The Very Best of Caitlín R. Kiernan

Drenched in an ocean setting and an atmosphere of corruption and decay, Kiernan's short fiction, published previously in volumes by several small presses, is collected here for the first time. "In Andromeda Among the Stones," Meredith Dandridge has to close the gate her father opened, letting the horrors of World War I into the world. In "Houses Under the Sea," a cult leader ushers her followers into the ocean (readers of Kiernan's The Drowning Girl will be familiar with the group), while "The Prayer of Ninety Cats" features a film critic who reviews a disturbing film covering the life of Erzsebet Báthory. In "A Fairy Tale of Wood Street," the narrator's girlfriend stops hiding the cow's tail that she had all along, and an artist enters the land of faeries in "La Peau Verte." The anthology's lack of explanatory prefaces or afterwords is noticeable, but the stories speak for themselves. VERDICT Bodies, relationships, and the world are all changeable, shifting, and unstable in this collection by a master of dark fiction. Though influenced by Lovecraftian mythos, the work stands on its own and will be essential for Kiernan devotees.--Jennifer Mills, Shorewood-Troy Lib., IL

January 1, 2019
Kiernan (Black Helicopters?, 2018) is among the most critically acclaimed authors of dark fantasy and horror alive today, but her nonlinear, grotesque, boundary-pushing fiction has not achieved the mainstream success it deserves. This collection, the latest attempt to select her best short fiction from more than 250 pieces, focuses on the harder-to-find works published in long-sold-out limited editions. The result is a volume that presents a mere snapshot of her genius, showcasing the ways she plays with gender, builds nightmarish tension, and crafts stories where beginnings and endings don't matter in the face of such compelling characters. Despite the darkness at each story's core, there is also beauty in these lyrically compelling tales that are nearly impossible to stop reading. Seasoned fans may have read some of these stories before, but not all, and new fans of weird writers like Carmen Maria Machado, Jeff VanderMeer, and China Mi�ville will be glad to find this volume and thereby discover a writer who inspired them all.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2019, American Library Association.)