Warren, Kaaron

Entry updated 15 April 2024. Tagged: Author.

(1965- ) Australian author, best known for supernatural horror tales like her first novel Slights (2009), which won a Ditmar Award for best novel. She began publishing work of genre interest with "The Blue Stream" in Aurealis for October 1994; this tale was assembled with other early work as The Grinding House (coll 2005; vt The Glass Woman 2007). Further collections include Dead Sea Fruit (coll 2010), Through Splintered Walls (coll 2012) and The Gate Theory (coll 2013). Whatever genres may be invoked in a particular tale – some transacting more than one – her work conveys a muscular attentiveness to the twists of her material, with Feminist revelations and affirmations clearly articulated.

Of sf interest is Warren's second novel, Walking the Tree (2010), which strongly demonstrates the power of Equipoise to jostle and enrich a text (see Fantastika); in this case, an adolescent's ritual trek through fantasy-like environment to a mysterious Great Tree, in order to gain adulthood, eventually unpacks not only as a Rite of Passage tale [see The Encyclopedia of Fantasy under links below] but also as an sf novel. The Tree itself, which takes five days to circumnavigate, occupies the heart of what may be a colony world, and has a clear role (see Eugenics; Genetic Engineering) in maintaining the health of the species. Mistification (2011) is a complexly told fantasy; The Grief Hole (2016), which is horror, won another Ditmar Award for best novel; Tide of Stone (2018) is an austerely unrelenting examination of Crime and Punishment in the land of Tempuston, where murderers are allowed to choose death or eternal life immured in a tower, where they wither into tortured Struldbrug-like effigies. [JC]

Kaaron Warren

born Melbourne, Victoria: 1965

works

Slights (London: Angry Robot, 2009) [pb/]
Walking the Tree (London: Angry Robot, 2010) [pb/Greg Bridges]
Mistification (London: Angry Robot, 2011) [pb/Veysel Zandi]
The Grief Hole (Australia: IFWG Publishing, 2016) [hb/Keely Van Order]
Tide of Stone (Los Angeles, California: Omnium Gatherum Media, 2018) [pb/]
Into Bone Like Oil (Atlanta, Georgia: Meerkat Press, 2019) [novella: pb/S A Hadi Hasan]
The Underhistory (London: Profile Books, 2024) [hb/]

collections

The Grinding House (Woden, Australian Capital Territory: Canberra Speculative Fiction Guild Publishing, 2005) [coll: pb/Robyn Evans]
- The Glass Woman (Rockville, Maryland: Prime Books, 2007) [coll: vt of the above: pb/]
Dead Sea Fruit (Greenwood, Western Australia: Ticonderoga Publications, 2010) [coll: hb/Olga Read]
Through Splintered Walls (Yokine, Western Australia: Twelfth Planet Press, 2012) [coll: pb/Amanda Rainey]
The Gate Theory (Beechworth, Victoria: Cohesion Press, 2013) [coll: ebook: paper edition issued 2015: na/]

links

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