Customer Reviews

Alabaster

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

Few writers today, with the exception of Clive Barker, dare to tread the grounds of dark fantasy where Caitlín R. Kiernan plays. Kiernan's writing technique polishes each sentence to gem status before moving to the next, and the result is rich prose that reads as well aloud as it does silently. Kiernan allows the plot to develop in the reader's imagination while she provides the characterization and mood. In Alabaster, the result is Dorothy and Oz as written by Lovecraft.

First, a confession ... I am a huge Caitlin R. Kiernan fan. Having said that, and adding that I own as many of her books and short-story collections as I could get my hands on, I can tell you that this is easily my favorite book by this author!

For long time fans, it's a fantastic addition. It adds to the growing mythos and explores one of the most fascinating characters that Kiernan has ever created. For those that have never read Kiernan before, this book is a very easy introduction to her work and presents it in easy-to-digest chunks - a series of short-stories with one primary protagonist.

Another really nice feature is two (2) tables of contents, one in the order the stories were first produced and another in the order the stories actually take place. I chose to follow that second index, others may prefer to keep with the way the author originally presented these stories.

In summary, I can highly recommend this book for fans and fans-to-be alike. If you like dark fantasy, Lovecraftian horror through a uniquely American-gothic filter, a gorgeous use of language, intensely deep and deeply fascinating characters, and stories that stick with you long after you read them - then this is the book for you. Buy it. Read it. Love it.

Kiernan can write, no question about it. She is excellent at painting a surreal picture ripe with menace. This collection of stories was beautiful yet keenly disturbing. Reading it is like that feeling when you know someone is right behind you but they haven't announced themselves yet. The longer the feeling lasts, the worse it feels. Dancy is a very unusual protagonist, one I grew quite fond of. I'm not sure she's completely sane, but the things she's faced, who can blame her. Take a plunge into the frightening worlds that Kiernan has created, but I'd read it during the daytime if I was you.

Alabaster collects five works of Kiernan's short fiction, all centered on her character Dancy Flammarion, first introduced in her novel Threshold. (Note that I'd never read any of Kiernan's work before this, so this collection clearly stands well on its own.) Dancy is an orphaned, albino girl who seeks out and kills monsters on the command of a terrifying angel. Each of the stories records her encounter with one of the monsters that the angel sends her to find, and peels back a layer of Dancy's past and psyche, to reveal how deeply damaged and used she is. To say that Dancy is a tragic character doesn't even come close. Each of monsters she meets, though technically monstrous so far as it comes to killing people in horrible ways and so on, is far more humanly self-aware than is Dancy, and can likewise see her situation far more clearly than she ever does. Ultimately, what the stories show the reader is that Dancy is a monster of another kind: a crippled soul who will never truly understand who she is, what she does, or why she does it, and will never be loved by another being, human or otherwise. I would like to think that she's not irredeemable, but at least within these stories, she's hopelessly lost and severed from humanity, and sustained only by her faith in an angel that the reader soon realizes has no interest in her as an individual and is, of course, yet another kind of monster in an endless and highly relative bestiary.

To talk about the actual stories: Kiernan is a brilliant stylist, very darkly enchanting. She has a knack for running sentences together with strange, quietly startling syntax, and her descriptions are extremely memorable, shifting easily from the swamps and weedy cinderblocks of the good old Southern Gothic to the liquidly, sinisterly dreamlike. Actually, the experience of reading Kiernan's stories feels much like being caught in a nightmare: they have that slow-motion pull of events, the elasticity of time.

The basic construction of each of the stories was much the same, which was a downside to the collection, because they became somewhat indistinguishable after a certain point. The moment of the monster's death is almost never the story's actual climax, with much of the story focusing instead on Dancy's psychological experience as she travels to and from the site of her kill. However, Kiernan does intercut perspectives and play with chronology to maintain narrative tension. But if you're a plot-driven reader, there isn't going to be much here for you, and even I found my attention drifting at times, particularly during the novella "Bainbridge," which features an explanation for the presence of Dancy's angel in her life (and hence I imagine will be welcome to those who've been following Dancy since Threshold) in a lengthy, interwoven side-narrative that I unfortunately thought was rather overwrought, and weighed down with pompous, cliché dialogue. I found this and the vignette "Alabaster" the two least effective and memorable pieces in the collection.

My favorites were "Les Fleurs Empoisonées," which, so far as the Dancy stories go, is rather more of a romp, featuring as it does a ghoulish sisterhood of Sapphic belles with a taste for fine cooking and human autopsies; and "Waycross," which I found the darkest and most moving of the stories, since one of the monsters whom Dancy encounters forces her to take a journey through her own past and inner landscape. Sounds cheesy in summary, but it's beautifully executed.

Overall, I think the collection as a whole is much more than the sum of its parts. I found the portrait of both Dancy and her world deeply thoughtful, moving, and haunting (I feel like I can't say "haunting" enough times about this book). Dancy's world is one of those universes that you by no means would want to live in, yet is nonetheless so vivid and compelling that you can't help but wish you could visit for a few hours.

I first encountered Dancy Flammarion in the pages of Threshold, and while she was not the main character of that book, she made a strong imprecision. I was delighted to find that Caitlin Kiernon had written more about her.

This is a teenage girl who hunts monsters, but Dancy is more Joan of Arc than Buffy, driven by inner voices that verge on madness. The stories and landscapes lingered in my mind.

I read a library copy, but wanted to own it, and so bought the trade paperback from Amazon. I was delighted to find it shared the same evocative illustrations that had also graced the hardback edition.

Short stories of Dark Fantasy / Horror in the Rural South. Alabaster is a great little collection of stories about Dancy Flammarion, one of the more interesting characters in the emerging Keirnan mythos. Keirnan writes excellent mind bending dark fantasy and this is no exception.

The loving blend of rural southern poverty and mind bending dark fantasy is sometimes perfect. This is not a bad place to start with Keirnan who is really worth your time. Enjoy

Caitlin R. Kiernan, Alabaster (Subterranean Press, 2006)

What I have always loved about Caitlin R. Kiernan's work is the sense of being lost; there's never quite enough explicitly stated to let the reader gain firm ground, leaving one to make the associations in one's head. And as we all know, the imagination produces scarier things than we'll ever actually see. It's the same thing that works so well in John Carpenter's best movies or Kathe Koja's early novels, but Kiernan wields it more masterfully than either when she's bringing her A game. And Alabaster is, most certainly, her A game.

Dancy Flammarion has never been a central character in Kiernan's work, but she's often on the sidelines, looking out at the events therein. In Alabaster, Kiernan switches up and makes Dancy the lead, exploring some of the avenues Dancy has hinted at in previous books. And the little albino girl with the big blade, as it turns out, is just as absorbing, if not more so, than the characters we already know so well. Guided by an angel (who might not be), she finds herself in situations that get stranger and stranger as life goes on. And considering how outright weird her first brush with the supernatural is, that's saying something. As always, what seals the deal here is Kiernan's almost delicate touch with prose, working words the way a baker kneads bread, banging them around and slapping them down on the table, with the final product achieving a paradoxical softness, with a hint of sweet to counter the sour. While Kiernan's fame has been growing over the past decade, she's still nowhere near the A-list writer she certainly deserves to be. If you're a fan of the supernatural and have not yet discovered Caitlin R. Kiernan, I suggest you do so at the earliest opportunity; for my money, she's right up there with Clive Barker and Ramsey Campbell as a purveyor of the strange and rare. ****

I suppose albino monster killing avatars of a higher power may just have been done before. This waif girl version of such is even more a pathetic specimen than the other one, in general, perhaps a 78 pound weakling, even, in that she looks like she would struggle to bench press a baby toad.

No soul-sucking sword, either, just a not overly well sharpened kitchen knife to face the monsters, demons, and crazed magic-wielders, after a bit of prompting from a showy fiery sword wielding angelic not overly helpful type.

Alabaster : Les Fleurs Empoisonnées - Caitlín R. Kiernan
Alabaster : The Well of Stars and Shadow - Caitlín R. Kiernan
Alabaster : Waycross - Caitlín R. Kiernan
Alabaster : Alabaster - Caitlín R. Kiernan
Alabaster : Bainbridge - Caitlín R. Kiernan
Alabaster : On the Road to Jefferson - Caitlín R. Kiernan


A bailiff, a dead bear, and a League of monstrous women.

3.5 out of 5


Riddle survival.

3.5 out of 5


"Sure, we been prayin' for someone, but not a crazy albino kid with a butcher knife."

3.5 out of 5


"I don't have a tail," Dancy says, wishing the albino girl in the mirror, the girl who isn't her reflection after all, would shut up and go away. "You might as well, as far as the Seraphim are concerned. To them, you're nothing but a trained monkey, an ugly little freak of evolution they can swindle into wiping their Heavenly arses for them."

3.5 out of 5


Angel slicing.

3 out of 5




4 out of 5 overall