dandelionfiles

"ONE OF US! ONE OF US! ONE OF US!"

"Jules?" My inner animus was worried as he stared at me as I chanted and danced, the book Alabaster by Caitlin Kiernan still clutched within my hands. I swirled around, raising the book high in the air, worried the sunlight might damage it. I couldn't stop chanting:

"ONE OF US! ONE OF US! ONE OF US!"

"Jules, stop it! Tod Browning has demonically possessed you again! You are not in the 1932 Horror film, "Freaks" and you never were!" My inner animus wrung his hands.

"ONE OF US! ONE OF US! ONE OF US!"

"I'm going to take the book AWAY from you if you don't shut up."

The threat was enough to calm me down. My animus is ingenious when it comes to hiding things. Do you know what that man has done to my KEYS? Besides, just getting a HOLD of the book was hard enough--I had to SPECIAL ORDER the thing from Borders in Miamisburg, OH just to be able to get near the thing.

It's one of the complaints I have about bookstores--they don't CARRY ENOUGH of Caitlin Kiernan's writing for my tastes. This is a real shame, since she's a fine author and modern Lovecraftian who deserves to be read as much as possible.

The worst part of the fact that it's so hard to find Kiernan's work is this: you have to have read all of her previous work in order to properly appreciate and admire "Alabaster". The reason for this is simple: Alabaster is a book that stars a supporting character from her book Threshold, the first book I ever even SAW in a local bookstore, which is how I found out she EXISTED outside the comic book world as an author to BEGIN with (she wrote some storylines for a series based upon Gaiman's Sandman called "the Dreaming"). As an unrepentant book addict, I sympathize with all book addicts--especially Lovecraftian ones, and the fact you can't FIND her work easily is a mite bit unfair, especially when you consider the ubiquity of really crappy work that usually takes up shelf space HER work should have.

Kiernan actually writes REAL horror, folks. She doesn't try to package horror as "Harlequin with fangs", she doesn't try to make it pretty, she actually writes good, frightening stories with complexities, which is something the horror field desperately needs. Kiernan is the perfect anidote to a phenomena that's needed countering for some time now: the idea of "sex symbol heroine in brief clothing that looks hot whilst slaying evil beasts".

"Alabaster" is about a teenage girl who has been contacted by an angel to slay beasties for it, and Kiernan doesn't whitewash anything about just how horrible being a hero could possibly be. Dancy Flammarion is the name of this character, and she inspires readers to chant "ONE OF US" because Kiernan explains that she is an albino--someone without pigment in her skin, someone who has pink eyes and white hair and no ability to deal with sunlight, someone who is regarded as a Freak like the Tod Browning 1932 movie was all about. In another book, she'd be exploited within a circus, but in Kiernan's hand the question becomes, "Is she being exploited by God"?

The character even finds aspects of herself questioning her duties, arguing with her face in the bathroom mirror, her questions often manifesting strongly as voices she hears from the monsters themselves before she kills them. She can't help but wonder: what kind of angel would demand for a vulnerable child to travel the country homeless to slay monsters, anyway? What kind of God would think this sort of thing is fair? The worst questions she keeps asking herself won't go away--as she must steal food from a place she has to destroy on the angel's orders, she tries to justify her theft because she knows stealing is wrong: "She rolls the top of the paper bag down tight and tells herself it's not stealing, not really, that she's not taking much and nothing that she doesn't need, so whatever it is, it isn't stealing." She thinks about the deaths she has caused, wondering if she has done the right thing, and asks, "Is this what you want from me?" What kind of God demands such a horrible vengeance instead of forgiving? Wouldn't a true angel figure out a way to feed someone working for him? Who is this angel, anyway?

Kiernan claims that she won't write about Dancy Flannarion again, which is a shame--Dancy's too intriguing to leave behind forever. As a fan, I hope that Kiernan changes her mind. The book is clever in that Kiernan never allows the reader to settle any questions, even weaving Dancy's angel into stories from another series of novels(Silk and Murder of Angels) in which a woman allows her pathology and psychic power to destroy the woman she loves for an imaginary "justice", almost destroying the world in the process--leaving the reader to even wonder if God had anything to do with this angel to begin with. One of the reasons Kiernan is a genius is that she understands that complacency and belief without evidence is dangerous--her stories reflect this belief continuously. Characters who allow themselves to take easy answers usually die horribly at the hands of the supernatural beasts in front of them.

If you've read Threshold and can't forget about Dancy Flammarion, GET THIS BOOK. If you haven't--pick up Threshold first before you special order it. Heck, do yourself a favor and pick up Silk and Murder of Angels as well, because they're spooky and too much fun to miss. Either way, if you're reading anything by Kiernan, expect to enjoy a delightful author.