Silk

This is such an amazing book. Caitlin R. Kiernan may be the H. P. Lovecraft for the 21st century! Silk is that good. Kiernan's superb imagination is balanced by the perfectly-realized reality of her landscape. Though filled with shudders and suspense, the book is not filled with the sort of absurd gore and splatter that ruins so many scary books these days. Kiernan knows there are scarier things than blood and guts. This is an absolute must read.

From the first page to the last, Silk is a beautiful, black pearl of a book. Caitlin Kiernan's character's will break your heart and her way with words will leave breathless - this book is that good. Smart, sexy, and scary, this is the best dark fantasy novel I've read in years.

Silk is a triumph of incremental suspense. Kiernan begins her novel of Southern Gothicisms with solid characters and a finely-tuned knack for describing her setting, coupled with a powerful, almost poetic flare for the English language, and slowly lures the reader into a frightening world where nothing is certain and every shadow is reason for fear. Her ability to undermine our sense of reality is awesome and she uses it to set up a novel where the things that go bump in the night might only exist in the mentally-ill or drug-altered minds of her characters as nothing more than an elaborate array of shared hallucinations....or may be very, very real indeed! Kiernan's beautiful writing and terrifying story definitely work for me! I loved this book.

Are you afraid of spiders? Well, this is one magnificently spidery book. Though the author is a master (or is that mistress?) of lyrical prose, exquisite characterization, mood, and subtext (quantum physics *and* Orpheus in one book!), Silk still manages to touch a lot of our most basic fears and takes full advantage of them. Kiernan's portrait of Birmingham, Alabama, as a brooding post-industrial wasteland is as chilling as the shadowy creatures that may (or may not) stalk its nights. The author's familiarity with the youth subcultures of the early 1990s adds another marvelous dimension to what may be the coolest spooky novel I've read since Poppy Z. Brite's Lost Souls. This novel *proves* once and for all that a book can be scary as hell *and* extremely intelligent at the same time. It certainly deserves the awards it's won and the praise its received from "big name" authors like Clive Barker and Neil Gaiman.

I read SILK because a friend of mine recommended it and because I've been enjoying Caitlin Kiernan's work on THE DREAMING. I was *not* disappointed. This is one of those really rare Gothic novels that transcends the limitations of its genre (and the things we're usually willing to settle for from that genre) and delivers a stunning literary delight. The book works on many different levels. Yes, it's a very frightening novel, filled with strange goings-on and crawly things. It's also a wonderful experiment in language; it's rare to find an author who seems to take such sheer enjoyment from the act of constructing sentences. On another level, this is a fine example of the fiction of the New South, a skillfully woven Southern Gothic. It's a masterful collection of character studies, and any fledgling writer would do well to study SILK as an exercise in learning how to create *real* and believable people from words and imagination. It's hard to accept that this is a first novel, so marked is its scope and maturity. I, for one, will be eagerly awaiting this author's second!