“It was never a straight line but always only a maze, a labyrinth that we haunted and that haunted us back, in turn. A circular haunting, a spiritual Möbius strip – our games, your shifting faces, the sex, stories we told and untold, picked apart and refashioned to suit our needs, the loneliness, the old shack in the woods, what we found when I followed you inside, and on and on and on and on. I could write this tale for a thousand more days and nights and still I would draw no nearer to a genuine ending and I would find no tidy resolution. Conclusion is arbitrary.” Caitlín R. Kiernan is one of the finest writers of Weird fiction across the history of the genre, and each of their new short story collections is a cause to celebrate. Vile Affections (2021) is another essential addition to Kiernan’s impressive body of work, one that gives a good example of their range and power as a writer, whilst offering tantalising hints of where they might be going next. Told with their usual mastery of language and penchant for hallucinatorily vivid prose, these 22 new stories bristle with Kiernan’s inventive talent. As one would expect from Subterranean Press, it’s a gorgeous volume as well. Each story is accompanied by an appropriately twisted illustration by Vince Locke, and followed by annotations from Kiernan themselves. It’s difficult to imagine a fan of Kiernan’s work or Weird fiction in general not wanting to read this collection. The collection displays the themes and motifs that Kiernan is repeatedly drawn to, and demonstrates the variety of approaches they use to tackle them. Horrific visions and recurring nightmares of drowning haunt the narrators in ‘Day After Tomorrow, the Flood’, ‘As Water Is In Water’ and ‘The Green Abyss’. Kiernan takes on familiar monsters like vampires and werewolves and makes them their own in ‘Theoretically Forbidden Morphologies’, ‘King Laugh (Four Scenes)’ and ‘Mercy Brown’. They twist fairytales into strange and unnerving new shapes in ‘Iodine and Iron’ and ‘Which Describes a Looking-Glass and the Broken Fragments’. And in ‘Cherry Street Tango, Sweatbox Waltz’ they deploy noir tropes and topology in order to excavate the uncanniness and uneasiness at the heart of the genre. As always with Kiernan, nothing in these stories is quite as it first appears, and the shared themes and experiments with genre serve to highlight this. One of their great strengths as a writer is how they can take two stories with similar themes or motifs and take them both in entirely unexpected and surprising directions. Kiernan’s stories haunt the memory because of how vividly they conjure atmosphere and feel. From the Alabama of Kiernan’s childhood to the murky depths of prehistoric oceans to post-apocalyptic vistas mutated beyond the understanding of humans, the reader can almost taste the settings, so fully are they evoked. The southern highway in ‘Virginia Story’, haunted by strange and unfamiliar roadkill, and the charred forest in ‘The Great Bloody and Bruised Veil of the World’ suggest incursions of the uncanny into our reality. ‘A Chance of Frogs on Wednesday’ takes the reader on a surreal quest into a world where the uncanny has replaced our reality. Speculative fiction stories like ‘Metamorphosis C’ or the cyberpunk-ish locale of ‘Cherry Street Tango, Sweatbox Waltz’ imagine futures haunted by the dispossessed and the down and outs, secret worlds of hired assassins, vanishing marks and subterranean horrors. Throughout them all there is a sense of the fragility of human lives, as we live on the surface of a world more nightmarish and strange than we can possibly imagine, one which might so easily become entirely inhospitable to humanity. What’s striking about this particular collection is how many stories are essentially intimate and frequently antagonistic conversations between two characters. Kiernan excels at painting monstrous, mysterious characters, revealing what the reader needs to know about them through how they interact with others and the world. Many of the stories feature characters grappling with psychiatrists. ’Untitled Psychiatrist No. 4’ and ‘As Water is In Water’ are portraits of characters who, in what they refuse to tell their psychiatrist, reveal their deepest anxieties to the reader. ‘The Last Thing You Should Do’, ‘The Tameness of Wolves’ and ‘The Surgeon’s Photo (Murder Ballad No. 12)’ are told from the perspective of characters in thrall to sinister beings, their uneasy and abusive relationship delineated by the power dynamic displayed between them. And ‘The Lady and the Tiger Redux’ shows a relationship collapsing in on itself, brought to its knees by the couple’s encounter with the Weird. These stories demonstrate that as well as being a master of atmosphere and language, Kiernan is also crucially a master of character. Kiernan’s approach to storytelling is to embrace the strange and the uncanny. Their stories are like labyrinths, mazes in which the unwary reader can become lost or trapped. They avoid easy resolutions or any sense of closure, preferring instead to discomfort and disturb. This sense of the uncanny coming from the inexplicable extends to Kiernan’s fascinating and confounding notes. They do not seek to explain or elucidate what’s happening in these stories, for that would destroy the mystery, the tension, the magic. Instead, Kiernan’s wry but honest notes tell frankly about the sometimes oblique sources and inspirations behind these stories, as well as the difficulties of writing in such turbulent times. As such, Vile Affections is not just another excellent and essential collection of Kiernan’s Weird fiction, it also offers a privileged snapshot into one of the great creative minds of our age.  Vile Affections by Caitlín R. Kiernan In Vile Affections, Caitlín R. Kiernan's seventeenth short fiction collection, the boundaries of desire, fascination, passion, and dread collide. That which is beautiful may easily be profane. Those who love us may devour us alive. A shadow may shine like a supernova. The eye of the beholder is God. In these twenty-two stories, Kiernan's trademark range is on display, taking us from submerged and monster-haunted dreamscapes to quiet bedroom conversation between lovers, from unexpected and uncanny roadkill to an object lesson on the perils of picking up hitchhikers on rainy Appalachian nights. Moving deftly between such disparate genres as cyberpunk, fairy tales, and Southern Gothic, this is Kiernan at their eerie best. Publisher : Subterranean Press; Deluxe edition (30 Nov. 2021) Language : English Hardcover : 384 pages ISBN-10 : 1645240436 ISBN-13 : 978-1645240433 A Book review by Jonathan Thornton TODAY ON THE GINGER NUTS OF HORROR WEBSITE BORN IN BLOOD, VOLUME 2 BY GEORGE DANIEL LEA [BOOK REVIEW]THE SHADOW PEOPLE BY GRAHAM MASTERTON [BOOK REVIEW] THE HEART AND SOUL OF HORROR FICTION REVIEWS Comments are closed.
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