Customer Reviews

Silk

5 star:		(80)
4 star:		(11)
3 star:		(12)
2 star:		(9)
1 star:		(10)

 

 

This is such an amazing book. Caitlin R. Kiernan may be the H. P. Lovecraft for the 21st century! Silk is that good. Kiernan's superb imagination is balanced by the perfectly-realized reality of her landscape. Though filled with shudders and suspense, the book is not filled with the sort of absurd gore and splatter that ruins so many scary books these days. Kiernan knows there are scarier things than blood and guts. This is an absolute must read.

Silk is a triumph of incremental suspense. Kiernan begins her novel of Southern Gothicisms with solid characters and a finely-tuned knack for describing her setting, coupled with a powerful, almost poetic flare for the English language, and slowly lures the reader into a frightening world where nothing is certain and every shadow is reason for fear. Her ability to undermine our sense of reality is awesome and she uses it to set up a novel where the things that go bump in the night might only exist in the mentally-ill or drug-altered minds of her characters as nothing more than an elaborate array of shared hallucinations....or may be very, very real indeed!

Kiernan's beautiful writing and terrifying story definitely work for me! I loved this book.

From the first page to the last, Silk is a beautiful, black pearl of a book. Caitlin Kiernan's character's will break your heart and her way with words will leave breathless - this book is that good. Smart, sexy, and scary, this is the best dark fantasy novel I've read in years.

Are you afraid of spiders? Well, this is one magnificently spidery book. Though the author is a master (or is that mistress?) of lyrical prose, exquisite characterization, mood, and subtext (quantum physics *and* Orpheus in one book!), Silk still manages to touch a lot of our most basic fears and takes full advantage of them. Kiernan's portrait of Birmingham, Alabama, as a brooding post-industrial wasteland is as chilling as the shadowy creatures that may (or may not) stalk its nights. The author's familiarity with the youth subcultures of the early 1990s adds another marvelous dimension to what may be the coolest spooky novel I've read since Poppy Z. Brite's Lost Souls. This novel *proves* once and for all that a book can be scary as hell *and* extremely intelligent at the same time. It certainly deserves the awards it's won and the praise its received from "big name" authors like Clive Barker and Neil Gaiman.

I read SILK because a friend of mine recommended it and because I've been enjoying Caitlin Kiernan's work on THE DREAMING. I was *not* disappointed. This is one of those really rare Gothic novels that transcends the limitations of its genre (and the things we're usually willing to settle for from that genre) and delivers a stunning literary delight. The book works on many different levels. Yes, it's a very frightening novel, filled with strange goings-on and crawly things. It's also a wonderful experiment in language; it's rare to find an author who seems to take such sheer enjoyment from the act of constructing sentences. On another level, this is a fine example of the fiction of the New South, a skillfully woven Southern Gothic. It's a masterful collection of character studies, and any fledgling writer would do well to study SILK as an exercise in learning how to create *real* and believable people from words and imagination. It's hard to accept that this is a first novel, so marked is its scope and maturity. I, for one, will be eagerly awaiting this author's second!

If you aren't already familiar with Caitlin R. Kiernan from her fabulous short fiction, I strongly recommend SILK. This is definately NOT your mother's horror novel! I was completely blown away by the book. Kiernan's voice is distinct and powerful, and not for the squeamish. Five stars.

I was impressed with the originality of the central theme. The horror element of Silk is not vampires, nor ghosts, and really has nothing to do with the alleged war 'tween Heaven and Hell. From beginning to end, Silk is a vivid and sensual buffet of metaphors as dark and rich as a death-by-chocolate dessert flanked by a syrupy thick cup of (good) french roast coffee. And while you may or may not like or identify with the characters (I believe I would be tempted to backhand the affected, ungrateful, selfish Spyder Baxter in real life, long-legged thingummies or no), Ms. Kiernan has given them all the spark of life -- they are well-developed and quite believable. If you read this book and come away thinking only about its portrayal of youth and Goth subculture, then I would be so bold as to say that you're missing the point. I myself came away from this story thinking about the choices we make with respect to our inner fear, pain, and rage. If you read this novel, compare the similarities between Daria and Spyder, as well as the very different choices which they ultimately make.

The one thing which caused me to give this 4 instead of 5 stars: too many questions left unanswered at the end, mostly 'what exactly was happening during such and such scene?' and 'why did it happen?'. As a writer, I like to leave some elements up to the reader's imagination and interpretation, too, but there was a little more of this than I would have liked. Other than that, Silk is a great read and an example of the kind of first novel which any talented fledgling writer in the horror/dark fantasy genre should challenge his or herself to match.

i haven't read a lot of books that made me feel as though every single word mattered, as if the novel would be diminished by the subtraction of any of them. that's the sort of book that silk is - i hung on every beautiful, perfectly-placed word. like a delicious meal, silk leaves you satisfied, but still wanting more. so now i will go read it again.

It's great to see one of the best contemporary Gothic novels in a snazzy new trade paperback format. I'm very glad the publisher kept the same cover art, though. SILK received both the Maiden Voyage and International Horror Guild awards for best new novel. If you haven't read it already, SILK is a truly remarkable and supremely effective novel. Caitlin Kiernan is surely one of the current masters of the form, and in this novel she has crafted a wonderfully creepy story of hauntings and insanity. Great characters who never fail to ring true and some of the most stunning prose out there. The soft-spoken ending is one of the novel's genuine triumphs. To paraphrase what Stephen King once said of Shirley Jackson, Kiernan doesn't need to raise her voice to unsettle us. Her whispers are loud and clear, and SILK is, like Jackson's THE HAUNTING OF HILL HOUSE (or classic English ghost stories and the works of Machen), a book of whispers. I loved this book when it was first released in 1998 and I still love it.

The first book I read by Caitlin R. Kiernan was her short story collection Tales of Pain and Wonder (wonderful), and then I read her novel Threshold. Both won me over. I finally got a copy of Silk and I love it too. She manages to writer horror and fantasy and the real world all at the same time in a way that I've never found any other writer do.