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Post by cauldronbrewer on Aug 29, 2017 18:02:39 GMT
I've always been impressed (and sometimes intimidated) by Caitlin Kiernan's elegant, dreamlike short stories but only recently discovered her Dancy Flammarion stories. I read one ("Alabaster") in the Mammoth Book of Angels and Demons (2013, Robinson/Running Press; edited by Paula Guran), and that prompted me to seek out the others. The ones I've read have captivated me more than any horror fiction in a long while.
Dancy is a teenage albino who wanders the backwoods of the Deep South, slaying monsters on the orders of an angel (or maybe just her own disturbed mind). Imagine a Southern gothic Buffy, or Manly Wade Wellman's John as a girl with a butcher knife and voices in her head.
Kiernan introduced Dancy as a supporting character in Threshold, a 2001 novel. She subsequently reworked the character in a series of short stories, collected in Alabaster: Pale Horse (2014, Dark Horse Books). For anyone interested, I'd recommend that collection as the entry point; it also includes some fine illustrations. I still have two stories to read, but so far it's my favorite horror book of the year. The stories are as follows:
Les Fleurs Empoisonnées The Well of Stars and Shadow Waycross Alabaster Bainbridge Highway 97
Since 2014, Kiernan has written two more Dancy stories (neither of which I've read yet). One, "Dancy vs the Pterosaur," appears in The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year: Volume Ten (2016, Solaris; edited by Jonathan Strahan). The other, from 2017, is "Tupelo (1998)" and as far as I can tell has only appeared in the Sirenia Digest.
Kiernan has also written a third take on the character in a series of Dark Horse comic books, collected in three hardback editions. I liked the first two; haven't read the third yet.
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Post by cauldronbrewer on Sept 2, 2017 13:42:18 GMT
Having finished all of the stories in Alabaster: Pale Horse along with "Dancy vs. the Pterosaur," I'm still taken with Caitlin Kiernan's Dancy Flammarion stories. Strongly recommended for anyone who likes rural U.S. Southern horror. In my book, Alabaster is up there with Manly Wade Wellman's Who Fears the Devil and Michael McDowell's The Elementals and Blackwater. Dancy is a great character--oddly heroic even though she's also frightened, lonely, narrow-minded, fanatical, of questionable mental health, and possibly a monster in her own right. The being who gives her orders might be her own hallucination, a genuine angel, or an even worse monster; what is clear is that it doesn't give a damn about Dancy's well being.
A few notes on the stories:
Les Fleurs Empoisonnées: Dancy accepts a ride from an enigmatic man and his two creepy (maybe undead) charges to Savannah, where she meets a mansion full of cannibalistic ladies and a boy with a strange bottle. So who walks out alive? Interestingly, this is the first short story Kiernan wrote in the series but the last in the chronology within the book. The author recommends reading the stories in the order she wrote them, and I agree that probably works best (we learn more about Dancy as the stories go back in time).
The Well of Stars and Shadow: Eight-year-old Dancy visits her neighbor Mr. Jube, and then something comes knocking to play a riddle game. "You shouldn'ta come out here tonight," Mr. Jube tells Dancy.
Waycross: Now a homeless 16-year-old orphan, Dancy follows the commands of her angel to confront the Gynander, a creature who has no face of his own but wears the skins of his victims.
More to follow...
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Post by Jojo Lapin X on Sept 2, 2017 14:42:36 GMT
Michael McDowell's The Elementals and Blackwater. I bought and read the first volume of BLACKWATER when it was first published, and remember liking it, but then for some reason I was unable to pick up the rest of the series. Now there is an ebook version of the whole thing, and I have recently been trying off and on to get through it. The problem is, it is a bit boring . . .
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Post by cauldronbrewer on Sept 2, 2017 19:02:13 GMT
Michael McDowell's The Elementals and Blackwater. I bought and read the first volume of BLACKWATER when it was first published, and remember liking it, but then for some reason I was unable to pick up the rest of the series. Now there is an ebook version of the whole thing, and I have recently been trying off and on to get through it. The problem is, it is a bit boring . . . When I was a kid, my family would take trips to the big city (in this case, Lexington, Kentucky), and my parents would drop me off with my brother at the local Waldenbooks (anyone remember that chain?). I still have vivid memories of looking at the covers for the Blackwater series while hanging out there. A few years ago I finally bought the entire thing and read it. It caught me in the right mood, and I enjoyed it a good deal. At the same time, I can see why a horror fan might find it boring--the multi-generational soap opera element tends to outweigh the supernatural horror element. Anyway, The Elementals would be my vote for McDowell's best work. Unlike Blackwater, it's a short book that focuses tightly on the supernatural horror part--though still with the family dynamics stuff that he seems to like. It's also one of the creepier books I've read, even if the author doesn't quite stick the landing. But now I'm just repeating what I said in the Blackwater thread.
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Post by Jojo Lapin X on Sept 2, 2017 19:12:36 GMT
I do not mind soap opera elements. (In fact I follow an actual soap opera on a daily basis---it started as a kind of joke, and then something went wrong.) The problem here is the soap opera elements are boring. Perhaps it improves later, if I get that far.
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Post by cauldronbrewer on Sept 2, 2017 19:14:03 GMT
I recall them going along in pretty much the same vein, though Miriam turns out to be a surprising character.
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Post by cauldronbrewer on Sept 2, 2017 19:23:36 GMT
Going back to Kiernan, I was intrigued, but not surprised, to find that she's also a big Wellman fan. From an interview I just discovered in The Weird Fiction Review: So, hey, I pointed it out.
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Post by cauldronbrewer on Sept 6, 2017 1:53:09 GMT
Continuing with my Dancy Flammarion fixation...
Alabaster: Dancy's visit to a gas station to use the restroom goes about as well as you might expect, given the sign outside that reads LIVE PANTHER--DEADLY MAN EATER. Takes place before Waycross but after ...
Bainbridge: Dancy visits an unhallowed church. We also learn about her mother Julia, who tried to drown herself in the Gulf of Mexico as a teenager. Something else happened instead.
Highway 97: A vignette in which a dog pesters our latter-day Joan of Arc by following her and singing, "Nearer, My God, To Thee." For most people this would be a startling experience, but for Dancy it's just one more damn thing to deal with.
Since finishing Alabaster: Pale Horse I've read "Bus Fare" (the starting point for the comic book version of the character) and "Dancy versus the Pterosaur." I also bought the issue of Kiernan's online journal that includes "Tupelo (1998)," the most recent story in the sequence. That's next on my reading list, and then I'm out of Dancy stories to read.
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Post by peeedeel on Sept 6, 2017 7:19:43 GMT
Continuing with my Dancy Flammarion fixation... I'm out of Dancy stories to read. I must confess I’ve long been a secret aficionado of Caitlín R Kiernan’s writing. Here’s something I wrote about her novel Low Red Moon some years ago: “It rained all afternoon and I listened to The Doors, mostly "The End," "Riders on the Storm," and "Touch Me" - I often wind up with a song on repeat, not realizing that I've been letting just that one song play over and over and over again for an hour. That would drive a sane person mad, right? But, anyhow, rain and four hours' worth of The Doors and in the end I had the prologue of Low Red Moon, which, at least for now, is called "Providence..."
Caitlín R Kiernan.
( Low Red Moon Journal 18th Dec 2001)
Yes, here there is a prologue - and it reads like a solemn hymn to violent death - an incantation to old, dark Gods: those powerful, supernatural forces beyond our ken, who delight in pain, suffering and blood, because, boys & girls, Madam Terpsichore desires “the busy, secret whispers passed between them…” (her dark, chuckling, Ghoul-like creatures) “…like scraps of flesh and gristle”. Here, yes, we listen to the poetry of rendered flesh and viscera... “It was a surprisingly unsavoury beginning, even for my stuff, taking me a little off guard, and I was left feeling disoriented and jumpy and in need of a long, hot shower. That doesn't happen very often, fortunately. That I write something which actually upsets me while I'm writing it (or afterwards, for that matter).”
(Low Red Moon Journal 18th Dec 2001) Thus commented Caitlín Rebekah Kiernan, authoress and chronicler of urban decay, creator of disturbing visions and dark fantasies, whose subterranean creatures and changelings originate in “those eons of time that proceed the short span of human history…” Low Red Moon, like its predecessor, feels part narcotic hallucination, part an explication of the unreliability of perception, of understanding and the very nature of reality. It is, ultimately, a novel of “existential shock”. But this prologue is like a suspended tick of time between a cycle just past and one about to begin. It is in effect a sort of overture of blood...And narrative movement begins again in chapter one with the cop’s voice... “You feeling any better, Mr. Silvery?” So, sometime after the events depicted in “Threshold”, we find Chance and Deacon have married... Deacon Silvey, you’ll recall, is a psychic who helped the Atlanta police with some of their cases. He is an unemployed drunk who is currently on the wagon...but only just. He uses his gift, his psychometric skills to help the Birmingham police and “sees” an inhuman killer... Meanwhile Chance, a paleontologist of some renown, is expecting a baby, and begins observing (hallucinating) stigmata on herself, first in a public restroom; then later witnesses flowing blood from the replica of a Megalopseudosuchus at an exhibition, the blood dripping from its mouth and the “lungfish trapped between its plastic jaws”... Chance doesn’t believe in husband Deke’s abilities. As far as she’s concerned he experiences good old fashioned hallucinations, maybe DTs, the bloody phantasmagoria of his visions a simple chemical imbalance of his ill-used mind. Either that or he’s lying...To himself and to others. Chance isn’t sure which of these is the case. She’s torn between her own bloody nightmares and the fear that Deke is gradually succumbing to his own demons...And somehow we know, as readers, there’s going to be no living happily ever after with this tale. And why the hell should there be? Let’s hear from Ms Kiernan. “Do I continue to struggle to write literate, meaningful dark fiction, because that's what I do, and because all writers should strive at all times to do their best and only their best, and because there's so little of quality dark fiction in the world? Or do I accept that very few people want literate, meaningful dark fiction, and cave in to the whims of the no-brows who have made this Age of Irony what it is, in the faint hope that I'll sell more books if I only write stories that are easier to read. Stories with pretty, simple, flawless, easily loveable people who face the Big Bad Thing, making the world once again safe for soccer moms and leafblowers, all wrapped up with the gaudy pink bow of the cherished Happy Ending?”
Caitlín R Kiernan. (Low Red Moon Journal 30th Nov 2003) Yeah, way to go. Psychotic Narcissa Snow is after Chance and her baby. She’s an escapee from one of H P Lovecraft’s worse nightmare’s, a killer who listens to her victims voices locked up inside her head, and who wishes to ascend to the ranks of...Of what exactly? Because poor bloody Narcissa could be as delusional as...Well, as delusional as Deke or his young wife. And face it, boys & girls, if they aren’t delusional then there’s something pretty nasty creeping round the corner! So Narcissa craves acceptance. She’s a hybrid. Not quite one thing or another. She feeds copses to ghouls who chuckle ‘their ugly dog-bark laughter...’Yeah, and as if that weren’t enough this wonky hybrid, crazy as a shitehouse rat, is being hunted by Scarborough and Mary Jane, a pair of nothing kids looking ‘like rejects from a Tarantino film’, the boy ‘tall and thin as a pole, his leather biker jacket hanging loose on bony shoulders’; while ‘the girl is pale and pretty...’ Described the way I’ve described the plot here, it all seems perhaps a tad juvenile? But trust me it isn’t. Ms. Kiernan’s prose is pure electric fire: “The sun comes up slow and cold, heartless blue-white light to worm its way through the trees crowded close about the old house on Cullom Street and find Narcissa still squatting naked on the floor in front of the remains of the dead rat. A deep gouge in the wood from the bullet, and she’s picked the rat apart with her nails, has spread its innards and bones, its fur and teeth, like a deck of tarot cards. A meaning to every drop of blood, unspoken significance in each speck of flesh or tiny vertebra, and she has squatted there for hours teasing understanding from the gore. And finally, their intentions revealed to her in the torn membrane of a kidney, the acute angle of a femur to a rib, their intentions and their names, and, what’s more, that they had gone to the seer. Narcissa grinds her teeth and stares at the morning light, then licks a bit of rat off her thumb and looks back down at the mess on the floor.”
Visceral, powerful prose, its immediacy almost intimidating. Ms. Kiernan is a writer of spectacular talent. Here’s what she has to say about writing: “It's almost painful sometimes. I can see it in my head. Perfect. And then I have to tear it all apart, these perfect, intricate, fluid images, and put it back together in clumsy, faltering words. The worst part, though, is the end of a day like this, knowing that I have to get up at eight o'clock and do it all over again, start where I finally gave up and quit today, after reworking much of today's prose until I'm halfway happy with it, and then slog on ahead, hoping that it'll get easier.”
(Low Red Moon Journal 17th Feb 2002) Boys and girls what on the surface appears simple is in fact complex. Great thought, “blood, sweat and tears” went into the creation of this novel. Ms. Kiernan’s genius here brings together references to William Blake, whose eidetic memory surviving the transition from childhood to adulthood, providing him with visions of other realms more real than...well, than reality! C G Jung, Lewis Carroll, Charles Fort, Lovecraft and others. Ms. Kiernan lays open the soft underbelly of society, allows us to witness obsessive-compulsive thoughts and actions, individual addiction and frailty, madness, violence and urban squalor and decay. Hers is the poetry of Apocalypse... “Anyway, what they never told me, because they couldn't have known, was that if I ever got my wish, I'd discover that writing books was not fun or exciting or romantic or any of the other things I imagined it to be. It's simply hard. Mindnumbingly hard. That people who write books spend most of their lives alone in small rooms staring at blank pages or, as it would turn out, computer screens, for hour upon hour upon hour, occasionally getting lucky and finding a sentence to fill some of that damned white space with. They couldn't have told me about the stress or carpal tunnel syndrome or writer's block. How you start to forget that there's a difference between day and night because you rarely go outside. How you ultimately reach a point where that one thing that drove you to ruin your life and your eyes and your nerves, the simple joy of reading, would itself become annoying because, after all, it's really work.”
Caitlín R Kiernan. (Low Red Moon Journal 24th Nov 2001) If you haven’t already encountered Ms. Kiernan’s novel Low Red Moon, I would urge you to run out and get a copy NOW! It’s an experience you’ll not regret...Nor forget!
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Post by cauldronbrewer on Sept 6, 2017 15:20:54 GMT
So, sometime after the events depicted in “Threshold”, we find Chance and Deacon have married... ... If you haven’t already encountered Ms. Kiernan’s novel Low Red Moon, I would urge you to run out and get a copy NOW! It’s an experience you’ll not regret...Nor forget! Thank you for the recommendation. When I read Threshold, I found myself caring more about Dancy than about Chance or Deacon, even though she's a supporting character in that book and they're the protagonists. Still, I might give Low Red Moon a try.
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Post by andydecker on Sept 7, 2017 17:18:08 GMT
I never could get into her. From what I read of her, I always thought her pretentious style over substance, the novels rather slow and boring. That I thought her comic work for Vertigo also very dull, didn't help. Joshi, for whom I have a lot regard, hails her as the current best writer in the genre. Which I also think pretty ridiculous.
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Post by cauldronbrewer on Sept 7, 2017 17:44:02 GMT
I never could get into her. From what I read of her, I always thought her pretentious style over substance, the novels rather slow and boring. That I thought her comic work for Vertigo also very dull, didn't help. Joshi, for whom I have a lot regard, hails her as the current best writer in the genre. Which I also think pretty ridiculous. For what it's worth, I've only read one novel of hers ( Threshold) and I prefer her short stories to that one. Of the Dark Horse comics of hers that I've read, I thought the first Alabaster graphic novel ( Wolves) was strong and the second one ( Grimmer Tales) was almost as good. The third one ( The Good, the Bad, and the Bird), I'm not as keen on, partly due to a change in the art team and partly due to the nature of the story. As for Joshi ... he has a strongly fixed notion of what makes for good horror and what doesn't. I find his analyses interesting even though I don't always agree with them.
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Post by andydecker on Sept 7, 2017 17:54:31 GMT
I never could get into her. From what I read of her, I always thought her pretentious style over substance, the novels rather slow and boring. That I thought her comic work for Vertigo also very dull, didn't help. Joshi, for whom I have a lot regard, hails her as the current best writer in the genre. Which I also think pretty ridiculous. For what it's worth, I've only read one novel of hers ( Threshold) and I prefer her short stories to that one. Of the Dark Horse comics of hers that I've read, I thought the first Alabaster graphic novel ( Wolves) was strong and the second one ( Grimmer Tales) was almost as good.
I only read her contribution to DCs The Dreaming . Which, to be fair, wasn't working well before she came to be the writer. A lot of the post Gaiman comics in the Sandman universe didn't work.
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Post by cauldronbrewer on Sept 7, 2017 19:14:25 GMT
Speaking of the Alabaster graphic novels that Kiernan wrote: Her story "Bus Fare" provides the basis for the first issue of the Wolves miniseries, and you can read it on the website for Subterranean Press. It's written in a simple, almost plain, style, and told mostly through dialogue. To make a short story even shorter, it's about how Dancy meets a young werewolf at a bus stop, plays a riddle game for her life, and takes a vow that may save her hide at the cost of her soul. As if the Dancy Flammarion timeline weren't confusing enough, "Dancy versus the Pterosaur" explicitly treats the events of "Bus Fare" as a dream within the short story continuity.
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Post by dem bones on Sept 7, 2017 22:45:07 GMT
Many thanks for sharing the link, CB. Have only read the odd Caitlin Kiernan short via various 'Best of Year' anthologies & co., and didn't know of Dancy Flammarion until you posted this thread. If Bus Stop is typical of her work, can see why you like her. Another for the ever-expanding werewolf thread. As for Joshi ... he has a strongly fixed notion of what makes for good horror and what doesn't. I find his analyses interesting even though I don't always agree with them. Same here. The problem is when people take his opinion as Gospel. We had at least one instance of that on here. It didn't end well.
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