Alabaster (Paperback)

~ Caitlin Kiernan (Author), Ted Naifeh (Author)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Dancy Flammarion, an albino adolescent who speaks to angels and slays monsters in human guise in the backwoods of contemporary Georgia, is the heroine of the five interlocking stories that make up this eerie dark fantasy collection. Kiernan introduced Dancy as an enigmatic waif in her horror opus Threshold (2001) and has since conceived an elaborate cosmology in which the fey girl is one of many human avatars fighting small skirmishes on Earth that have cataclysmic repercussions across planes of reality. In "Les Fleurs Empoisonnées," Dancy is taken captive by a matriarchy of necrophiles whose decaying mansion is a nexus point for perverse and grotesque phenomena. "Bainbridge" interweaves multiple story lines that cut across time and space to show the far-reaching ramifications of Dancy's efforts to exorcise an ancient evil infesting an abandoned church. Kiernan imbues the tales with disquieting gothic imagery and envelops them in rich, evocative prose that conveys cohesiveness beyond their fragmentary plots. (Sept.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

From Booklist

In her fourth short-story collection, Kiernan revisits a quirky character from her acclaimed horror novel Threshold (2001). Dancy Flammarian is a haunted albino teenager receiving guidance from an invisible guardian angel to track down and eliminate primordial, hellish monsters. Five previously uncollected stories follow Dancy's macabre questing from her childhood in the swamplands of Northern Florida to her hitchhiking travels across the red dirt backroads of Georgia, everywhere confronting evil face-to-face. In "The Well of Stars and Shadow," Dancy encounters her first demon, living in a bayou ghost town, and absorbs the uneasy revelation that every creature seems to know her name. In "Waycross," Dancy is abducted by a growling beast known as the Gynander, which disguises itself in the crinkled skins of its victims. "Les Fleurs Empoisonnees" introduces Dancy to perhaps her most ghoulish adversaries yet, the group of Savannah vivisectionist matriarchs called the Stephens Ward Tea League. Kiernan's richly evocative prose vividly portrays her twisted characters as well as it illustrates their eerie, kudzu-infested, Deep South surroundings. Carl Hays
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 184 pages
• Publisher: Far Territories (May 14, 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1596062231
• ISBN-13: 978-1596062238
• Product Dimensions: 8.3 x 5.5 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 5.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #514,607 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

2 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Good for fans, great as an introduction!, July 9, 2007

By	Stephen Jarjoura "runester" (Boylston, MA United States) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Alabaster (Hardcover)

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.

5.0 out of 5 stars Haunting and nightmarishly beautiful - a great introduction to Kiernan's work for new readers, September 13, 2009

By	Emera (-) - See all my reviews

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, I think that what the stories are trying to 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.

5.0 out of 5 stars I don't think we are in Oz anymore., July 15, 2009

By	T. R. Volk (Atlanta, GA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

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.