Monday, October 06, 2003
It's 9:42 a.m. on a Monday morning and I've felt better. You will note that Blogger posts in Central Time, so trust what I say, always, and not what it says. Strike that. Never trust a word I say.
9:43 a.m.
Yesterday, I reworked the epilogue, added chapter titles to the first half of Murder of Angels (I only decided the chapters would be titled halfway through the writing of the novel), changed the word "hounds" to "jackals" throughout (to avoid confusion with the "hounds" sensu "So Runs the World Away," "The Dead and the Moonstruck," and Low Red Moon), added epigraphs before Part One and Part Two, and so on and such like.
9:47 a.m.
I had to resend my afterword and all the lettered "extras" to Bill Schafer for the Subterranean Press edition of Low Red Moon. I read "Red Clay" by Michael Reaves (in The Children of Cthulhu).
I kept hoping that the emptiness (which, by the by, Poppy mentions dreading as she finishes The Big D) would abate somewhat with the normalcy of work. That I could drive it away with details. But it only grew more profound as the day progressed.
I imagine myself eating the manuscript, stuffing it all back inside, in an attempt to fill the hole it's left.
(This morning I prefer short paragraphs.)
I probably shouldn't do this, but here's the review of Low Red Moon (by Tim Pratt) from Locus (October, 2003). Be warned, some of the following may constitute the mildest sorts of spoilers:
Low Red Moon is a sequel of sorts to Kiernan's IHG-award-winning novel Threshold, though not in a linear sense. The same principle characters from Threshold — alcoholic psychic Deacon, hard headed geologist Chance, and goth/punk would-be writer Sadie — are once again brought together, this time in a world in which the reality rupturing events of Threshold never took place. In the universe of Low Red Moon, the lives of these characters divereged somewhat, at a point in time before the previous novel began (Those who've read Threshold and recall Kiernan's unusual ending will realize that this is not as large a divergence as it seems.) As such, the novel stands alone quite well, though it is enriched by knowledge of the previous work, and Kiernan provides a number of small references to What Might Have Been.
In this reality, Deacon and Chance are married, and expecting their first child, while Sadie and Deacon (who were lovers in Threshold) are casual friends and uneasy confidants. Their lives, while far from perfect, are at least ordinary, filled with understandable struggle — Sadie's aimlessness, Deacon's struggle with alcohol, Chance's difficulty maintaning her career while nine months pregnant.
Enter Narcissa Snow, a serial murderer with a deeply twisted past and a burning desire to transform herself, literally, into a monster. For complex reasons, she beleives that Deacon, Chance, and especially their unborn child, are the key that will enable her to achieve that goal.
The story is fast paced, emotionally wrenching, and thoroughly captivating. Low Red Moon is a very different book than Threshold, where the pleasures were mostly in Kiernan's lush prose and masterly evocation of atmosphere. Here she eschews that style, with its echoes of Joyce and Faulkner, for a more straightforward approach to language, and even has writer Saide make a comment about it: "Oh, you mean the way I liked to run words together to make new adjectives? Well, I don't do that anymore. It just kept pissing people off." It didn't piss everyone off, but it's true that the style would not have been well suited for Low Red Moon, an altogether more plot oriented book, which combines the best elements of quiet supernatural horror, over the top violence, serial killer mystique and chase/suspense tales. Low Red Moon is more compulsively readable than Kiernan's previous novels, and while it does not seem quite so ambitious, that does not necessarily lessen its worth.
In a way, this book is the culmanation of much of Kiernan's recent work in the short form, bringing in elements, scenes and characters from her first rate novella, In the Garden of Poisonous Flowers and stories like "The Road of Pins" and "The Long Hall on the Top Floor," expanding on the ideas and interactions she first explored at shorter length, with marvelous results. Kiernan only grows in versatility, and readers should continue to expect great things from her.
I can live with a review like that.
Last night, I watched The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms (Bradbury and Harryhausen, *sigh*) and then fell asleep to Key Largo (Bogey and Bacall, *sigh*). I slept uneasily. At best. Anyway, now I go and work, because that's what keeps the normal people . . . er, I mean the monsters . . . yeah, that's what I mean . . . under the bed . . .
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