Kiernan, Caitlín R

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Kiernan, Caitlín R.

Personal

Born May 26, 1964, in Skerries, Ireland; daughter of Padraic Kiernan and Susan Elaine (Ramey) Cleveland. Education: University of Colorado, B.S., 1986; attended University of Alabama—Birmingham, 1984-91. Hobbies and other interests: Vertebrate paleontology.

Addresses

Home—Atlanta, GA. Agent—Merrilee Heifetz, Writers House, 21 West 26th St., New York, NY 10010. E-mail—[email protected].

Career

Writer, 1993—. Red Mountain Museum, Birmingham, AL, associate paleontologist, 1985-86; San Diego State University—San Diego, CA, research associate, 1986-88.

Member

Society of Vertebrate Paleontology, Society for Sedimentary Geology, Paleontological Research Institution.

Awards, Honors

Barnes & Noble Maiden Voyage Award, and International Horror Guild Award for Best First Novel, both 1998, both for Silk; nominated for Bram Stoker Award and British Fantasy awards; International Horror Guild Award, 2001, for best short story, for "Onion," and 2002, for best novel, for Threshold.

Writings

FICTION

Silk (novel), Penguin/ROC, (New York, NY), 1998, revised and with illustrations by Clive Barker, Gauntlet Publications (Springfield, PA), 1999.

Threshold (novel), Penguin Putnam (New York, NY), 2001.

(With Poppy Z. Brite) Wrong Things (short stories), Subterranean Press (Burton, MI), 2001.

Tales of Pain and Wonder (short stories), Gauntlet Publications (Springfield, PA), 2002.

From Weird and Distant Shores (short stories), Subterranean Press (Burton, MI), 2002.

In the Garden of Poisonous Flowers (novella), Subterranean Press (Burton, MI), 2002.

The Five of Cups (novel), Subterranean Press (Burton, MI), 2003.

Low Red Moon (novel), Penguin/ROC (New York, NY), 2003.

Murder of Angels (novel), Penguin/ROC (New York, NY), 2004.

Short stories collected in anthologies and published on Web 'zines and in periodicals. Also author of comic book series, including "The Girl Who Would Be Death" and "Bast: Eternity Game," and stories for Neil Gaiman's The Dreaming, all for Vertigo/DC.

CHAPBOOKS

Candles for Elizabeth, Meisha Merlin Press (Decatur, GA), 1998.

A Study for "Estate", Gauntlet Publishing (Springfield, PA), 2000.

On the Road to Jefferson, Subterranean Press (Burton, MI), 2002.

(With J. K. Potter) Embrace the Mutation, Subterranean Press (Burton, MI), 2003.

Trilobite: The Writing of Threshold, Subterranean Press (Burton, MI), 2003.

Waycross, Subterranean Press (Burton, MI), 2003.

OTHER

Contributor of technical articles to science journals, including Bulletin of Zoological Nomenclature, Journal of Paleontology, and Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology.

Sidelights

Caitlín R. Kiernan is, according to a reviewer for Publishers Weekly, "a leading exponent of the generation-X horror story." Kiernan's novels recount tales of modern gothic terror, as in her debut book, Silk, or more Lovecraftian tales of horror in Threshold and Low Red Moon. Additionally, Kiernan's short-story collections and novellas plumb the borderland of the spooky and goth horror. "Walk into your local megabookstore," noted James Mann on Ink 19 online, "and tucked somewhere in the back, once you bypass the diet books and Hollywood tell-alls, lurks the horror section. Generally the section will consist of 47 assorted Stephen King and [Dean Koontz] titles, but if you're lucky, hovering nearby will be the work of dark fantasist and paleontologist Caitlín R. Kiernan." For Mauricio Saravia, writing in Artist Interviews, Kiernan is "one of the hottest noir fiction writers."

From Bones to Books

Kiernan was born north of Dublin, Ireland, in 1964, but after the death of her father when she was a young girl, she moved to the United States with her mother. She grew up in the south, moving from Louisiana to Florida and eventually settling in Birmingham, Alabama. As a child she developed a taste for dark fiction and fantasy, enthralled by writers such as C. S. Lewis, Ray Bradbury, Harlan Ellison, J. R. R. Tolkien, and Richard Adams, as well as by the works of H. P. Lovecraft, Algernon Blackwood, and Arthur Machen.

In the 1980s Kiernan left Birmingham to study at the University of Colorado at Boulder, eventually earning a degree in vertebrate paleontology. After graduation, she returned to Alabama, taking classes at the University of Alabama and working for a time as associate paleontologist at the Red Mountain Museum in Birmingham. Her researches in paleontology led to her identification of a new giant marine lizard, or mosasaur, from the Mesozoic era, which she named Selmasaurus russelli. She continued to contribute professional articles in journals such as the Journal of Paleontology, and the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology until 2002. However, fiction writing began to dominate her attention by the early 1990s.

Generation X-Brand Horror

Kiernan's earliest fiction efforts took the form of short, anti-utopian science-fiction tales which she published in anthologies and small-press magazines. Soon, however, she began moving away from science fiction, concentrating on darker fiction, what she began to call "gothnoir," her own special brand of modern horror. Kiernan was working as a dancer when she decided to write a gothic horror novel in the early 1990s. Prompted by the success of Anne Rice and other mainstream gothic writers, publishers were willing to take on new practitioners in the genre, especially those who wrote about vampires. As Kiernan told W. C. Stroby in Writer's Digest, during the period when she was completing her first book, The Five of Cups, she lived in fear that a novel too similar to her own would precede her. Nine months later, instead of sending its prologue to a list of literary agents, she sent it to other gothic writers whose work she read and loved. "I did not have enough self-confidence to think I could land an agent right off the bat," Kiernan told Stroby. Author Melanie Tem asked to read the manuscript and then sent it to her agent, who declined to represent it because of the very spate of vampire novels already in print. "So he asked if I would write him another book," Kiernan recalled. This was the genesis for her 1998 novel Silk. During this same time, Kiernan was busy with other projects, as well, writing for DC Comics and appearing as lead vocalist for a goth band, Death's Little Sister. With the publication of Silk in 1998, Kiernan left the band to devote herself full time to fiction.

Set in Birmingham, Alabama, Silk recounts the story of a close-knit group of "goths" controlled by the enigmatic Spyder, a woman who sports spiderweb tattoos and white-blonde dreadlocks. After a ritualistic drug-taking ceremony in her basement that leaves the group in a permanent, half-hallucinatory state, relationships begin to splinter and Spyder's well-hidden past is revealed in the process. Much of the action takes place at Spyder's haunted house and across various real-life goth hangouts in Birmingham. Spyder's arachnophilia comes to serve as a metaphor for the silken "web" that ensnares her friends and lovers.

Silk won praise from reviewers and a jacket blurb from none other than well-known horror writer Clive Barker graced the novel's Penguin/ROC edition. Writing for Southern Voice, Colleen McMahon found Silk atypical of the horror genre because it is "as much about the loss of trust and love in relationships as about anything supernatural." McMahon termed Spyder and the various creations of Kiernan's pen "well-drawn and believable denizens of the goth and punk subcultures. She introduces them gradually, provides flashbacks of their variously dysfunctional backgrounds, and details of their everyday lives." In Alabama Forum, Constance Lynne also found effusive words of praise, calling Kiernan "above all, a remarkable student of personalities and relationships and the ways that we all contort and conform to survive in the world." "Kiernan takes us deep into the world of the outcast," Lynne added, ". . . and shows us in unflinching detail how the world tries to punish, if not eliminate, the nonconformist. Kiernan gives mainstream horror fans a fresh look at true terror: not bloody chainsaws and crazed stalkers, but the real-world nightmares of date rape and gay-bashing." Charles de Lint, reviewing the novel in the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, noted that "from the first page of Silk, I knew [Kiernan] has what it takes to excite me as a reader." And for Edward Bryant, writing in Locus, the novel "is an incremental triumph of texture and layering, harkening back to an earlier tradition of supernatural fiction, an era when storytelling took as much time as it needed to accrue the maximum affect."

Short Fiction Wins Acclaim

Kiernan earned kudos for her debut novel from fellow horror-fiction writers Poppy Z. Brite and Peter Straub, and Barker illustrated a limited edition of Silk issued by Gauntlet Publications in 1999. Two years later Kiernan teamed with Brite to produce the story collection Wrong Things, which was labeled a "brief but powerful collaborative venture" by a reviewer for Publishers Weekly. The stories—some written jointly and others composed separately—feature the collaboration "The Rest of the Wrong Thing." This tale is set in Brite's fictional town of Missing Mile, North Carolina, and follows Tyler, a waifish young woman with purple hair and "an obsession with righting wrongs," as the Publishers Weekly contributor explained it. Other stories in the volume include Brite's "The Crystal Empire" and Kiernan's "Onion."

Two other short-story collections by Kiernan collections were released in quick succession: Tales of Pain and Wonder and From Weird and Distant Shores. The latter collection of thirteen tales is also a collaboration, while Tales of Pain and Wonder gathers many of the stories Kiernan published in small magazines and anthologies over the years. A contributor for Publishers Weekly wrote the stories in Tales of Pain and Wonder "reveal a surreal world where the fantastic coexists with the familiar and the ordinary." The twenty-one tales included in this collection range in subject from a rape victim who seeks an odd form of revenge to a detective's nightmares brought on by the disappearance of a child. Library Journal's Jackie Cassada, described the tales as stories of "modern desperation and psychic dread," and praised Kiernan for her "literate and visceral" prose.

With 2002's In the Garden of Poisonous Flowers, Kiernan turned to the novella form to tell the story of albino orphan Dancy Flammarion, who is kidnaped by a group of vampires and sold to a woman with weird and formidable powers. A reviewer for Publishers Weekly found this "short" and "atmospheric" tale to be a "showcase for Kiernan's unique style," while de Lint, writing in the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, praised it as a "strange and fascinating piece of Gothica," and a sort of prequel to Kiernan's novel Threshold.

Contemporary Novels of Old-Fashioned Horror

Threshold, a 2001 release, combines Kiernan's talent for dark fantasy with her training in paleontology. The novel centers on a group of young adults led by paleontologist Chance Mathews and her onetime boyfriend Deke Silvey. While investigating a series of mysterious deaths, Chance learns through an albino psychic named Dancy Flammarion that the monsters in Dancy's visions may be all too real. Chance discovers a strange anomaly in the fossil record that indicates that Dancy's monsters are in fact an ancient life form that is shaping the destinies of all humankind. "I allowed myself to draw very heavily on my background in paleontology and geology for this novel," Kiernan told Saravia in Artist Interviews. Jackie Cassada, writing in Library Journal, hailed Threshold as an "eerie and moving tale of ancient terror and modern-day angst," while Booklist's Regina Schroeder noted that Kiernan's "brand of horror is subtle, the kind that is hidden in the earth's ancient strata and never stays where it can be clearly seen." A reviewer for Publishers Weekly commended Kiernan for her "carefully crated tale of awe-inspiring nightmare," while a Kirkus reviewer dubbed the novel a "corker," "tops in fantasy, with gripping paleontological sidebars."

"It's a challenge trying to balance" these two vocations, Kiernan admitted to Mann of her dual fictionwriter/paleontologist career in the Ink 19 interview. "The way things stand right now, I write during the day and do paleontology at night. . . . But it's wearing me down, doing what amounts to working two full-time jobs." In the March 2002 edition of the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology Kiernan published an article on mosasaur biostratigraphy, but according to the author's Web site, this would likely be her last scientific publication.

Chance and Deke are reprised in Kiernan's 2003 novel, Low Red Moon, in which the couple are married and expecting their firstborn. Deke has used his psychic skills to investigate a crime scene and comes up with a horrifying vision of a killer much less, or more, than human, while the pregnant Chance has also been troubled by bloody visions. The soon-to-be parents are, in fact, channeling the dark deeds of Narcissa Snow, a murderer with uncommon powers, who intends to use their unborn child as a sacrifice. When Narcissa kidnaps Chance, Deke must come to the rescue before losing both wife and child. A Publishers Weekly critic wrote that Low Red Moon has "unusual power," and presents a "memorable expansion of the author's unique fictional universe."

Also published in 2003 was Kiernan's first novel, The Five of Cups, which had gone unpublished for nearly a decade. This book is "a hyperkinetic, heart-breakingly ambitious, graphically violent epic of vampires and much, much else," according to Bryant writing in Locus. Set in Atlanta, Georgia, the tale features the renegade vampire, Gin, who has never been properly trained in the ways of the undead. In fact, her outsider status is becoming a threat to the vampire ruling body, the Consanguine, which includes Gin's own father. A contributor to Publishers Weekly noted that, despite the book's "excessive gore," it still "mesmerizes." The same reviewer went on to remark that this "flawed gem flashes with brilliance." Cassada, writing in Library Journal, described The Five of Cups as written in a "hard-core splatterpunk style, with hints of the historical gothic." The novel travels in time from modern Atlanta back to the U.S. Civil War, the Irish potato famine, and the city of New Orleans while it was in the grip of yellow fever.

Kiernan once commented: "Since I was a child, I've had a powerful fascination for the macabre, and most of the writers that I read when I was a kid fueled that fascination. So I think a good portion of what I'm doing now, the driving force behind Silk and my short fiction and the comics, goes right back to those stories, those authors, and all the time I spent sleeping with the lights on because of them. But it's important to me to bring something more than an infatuation with creepy stories to my own work. There's a particular sense of wonder, of awe, that I think dark fiction lost during the seventies and eighties, and that's what I'm trying to rediscover in my own work. If there's anything I'm trying to achieve with my writing, it's the reawakening in dark fiction of our awareness of those finer emotions."

If you enjoy the works of Caitlín R. Kiernan

If you enjoy the works of Caitlín R. Kiernan, you might want to check out the following books:

Poppy Z. Bright, Exquisite Corpse, 1996.

Christina Faust, Control Freak, 2002.

Lynn Flewelling, The Bone Doll's Twin, 2001.

Kiernan further explained her own place in the literary ladder: "I'm very uncomfortable with the practice of sinking fiction and authors into seemingly convenient 'genres.' It creates literary ghettoes that can eventually cripple a writer by instilling a feeling that what they're doing is innately inferior to the 'mainstream' and must be segregated from literature in general. The elevation of the mundane during the twentieth century is, in large part, responsible for the perceived need for genres, a disdain for the exotic, the heroic, the romantic. Ultimately, there's good writing and mediocre writing and bad writing; I see no reason for any further categorization than that. So I don't think of myself as a 'horror' writer or a 'fantasy' writer and I'd prefer that others didn't either."

Biographical and Critical Sources

PERIODICALS

Alabama Forum, May, 1998, Constance Lynne, review of Silk, p. 18.

Booklist, September 1, 2001, Regina Schroeder, review of Threshold, p. 58.

Kirkus Reviews, August 15, 2001, review of Threshold, p. 1153.

Kliatt, May, 2002, Lesley S. J. Farmer, review of Threshold, p. 28.

Library Journal, March 15, 2000, Jackie Cassada, review of Tales of Pain and Wonder, p. 132; November 15, 2001, Jackie Cassada, review of Threshold, p. 101; June 15, 2003, Jackie Cassada, review of The Five of Cups, p. 106.

Locus, September, 1998, Edward Bryant, review of Silk; June, 2003, Edward Bryant review of The Five of Cups; June, 2003, Tim Pratt, review of The Five of Cups.

Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, December, 1988, Charles de Lint, review of Silk, p. 45; July, 2002, Charles de Lint, review of In the Garden of Poisonous Flowers, p. 22.

Publishers Weekly, February 28, 2000, review of Tales of Pain and Wonder, p. 68; September 17, 2001, review of Threshold; October 22, 2001, review of Wrong Things, p. 53; December 3, 2001, Stefan Dziemianowicz, interview with Kiernan; March 25, 2002, review of In the Garden of Poisonous Flowers, p. 46; June 9, 2003, review of The Five of Cups, p. 41; July 21, 2003, review of Low Red Moon, p. 179.

Southern Voice, June 11, 1998, Colleen McMahon, review of Silk, p. 49.

Writer's Digest, March, 1996, W. C. Stroby, interview, p. 20.