LGBTQ+ HORROR MONTH: THE RED TREE BY CAITLIN R. KIERNAN

I was delighted when Ginger Nuts announced it was doing an LGBTQ+ month here on the site. I don't read a huge amount of horror, but there have been a few over recent years that I have wrapped myself in cozy blankets and turned all the lights on in order to read. One of these was Caitlin R. Kiernan's The Red Tree.

The book had been sitting on my shelf for quite some time when the name came up in a discussion of openly transgender writers. I am very glad it did as I was motivated to read The Red Tree at last.

The book is primarily from the perspective of Sarah, who has retreated to an isolated house to write after a bad break up and other things made her want to retreat from the world. Naturally Sarah is a very unreliable narrator and the story is build in the form of two lots of 'found documents' of a sort. The journal writing Sarah did when she was in the house, and the writing she found of a previous occupant, and anthropologist obsessed with the bloody history of the tree outside.

Because the story is created by these scattered writings the reader is constantly intrigued, dealing with little in the way of hard fact or evidence. Everything we read is questionable. Is Sarah losing her mind? Was the previous occupant suffering a breakdown? Is the woman who rents the top flat for a stretch of the book even real?

We never get the full detailed history of the Red Tree itself although much of it is pieced together, again during the course of the story, which at it's heart is a haunted house tale in the tradition of Hill House. The traditional combination of a physical environment that becomes increasingly malignant and a narrator who seems ever less stable leaves the reader disoriented and not able to pinpoint what is true and what is madness. Of course in some ways that's where the horror lies.

I love a good haunted house story, and, although the focus of The Red Tree is the titular tree it is none the less a superbly crafted example of the sub genre. This remains one of the my favourite horror stories, working away quietly on you as read until you are left shaken and unsure and a little more suspicious of those old gnarled branches.