves, just like music downloads, require an additional payment.  Worse still, if you want a digital version of a book you already own, you have to buy it all over again.

Batteries Required. There is no way around it.  The Kindle is an electronic device.  Paper books consume trees, but electronic ones consume power.  I’ve never had a paperback switch off because the charge ran out.  I’ve never had to change and recycle its batteries either.

Goodbye Secondary Market. There is no such things as a used e-book.  Once you buy a Kindle book, you’re stuck with it.  You can’t sell it to a used book store, donate it to the library, or even lend it to a friend.  (Unless you trust your friend with your $500 electronic reader.)  In short, if the book sucks, you can’t recoup any part of your investment.  (On the plus side, maybe this will finally stop ratty copies of Future Shock and Your Erroneous Zones from piling up at thrift stores.)

Limited Selection. While Amazon’s stated goal is to make every book they sell available for the Kindle, that goal is still way off on the horizon.  Right now, there about 275,000 books ready for Kindle download.  That may sound like a lot to some people, but when you consider that my little craftsman cottage contains roughly 2,000 books, it no longer seems that impressive.  The kinds of books for sale also present a problem.  Right now, the digital shelves hold mainly bestsellers and new books by established, mainstream authors.  In other words, books that a large number of people will want to buy.  Trouble is, I don’t read those books.  Right now, I’m in the middle Michael McDowell’s Cold Moon Over Babylon, a twenty-nine year old Southern Gothic that has been out of print since I left elementary school.  Could I read that on a Kindle?  Not a chance.

Cold Moon

It’s not really as bad as all that.  What is, right now, Kindle’s biggest problem may turn out, in a few years, to be its greatest virtue.  When books become digital, they need never go out of print.  Why would they?  Digital books don’t clutter up warehouses or bookstore shelves.  None of the storage costs that motivate the destruction of unsold books will ever hold true again.  Computers have already changed the way I buy and even trade books.  (If you’re unfamiliar with internet book trading, check out Paperback Swap, my favorite exchange site.)  In a few years, once the technology settles down, I fully expect that Kindle, or something similar, will change the way I read.  Maybe then I can use my shelves for something else.  Anyone got some spare houseplants?

Dave Hurwitz

Bring Out Your Dead: Donald Westlake, Blossom Dearie, J. G. Ballard

I seemed to have turned a corner somewhere.  I can remember a time when it felt like I did nothing but attend weddings.  Now it’s funerals.  With no belief in the hereafter to gladden my heart, funerals only serve to drive home the message that someone I liked and cared about has been cut out of the world.  What’s more, a good memorial service displays every unguessed facet of the departed’s life.  The childhood I never saw.  The achievements I never heard of.  The other friends I never met until now.  I’m left with the uncomfortable feeling that I never knew the deceased at all, that I never asked the right questions, that I missed something, and I’ll never find it now.

Donald Westlake

Then there are the deaths I read about.  The ones that are not so much a personal loss as a ‘a loss to the jazz world’ or ‘a loss to literature.’  In this respect, the last four months have been pretty bad.  Mystery readers lost Donald Westlake (and his evil alter-ego, Richard Stark) on the last day of 2008.  I have written about Stark / Westlake previously, and that piece seems a more fitting tribute than anything I could do here.  While I never met Westlake or either of the people described below, I mourn their passing in small way.

Blossom Dearie
April 28, 1924 – February 7, 2009

If you’re my age, you’ve heard the voice of Blossom Dearie, whether you know it or not.  You heard it every Saturday morning, courtesy of Schoolhouse Rock.  Dearie was the voice (and piano) behind “Figure Eight” and “Unpack Your Adjectives.”  While Dearie often

Blossom Dearie

asserted that her piano playing was superior to her vocal work, it’s her voice I most enjoy.  Girlish almost to the point of squeakiness, but tinged with a humorous cynicism, it brought a breezy sophistication to all of her songs.  Her mischievious streak frequently displayed itself in ironic show tunes like “To Keep My Love Alive” or “Always True to You in my Fashion.”  Before educating the masses via television, Dearie was a fixture of the late 50’s early 60’s jazz scene.  Though she went on to establish her own label, Daffodil Records, the recordings she made in those early years for Norman Granz at Verve (accompanied only by drums and an upright bass) are, in my opinion at least, her best.  My Gentelman Friend and Once Upon a Summertime are particular favorites, and either would make a good introduction to her work.  Dearie never retired, performing regular gigs in New York and London well into the new millennium.  I always hoped I’d be able to see her on stage, some day.  I never did.

J. G. Ballard
November 15, 1930 – April 19, 2009

Ballard has been called the inheritor of H. G. Wells, and I can see the similarities.  Both were concerned about the impact of technology on human beings, and both were unsympathetically observant of their protagonists’ shortcomings.  Still, I can’t help thinking that the oddly prudish Wells (oddly, that is, for an advocate of free love) would have been horrified by the comparison. 

J. G. Ballard

Crash, Ballard’s most infamous novel (not to be confused with the tedious Paul Haggis film of 2004) deals with the sexuality of cars and car crashes.  Later works explored equally disturbing themes.  In both High Rise and Running Wild, homicidal psychosis erupts in posh gated communities.  The peaceful bird sanctuary of Rushing to Paradise devolves into a cult.  Cocaine Nights and Super-Cannes investigate our psychological needs for crime and violence.  Ballard’s last two novels were so controversial that they received no U.S. publication, and I wound up ordering both from overseas.  Millennium People details an absurdist terrorist movement among London’s professional class.  In Kingdom Come, a postmodern ad campaign turns a suburban shopping mall into a fascist breakaway state.

Although Neil Gaiman recently described Ballard as “terrifyingly normal”  in person, his biography is fully as interesting as his books.  Born in British controlled Shanghai, Ballard spent part of his childhood in a Japanese internment camp during World War II.  Later, he abandoned the study of medicine to join London’s literary avant-garde, editing Ambit, the literary magazine founded by pediatrician Martin Bax.  In 1964, Ballard’s wife died unexpectedly of pneumonia (not, as myth and rumor would have it, in a car crash) leaving him to raise three children on his own.  His work has been filmed by directors as diverse as Steven Spielberg and David Cronenberg.  One final book, an account of his losing battle with cancer, has yet to be published.

In one respect, the deaths of artist are not so final as the deaths of others.  The University of Chicago, which began reprinting Westlake’s Parker novels last year, has accelerated its publishing schedule.  Two more, The Mourner and The Score, are out already, with an additional four to appear throughout the year.  Sadly, Daffodil Records seems to have closed its doors (or at least its Internet portals), but not before reissuing some of Dearie’s back catalog.  The Complete Stories of J. G. Ballard, weighing in at twelve hundred pages, is slated for a September release by W. W. Norton.  Though none of these people will ever create anything new, there is a lot of their work that I still have yet to enjoy.  It’s not what I would choose, if such things were up to me, but it will have to do.

Dave Hurwitz

The Future Is… Cluttered

Young as I look, I have an old man’s attitude toward technology.  To me, a cell phone is just an annoyingly portable land line.  A computer is just a glorified typewriter impersonating a stereo system.  When I look at any new bit of tech, I see the older toys that inspired it.  I don’t (perhaps can’t) see it for what it is, or what it might become.

William Gibson's newest novel

William Gibson never had this problem.  Just about every serious reader my age remembers the 1984 publication of Neuromancer, the novel that defined (or maybe even created) our expectations for a computerized future.  Somehow, Gibson saw the pokey little machines of last century and made the fantastic leap into cyberspace, a term which he himself coined.  For that achievement, he earned science fiction’s triple crown of awards (Hugo, Nebula, and PKD) and cult status as an oracle of the near future.

Gibson is still writing.  While the world at large is catching up with Neuromancer, Gibson has lost interest in the future, turning his energies to defining our rather peculiar present.  In Spook Country, Gibson explores the possibilities of Locative Art, digitally rendered images tied to a specific GPS location and viewable only with the aid of a clunky VR helmet.  Examples from the book include the corpse of a virtual River Phoenix outside the Viper Room, a hotel carpeted with flowers, and a giant squid whose skin surface is composed of ever-changing TV and movie grabs, destined to hover outside a Japanese department store.

Another piece, which is alluded to but not directly described, is an apartment where every object has been annotated, often more than once, by the resident.  In a modern example of life imitating art, Spook Country itself is heavily annotated on a website called NodeMagazine, named for an as-yet-unpublished and possibly fictitious magazine in the world of Gibson’s book.  (I get a headache just thinking about it.)

Node Magazine

Also published in 2007, Halting State by Charles Stross pushes the idea of digitally augmented reality a few years into to the future, where it has become a fully realized, commercially exploited technology.  The VR helmet has been replaced with trendy glasses, through which users can view a wide variety of ‘overlays’ onto the real world.  Need directions?  Just type your destination on your nonexistent keyboard and follow the fat red path down the sidewalk until you reach the blinking building.  Bored with the scenery?  Log on to your favorite game and battle some orcs and goblins on your way.  Guy on the bus bench ahead of you look dodgy?  Click a virtual menu button and any criminal record should appear above his head.  Assuming he exists at all.

While all this might sound both useful and amusing, a moment’s reflection should cause you to reconsider.  Once this technology becomes widely available, the whole world becomes one big Philip K. Dick novel, where what you see and what is real are two very different things.  What’s worse, what you see has been created by Pixar, sponsored by Coca Cola, and jammed into you irises by Microsoft.  Reality itself gets painted over to the point where it is no longer visible, like a billboard entirely obscured by graffiti.  Except in this case, the graffiti is the advertisement.

I pay the bills teaching English composition.  My job is hard enough already.  I compete for my student’s attention with laptops, cell phones, iPods, and the lure of instant entertainment they represent.  Add augmented reality, and my job becomes impossible.

Halting State

See that guy in the back row?  He’s watching a porno instead of listening to my lecture, but I can’t tell because only he can see it.  The dude next to him is drawing a Hitler moustache across my lip and emailing it to his buddy across the room, who is busy dissing me on RateMyProfessor.  The girl in the front row looks like she’s paying attention, but that’s just because she’s mapped Edward Cullen over me in real time.  Another student has turned me into a zombie.  Another is filling the air around her with butterflies and faeries, all of which are visible only to her.

Are you beginning to get the picture?

Do me a favor.  Once you’re done reading this, step away from the computer for a minute.  Go to a window, or better yet go outside.  Feel the wind on your face.  Look up at the sky.  The plain, ordinary blue sky.  No virtual dragons flying there yet.  No digital pterosaurs.  No mile high letters of fire advertising Jesus or hemorrhoid cream.  Just blue sky and fluffy white clouds.  Take a deep breath.  Enjoy it while it lasts.

Dave Hurwitz