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Kiernan, Caitlín R

Entry updated 25 November 2024. Tagged: Author.

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(1964-    ) Irish-born Comics writer and author, in the US from childhood, who began publishing work of genre interest with "Persephone" for Aberrations in 1995, and the script for a Neil Gaiman spin-off, The Dreaming (1997-2001). Most of her work has been variously designated as dark fantasy or cosmic horror, but intermittently throughout her prolific career there is a sense that – certainly in her latter-day sophistications of H P Lovecraft's cosmic horror (see Horror in SF) – she has written work as urgently and complexly Equipoisal as some of the darker tales of Stephen King or Peter Straub; the direct influence of Neil Gaiman is also clearly detectable. Hints of this accountability to argument flicker into view throughout the Threshold/Dancy Flammarion sequence, beginning with Threshold: A Novel of Deep Time (2001) and including Daughter of Hounds (2006); the later volume The Drowning Girl: A Memoir (2012) won the James Tiptree Jr Award. The heavily applied "darkness" of the sequence may seem anomalous to some sf readers, but in fact the initiating premise – that in something like a Time Abyss Underground beneath Alabama something like an Alien with no good will for human mayflies has its abode – is unpacked in sf terms, when Kiernan wishes to. Multifacetedly, subsequent volumes of the sequence explore various genre habitats, convincingly. "The Colliers' Venus (1893)" (in Naked City: Tales of Urban Fantasy, anth 2011, ed Ellen Datlow), which is set in an Alternate World Steampunk Denver (here called Cherry Creek), also invokes Time Abyss, as a live manifestation of Gaia is discovered deep in a mine shaft; having conveyed her warning message about the suicidal arrogance of Homo sapiens, she turns to coal dust, but lives on.

Also sf is The Dry Salvages (2004), narrated in a psychically frozen twenty-fourth century Paris by a woman who relives experiences from decades earlier when – within a Space Opera frame – she was part of a crew plumbing ancient mysteries parsecs distant. The stories assembled in A for Alien (coll 2009) are also sf. [JC]

Caitlín Rebekah Kiernan

born near Dublin, Ireland: 26 May 1964

works (selected)

series

Threshold/Dancy Flammarion

Siobhan Quinn

  • Blood Oranges (New York: Roc/New American Library, 2013) [Siobhan Quinn: pb/Patrick Kang]
  • Red Delicious (New York: Roc/New American Library, 2014) [Siobhan Quinn: pb/]
  • Cherry Bomb (New York: Roc/New American Library, 2015) [Siobhan Quinn: pb/]

individual titles

collections and stories

series

Alphabet

The Best of Caitlín R Kiernan

individual titles

links

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