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The Drowning Girl

3.89 of 5 stars 3.89 · rating details · 592 ratings · 148 reviews

India Morgan Phelps-Imp to her friends-is schizophrenic. Struggling with her perceptions of reality, Imp must uncover the truth about her encounters with creatures out of myth-or from something far, far stranger...

Paperback, 336 pages

Published March 6th 2012 by Roc Trade

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Mar 13, 2012 Jason rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: e-books, read-2012

5 Stars

Caitlin Kiernan is simply one of the best, the most original, and gifted writers in fiction today. She writes deep and dark horror stories and challenges you the reader as well as her many amazing protagonists to join her on a trip down the rabbit hole. Can you tell she is a real favorite of mine? I have read most of Kiernan’s work and have been taken in by her works, ever since I read The Red Tree, my first endeavor into the mysterious mind of Caitlin Kiernan.

In this book, The Drowning G...more

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Mar 02, 2013 Ryandake rated it 4 of 5 stars

it's been a while since i've been this flummoxed by a book.

it's a ghost story, a mermaid story, a siren story, a wolf story, a crazy person story... all wrapped up in one. maybe that's why it's so hard to grasp--where it's not mythological, it's psychological, or maybe mythopoetic.

all of the above, i can handle. even in one book. it's a stretch, no doubt--this is not a fishhook book, where you get nabbed by the hook and pulled along. you have to do some serious swimming against the current here...more

6 likes · like · see review

Jan 17, 2013 Randolph Carter rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: horror, fiction

What if you were insane, but actually haunted by a real ghost? I'm not sure why nobody has ever really tried this before (Yellow Wallpaper doesn't count because it always calls the narrator's perceptions and mental stability into question).

Drenched in philosophy, history, psychology, science, and autobiography Kiernan uses her encyclopedic knowledge to weave a tale so dense it is sometimes difficulty to see where she is going but fascinating nevertheless. Imp seems to be the ultimate unreliable...more What if you were insane, but actually haunted by a real ghost? I'm not sure why nobody has ever really tried this before (Yellow Wallpaper doesn't count because it always calls the narrator's perceptions and mental stability into question).

Drenched in philosophy, history, psychology, science, and autobiography Kiernan uses her encyclopedic knowledge to weave a tale so dense it is sometimes difficulty to see where she is going but fascinating nevertheless. Imp seems to be the ultimate unreliable narrator, but is she? And there seems to be a narrator's narrator. The plot, such as it is, twists and turns, never proceeding linearly for very long. Kiernan, through her narrator, even comments on this fact. Real life rarely proceeds linearly. It only seems that way in retrospect due to what we choose to accept and discard in the telling/remembering.

History writing proceeds similarly since it almost always depends as much on what we discard or ignore in the telling as it does in what we conclude to accept. This is why we largely make the same mistakes over and over again even though the adage that "those who don't study history it are doomed to repeat" Study of history is almost useless as a prediction of the future because the distillation we make of history rarely resembles the plethora of currently known and unknown facts and "truths." The now almost never looks like the history we think we know. Otherwise, how can half the people think higher taxes are bad and half think they are good. One perspective must be "true" at this point in time but who knows for sure? Even when we are aware of the facts we accept and discard we cannot decide (if we are honest with ourselves), much less when we don't know, what we don't know.

And Imp cannot make any sense of the past even though she studies, reflects, and writes. She has no idea where she is going and her past is no guide because she cannot decide what to accept and what to discard. She's not even sure when she is sane (Is she? maybe she is hyper-sane) and even has trouble deciding whether what she is writing is fact or truth. The distinction is essential. Truth does not necessarily imply factual and a fact doesn't always imply truth. Now we are back to what to accept and what to discard and our own faulty senses and memories and thinking just muddles the situation more. Now add to that that the supernatural is real. Anyone would lose their sanity.(less)

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Mar 15, 2012 Kate O'Hanlon rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: horror, lgbt, currently-on-loan

Kiernan's last novel The Red Tree impressed me mightily but ultimately did not win me over. I have been vindicated in my decision to give her another go. All the technical expertise, authenticity and stunning command over a deep and complex plot that was displayed in The Red Tree is out in force again but in The Drowning Girl Kiernan also brings something extra (a more likeable protagonist? a more compelling mythos? a more satisfying ending? all of this?) that made this novel one I could love as...more

3 likes · like · see review

Aug 02, 2012 Sofia Samatar rated it 5 of 5 stars

This is a ghost story, and a mermaid story, and a werewolf story, and a schizophrenia story, and a love story. It's also a story about the power of art. The narrator, India Morgan Phelps, who goes by "Imp," is haunted by a strange woman (or possibly two women) named Eva Canning; she's also haunted by several works of art. She's haunted by a painting called The Drowning Girl, which shows a naked girl wading into the water, and by a painting called Fecunda ratis, which shows a crouching girl in re...more

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Mar 26, 2012 Angie rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: horror, fantasy, fave-2012

I wish I had the words to convince everyone to go out and BUY a copy of this RIGHT NOW. (It's a wonderful study of mental illness.) Unfortunately, the book's brilliance has rendered me mute. Yesterday, I sat outside in a different town--a city, in fact--at a gigantic market where hundreds of people went in and out, where I saw their purchases and smelled so many different kinds of food from all over the world--and all I could do was read this book. There was nothing else. It's that good. I hope...more

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Apr 24, 2013 aPriL MEOWS often with scratching rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: horror, literary, metafiction, mysteries-suspense-thrillers, paranormal

Only 300+ pages, but the themes, image echoes, literary and metafictional references are too numerous to catalog. This is a writer's masterpiece for other writers and literature majors. I don't mean to scare or challenge you; be warned it's not a true genre or other entertainment category, but I'd call it as coming closest to a literary gothic. There are no 'dictionary' words or overly gruesome scenarios, but it does cover ghostly mysteries possibly manifesting because of past cult suicides.

Indi...more Only 300+ pages, but the themes, image echoes, literary and metafictional references are too numerous to catalog. This is a writer's masterpiece for other writers and literature majors. I don't mean to scare or challenge you; be warned it's not a true genre or other entertainment category, but I'd call it as coming closest to a literary gothic. There are no 'dictionary' words or overly gruesome scenarios, but it does cover ghostly mysteries possibly manifesting because of past cult suicides.

India Morgan Phelps, nicknamed Imp, is a diagnosed schizophrenic. She works as a waitress and she is dependable except when she forgets to take her meds. Her aunt and psychiatrist watch over her, but she mostly takes care of herself, her car and her apartment. Despite her meds, she does not trust everything she sees and hears as she frequently experiences delusions. She has an unusual year and decides to write down what has occurred, whether it really happened or not. As the chapters spin out her story, it becomes obvious Imp is an unreliable narrator of the first rank, which she freely admits. Although she works as a waitress, she actually is an artist, a painter of images.

Spontaneous and impulsive, she picks up a woman who ends up living with her as her girlfriend and lover, Abalyn. In time, Imp learns Abalyn is a transsexual, but given that some of Imp's obsessions are mermaids, werewolves and ghosts, she has no problem with this. Imp has another, more serious problem -she believes a naked woman, Eva Canning, who she also picked up one night is a ghost of a suicide, who led a cult into the sea to drown decades before. Eva seems to change her form - she becomes a wolf, then a siren. Abalyn meets Eva when Imp brings her home, but other incidents that Imp also experiences do not appear to Abalyn. Something about Eva triggers Imp into a vision quest of sorts, a mix of delusions and reality she finds difficult to sort out. She begins this book journaling what she thinks happened, but off her meds and hallucinating, Imp knows she cannot trust the information she uncovers about Eva. The story is disturbingly non-linear as well, jumping forward and back in time, including incidents real and unreal, of which Imp resignedly confesses her awareness.

Imp feels the heart of the mystery is connected somehow to a painting she returns to again and again - Saltonstall's The Drowning Girl .

Who is the Drowning Girl?

Atmospheric and slowly engrossing, each time I picked up this book was a treat of beautifully created sentences and weirdly beautiful/nightmare twinning images. I believe the story Imp experiences is based on reality, but I do not think she is interacting with a ghost. To me, it was more like a meeting between two nice, but insane, people suffering delusions which collide. The problem for the reader is to pick who are the crazy two people, and whose reality happened, and which scenes are the delusions. Of course, a metafictional point is that this is a fictional read written by an author called Imp, in the end, which is the only open joke in the book. (less)

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Feb 21, 2013 Jeremy Preacher rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: witches-vampires-and-werewolves

There is a warning at the front of this book that it will not be the book you expect. It is a true warning. I had a pretty good idea of what the book would be about - a schizophrenic narrator having encounters with supernatural creatures that may be real or may be products of her illness - and that's not wrong, exactly, but it doesn't cover it. It's about relationships and identity and the idea of the supernatural, and I don't really want to say anything more lest I spoil it.

It's dark - there's...more

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Feb 21, 2013 Linguana rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: mythology, horror, fantasy

Full review posted at SFF Book Review.

This was a gem of a novel! It was scary and disturbing, filled with magic and myth and magnificent prose that rivals any of the classical Gothic ghost stories. Caitlín R. Kiernan takes well-known tropes of speculative fiction, blending horror, fantasy and psychological thriller elements, and creates something entirely new. I have not read any of the other Nebula nominees for 2012 yet, but it’s going to be damn hard to keep up with this one.

The Good: Fantasti...more

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Feb 12, 2013 Sarah rated it 5 of 5 stars

This book is not for everyone.

I mean that apart from individual biases--though anyone adhering to a strict diet of heteronormative gender-binary lit should probably let this one go.

The Drowning Girl is heavy on theme, on the tension between fact and truth and how experience and identity can color the interpretation, the chronology, and even the very existence of events.

The Drowning Girl is only vaguely linear, and occasionally beautifully incoherent. This is not your grandfather's plotline. If y...more

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Feb 08, 2013 Jacqie rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: book-club

This was pretty amazing. Imp, our protagonist and narrator, is writing a ghost story. Since Imp is schizophrenic, it's difficult for her (and the reader) to know what's real and what's imagined. It's horrible to be unsure of reality, but Imp mostly manages with grace.

As readers, we get a peek inside the mind of a fascinating, nuanced, unique character. It's a compulsive read; it's a good thing I read it on vacation because I had to keep going to find out what happened next and devoured it as fa...more

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Nov 09, 2012 Patrick rated it 3 of 5 stars

(I tried making this review friends-only but I guess there's not a way to do that. Strangers, please do not judge what a jerk I am. Goodreads friends, judge away but keep it to yourself.)

When I first saw Caitlin Kiernan, I thought she was obnoxious. It was my first time at the Readercom science fiction convention in Burlington, MA, and I had gone to a panel discussion called "Wet Dreams and Nightscapes" or something like that to hear Samuel Delany talk. Samuel Delany's a weirdo but he usually ha...more

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Oct 22, 2012 Lauren rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: horror

A stunningly effective idea of how hauntings could actually work (more like memes or obsessive thought patterns), a necessarily unreliable narrator, stellar characterization, and some very genuine creepiness made this book, like Kiernan's The Red Tree, one of my new favorite horror novels.

There's not a literal ghost anywhere that's scarier than Imp's early conviction that she met the woman named Eva Canning twice, once in July and once in November, and that each time was the first time. Her memo...more

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May 24, 2012 Jennifer rated it 5 of 5 stars

The novel is so brilliantly written that it's impossible to pin down the plot in any understandable way. Kiernan traps the reader inside the mind of India Morgan Phelps, a young woman with Schizophrenia. At times terrifying, at other times beautiful, the novel is full of concrete imagery so powerful that it's hard not to believe every single detail that Imp tells us even though Imp herself admits to confusion and uncertainty throughout. You become lost with Imp as she attempts to bring the event...more The novel is so brilliantly written that it's impossible to pin down the plot in any understandable way. Kiernan traps the reader inside the mind of India Morgan Phelps, a young woman with Schizophrenia. At times terrifying, at other times beautiful, the novel is full of concrete imagery so powerful that it's hard not to believe every single detail that Imp tells us even though Imp herself admits to confusion and uncertainty throughout. You become lost with Imp as she attempts to bring the events of two different times together and into a cohesive whole. At the end we're left wondering, with her, whether either of the events ever happened at all or was one or both of them just spiral thought formations she built upon for herself.

Mental illness is a close to home topic for me to read about even in novel form. It's a topic I've never really sought out to read and this novel was just a random pick from the library stacks. I grew up my whole life with a mother with Bi Polar Disorder (commonly called Manic Depression) and in my High School years I witnessed her sinking so deeply gone that she had to spend weeks locked away in the mental ward of a hospital one hour from home so that she'd survive and heal. It was during her last hospital stay that my Mom roomed with a middle aged woman with Schizophrenia at the hospital. Mom exchanged addresses with this woman to "keep in touch" during their recovery once both were released. The letters started out normally enough but would spiral into vivid imagery of flaming swords, angels and demons all in lines written in various stages of capitalization and no sense whatsoever to be made from them. I came to understand from those letters how very "warped" the thought process is of a Schizophrenic. It must be terrible to be aware of how far you've strayed and yet have no idea how to work your way back. I think that's why this novel grabbed me so hard. The entire time we're following India's thoughts and illustrations of events, she's very aware of how not aware she might be and yet can't be any other way.

I really have no way to express how awesome this book is. You read every single word in every single chapter and yet you have no idea what's really happening. Yet there is structure and repetition and everything flows sensibly enough despite that. It's confusingly beautiful.

One note I'd make is you're least bit offended by transvestites or lesbians or mental illness or Rhode Island or wolves or art, then you probably just skip over this-but it would be your loss!

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Apr 24, 2012 Suspense Magazine rated it 5 of 5 stars

Is there an eldritch, elder magic in the waterways and soil surrounding the ancient city of Providence, Rhode Island? With this novel, Caitlin R. Kiernan joins a continuum of writers, including Edgar Allan Poe and H.P. Lovecraft, who find terror and ghostly goings on in that which lies beneath cobbled streets, abandoned mills, and placid dark waters.
Like her mother and grandmother before, twenty-something Imp Phelps lives with schizophrenia. Her medications help her live an almost normal life. S...more

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Apr 17, 2012 Jeff Chappell rated it 5 of 5 stars

What is the nature of truth? Can something that may or may not be factually true nevertheless be truth? When you consider that all truth, even facts, actually are subjective in that we must filter them through our own eyes and minds, then is this distinction even relevant?

This is the theme at the heart of The Drowning Girl: A Memoir, which is a monumental achievement for author Caitlín R. Kiernan. While it shares some thematic points with its predecessor, The Red Tree, it is nevertheless distin...more

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Mar 29, 2012 Amy Eller Lewis rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: fantastical, favorites, what-s-next

This was, very possible, the most intense reading experience of the last decade. The last time I remember such an intense read was Haven Kimmel's "Iodine", and this outraces that by several yards.

I'm not going to bother talking about the premise (brilliant) or the structure (beyond innovative) because you can read about these things in the Amazon description.

I will, however talk about how none of these blurbs are accurate in preparing any reader for this book. And I don't mean that in the way y...more

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Mar 17, 2012 Ellen rated it 4 of 5 stars

With its unreliable narrator, India Morgan Phelps (Imp), a schizophrenic who sees a ghost from a painting with which she's long obsessed, Keirnan combines her lyrical style of writing with Imp's sometimes confused first person narrative. Note that I say confused narrative and not confusing narrative. It's Imp who's confused as she tries to figure out what's what and what really has happened to come to grips with her ghost and her life.

Despite Imp's unreliability, it's still easy to emphasise wit...more

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Mar 06, 2012 Paranormal Haven rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: reviews-by-beth-guest-reviewer

4.5 Stars

India Morgan Phelps or Imp is a schizophrenic who happens to see a ghost. In her mind it seems to tie in with a painting she saw as a girl, and soon she becomes obsessed. She struggles to find reality in this memoir.

The Drowning Girl is a novel that borders heavily in horror, not for any gross atrocity, but the spiraling loss and challenges of Imp’s mind. It starts with Imp trying to tell her ghost story. Imp tells us of her past, and the curse of insanity that haunts her family. The fa...more 4.5 Stars

India Morgan Phelps or Imp is a schizophrenic who happens to see a ghost. In her mind it seems to tie in with a painting she saw as a girl, and soon she becomes obsessed. She struggles to find reality in this memoir.

The Drowning Girl is a novel that borders heavily in horror, not for any gross atrocity, but the spiraling loss and challenges of Imp’s mind. It starts with Imp trying to tell her ghost story. Imp tells us of her past, and the curse of insanity that haunts her family. The fact that it traveled from mother to daughter seems like a parallel for her own ghost. Many of these small facts Imp points out, and adds to the Gothic touch of the novel. Soon Imp introduces her transgender girlfriend, Abalyn who moves in with her after Imp after Abalyn’s girlfriend kicks her out.

To say I enjoyed it is an understatement. There are not many novels like this one. It is a novel that readers will love or dislike. Told as a memoir the narrative is heavy, and serves for a slow start. The slow start makes up for itself in the haunting words of Imp who struggles to find what is, and is not. There is an odd mix of fairy tales, old murders, and coincidences that unfolds in what feels like a full circle. Imp isn’t a trustworthy narrator, but admits to her dishonesty, and rarely holds back. At times I found myself wanting to put the book down and come up for air, but as hard as I tried I couldn’t look away. The prose is dark, wonderfully dark, and did I mention Gothic?

On one hand this is a ghost story, on the other it isn’t. It is all how the reader preserves it from the information given to us from Imp. She runs down the rabbit hole of her own haunting, or obsession, pushing away Abalyn who seems to hold her together. The facts and untruths swirl around feeling disjointed until a payoff that is well worth it. At the start Imp tells the reader that all things seem like circles, and this holds true, even at the end.

This is a tale that leaks out depth. Trapped in stories and paintings of the past, Imp brings them up front for the reader to decide what has happened to her. Told in a heavy narrative, it is unlike anything I have read before. It isn’t an easy light read, and might not be for everyone, but I truly enjoyed it. I would recommend it for those who like old gothic stories, dark fiction, or anyone that just wants to switch it up to something new. I will without a doubt be reading more of this author’s work.
- Beth (Guest Reviewer)(less)

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Sep 18, 2012 BurningYourBooks rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: bump-in-the-night, fantasy, glbt, gods-and-monsters, mind-fuck, audio-booked-it, in-the-company-of-wolves, dea-syriae

I can't tell you how good the twists in this one are. Caitlin R Keirnan writes the way most people experience dreams. Similarly it it impossible to talk about her books in the same way it is impossible to talk of dreams and have the subject retain it's integrity without reducing it to either inanity or a series or random disconnected images. Reading The Drowning Girl is an exercise in wakeful dreaming.

This is a ghost story, with a mermaid and a werewolf. Wait, no - it's a story where a siren bi...more I can't tell you how good the twists in this one are. Caitlin R Keirnan writes the way most people experience dreams. Similarly it it impossible to talk about her books in the same way it is impossible to talk of dreams and have the subject retain it's integrity without reducing it to either inanity or a series or random disconnected images. Reading The Drowning Girl is an exercise in wakeful dreaming.

This is a ghost story, with a mermaid and a werewolf. Wait, no - it's a story where a siren births a wolf cub. That's not quite right either. It's a story about ... two paintings, two painters, two women, four suicides, one murder and a black eye - typed by hand by a diagnosed, third generation, paranoid schizophrenic named India Morgan Phelps - Imp to her friends.

Imp takes pills three times a day and sees a doctor once a week. She knows she's crazy but for the most part feels fine. She's functional. She holds down a steady job, pays for her own apartment, paints in her spare time and lives, very happily, with her girlfriend. She's an unreliable narrator, sure, by virtue of her illness, but there is a chance, however small it might be, that what she's telling could be the complete truth. After all she's vindicated on more than one occasion throughout the novel, no matter how far away from this fact the story might drift and no matter how hard some characters might argue against it.

One night she decides to go for a drive and rounds a bend on a lonesome country road where she finds a woman named Eva standing completely naked in the dark. What follows is an absolutely terrifying Mind Trip into the darkest parts of cults and art that the human psyche (even an admittedly unreliable and sick one) can conceive. This story is a set of Chinese boxes inlaid with layer upon layer of the mystery surrounding the question - who is Eva? And who is Eva?

After finishing this I realized they may just have to invent another genera of fiction for it to go and sit in by its lonesome. It's like someone took Black Swan and mixed it with the original versions of The Little Mermaid and Little Red Riding Hood. Highly and cautiously recommended. Read only if you're prepared to be utterly, emotionally laid flat after finishing.
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May 04, 2012 Erin rated it 4 of 5 stars

This book...it kind of messed with my head. Kiernan goes above and beyond her usual dark/strange/horror/fantasy mix by making the protagonist, India Morgan Phelps (aka Imp) a schizophrenic. So she's unreliable before the "supernatural" stuff starts going down. Kiernan messes around with the narrator, sometimes using "I" and sometimes using "Imp." In these cases, Imp is usually berating I for dawdling in her storytelling.

Imp maintains that a haunting isn't so much being followed around by a ghos...more

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Mar 04, 2012 Julia rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: fantasy, fiction, arcs, urban

Sometimes I get migraines. They're often preceded by visual auras, little spots of light floating across my field of vision. When I'm reading, these spots tangle with the type, making words tantalizingly familiar but inscrutable.

Reading THE DROWNING GIRL feels much like that. The charismatic but unreliable narrator, like any true artist, is able to convey the feeling of her own insanity without unraveling it's mystery. As I read, trying to match dates and references to reality, I realized I was...more

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Mar 23, 2013 Beth Anne rated it 2 of 5 stars

i really wanted to love this book. i set myself up to rave about it....but i just can't. based on all the reviews i have read (here and otherwise), this book seemed to have all the makings of a story i would love. fantasy, female narrator, gothic horror and the promise of an incredibly talented author.

Caitlin Kiernan is a talented author. this much is true. there are words and paragraphs and portions of this novel that are so beautifully written they begged to be framed as art. but then there we...more

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Jun 12, 2012 Garry rated it 2 of 5 stars

CRK (who I assume is the author) says at the start of her novel... "This is the book that it is, which means it may not be the book that you expect it to be". Yep, she got that right.

I can't recall how I first heard about The Drowning Girl; maybe it was just from surfing the Goodreads site. It was obviously sufficiently positive for me to purchase it, even though I don't tend to gravitate towards 'dark fantasy'. I do know what I expected when I started it though: an easy-to-read piece of genre f...more CRK (who I assume is the author) says at the start of her novel... "This is the book that it is, which means it may not be the book that you expect it to be". Yep, she got that right.

I can't recall how I first heard about The Drowning Girl; maybe it was just from surfing the Goodreads site. It was obviously sufficiently positive for me to purchase it, even though I don't tend to gravitate towards 'dark fantasy'. I do know what I expected when I started it though: an easy-to-read piece of genre fiction. That's kinda what I was hoping for when I started reading it on the plane.

Pretty soon it became clear that this was a novel with lesbian themes. I don't know if I'd ever known this, but it did give me a surprise. So I started researching Caitlin Kiernan - such an interesting woman! She's obviously a smart cookie (a paleontologist), but has also had a complicated personal journey. It should have come as no surprise by this point that The Drowning Girl might be a little more complex than I'd imagined.

The narrator is a young lesbian named Imp who embarks on a solid anchoring relationship with Abalyn. She also has a much darker supernatural relationship with a woman (a thing? a fantasy?) called Eva. At its best, particularly at the beginning, the story is captivating. I was hooked very early on.

However, Imp is an unreliable narrator. She's a third generation 'crazy', a schizophrenic like her mother and grandmother before her, and reality gives way to fantasy. She lies to her readers, and admits to it without shame. After a solid start, the writing becomes increasingly scrambled. At its worst, chapters descend into gibberish. All this is intentional of course, and the book is somewhat successful in allowing the reader to get into the head of someone with a severe mental illness. Which is all very well, but it doesn't exactly make for an easy read - trying to extract the story from all the ramblings isn't a picnic.

By the end of the book, I wasn't really sure whether the dark fantasy/horror elements of The Drowning Girl were intended to be real, or whether they were depictions of the demons in a mad woman's head. That's not really a criticism: I actually liked the ambiguity.

What I didn't really like was the nature of the dark fantasy/horror elements - they teetered on the edge of being silly. I was hoping for a more menacing menace.

The Drowning Girl will definitely have its admirers, and in a way I'm one of them. It is certainly a novel that makes you think very hard. If I'd been prepared for this, and saved it for a time when I was eager to be challenged, I probably would have rated it higher.(less)

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Feb 24, 2012 Krystal rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: arc

India is schizophrenic and the reader will know her as Imp in the novel. She has a distinct and intriguing personality that a reader will either like instinctively or have a hard time connecting to. The story is told from her perspective in the first person, making it easier for the reader to get to know her. Imp will inform the reader of the "family curse" that seems to strike random females within her family tree. The reader will enjoy getting the facts on Imp's background and past. Imp is one...more

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Apr 29, 2012 Georgina Bruce rated it 2 of 5 stars

It seems harsh to give only 2 stars to a novel that is technically quite accomplished and which is not full of bad writing. But something about CRK's work just leaves me cold. It's a shame, because in theory, the subject matter of this book is right up my street - an unreliable narrator, ghost story, haunted painters, fairy stories, etc. But this didn't develop into... well, anything much.

The characters are unlikeable, pretentious and humourless. They are all so miserable you wonder how they ma...more

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Mar 21, 2013 David Church rated it 3 of 5 stars

This is a real hard review for me, because moments of this book is sheer brilliance and other moments of this book felt like work for me. I was having to work through nonsensical ravings of a mad woman and stories within stories which is how the author is portraying the main character written in the first person perspective. I can handle this and see the importance of this to the story arc but in smaller doses. I felt like skimming some parts like chapter 7 specifically where the POV character i...more

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Dec 22, 2012 Liesl Biddell rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it, click here.

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Nov 10, 2012 Robin Edman rated it 4 of 5 stars

This book is so immersive that you could almost drown in it, except that it does eventually come to a sort of end. It's so good in such an odd way that I will not be able to do a very good job of describing it to you. I kept expecting the story to go all "Shadow Over Innsmouth" on me, but it never quite did. The story is very eerie, narrated by a character who can't rely very hard on her own perceptions, as she has schizophrenia and a bad memory for taking her meds on a regular basis. The crafts...more

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Apr 12, 2012 Sara rated it 2 of 5 stars

This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it, click here. I'd like to think that I'm Caitlin Kiernan's biggest fan. I completely fell in love with her writing when I read Murder of Angels, which was the first book of hers that I had read. I think the thing that really pulled me in was her way of (pardon my language) scaring the absolute shit out of me at any given moment (I have actually thrown her books across the room and hid beneath the covers...I'm 32 years-old) and it isn't with demented clowns hiding under the bed or anything even remotely normal...more I'd like to think that I'm Caitlin Kiernan's biggest fan. I completely fell in love with her writing when I read Murder of Angels, which was the first book of hers that I had read. I think the thing that really pulled me in was her way of (pardon my language) scaring the absolute shit out of me at any given moment (I have actually thrown her books across the room and hid beneath the covers...I'm 32 years-old) and it isn't with demented clowns hiding under the bed or anything even remotely normal. What gave her her edge was that she wrote about the underbelly of fear. The things that hide in the remote wilderness of our brains and peeps out only occassionally because we really do believe it (vampires, fae-folk, sirens, Cthulu-ish creatures and even the clandestine Mother Nature) exists. She also tends to be a bit autobiographical. Add into that her folkloric twists and creepy history lessons (both of which are two of my own obsessive interests) and you've got your basic outline of a Kiernan story. Which brings me to my point. If you've read more than 2 of her novels, you begin to know her writing pretty much right off the bat. Not that that's a bad thing! I like that. It makes me feel like she writes just for me, something I believe I have said about her several times to my friends and co-workers. I've read just about everything she has written, including some collections of storys or novels that are out of print. And like all other authors whom you read from the start of their career and forward you notice that they grow (as writers). Wow, I am rambling. Okay, I say all of this because I suppose I wanted it to be clear that Caitlin Kiernan is my favorite author, so when I say that I didn't like this book very much, you'll understand why. And Caitlin if you ever read this please forgive me. ~ This story's components: a schitzophrenic woman, a mermaid/wolf/siren (including real and made-up folklore and even artwork described therein pertaining to the creature(s) mentioned), mass murder-suicides, trans gendered and lesbian persons and even a sex scene or two, were fine. Absolutely perfect. However, I feel like Ms. Kiernan was a bit lazy on this one, only because she used the exact same storyline (girl may or may not be crazy, girl is afflicted by some chronic disease, girl is writer, said girl meets typewriter, story begins as a confession of sorts and digresses til complete) Mainly girl, mental and/or physical issue, typewriter and story to tell. She also used ALOT of folkloric detail (which I tend to like because it makes the story all the more real) which she did in the Red Tree (which coincidentally is my favorite book ever). The digression in this book is unreal. It's a complete ramble, excpt a few thrown details...and it's kind of boring. Although I must give credit she did manage to scare me once or twice. Imp and her typewriter and her ghost story which isn't really about being haunted per se but haunted in a different way and so on and so forth. Then of course all the needed backstory and biography of Imp and her suicidal grandmother and mother...okay I get it. The part that confuses me is the mermais Eva versus the wolf Eva. In the end, which one is it for god's sake!? I understand, yes she was a siren, but was she a ghost? It just drove me insane that I stuck with this novel through all of the digressions and the only satisfying portion is when Eva actually comes to Imp and do what sirens do. And to find out that that may or may not have been all part of a pyschosis or psychotic break was really dissapointing. I honestly don't like it when I'm given a choice as to whether something was real or not. Dammit I want you to tell me! And hopefully whatever frightening apparitions we meet in the story were real, because well how great is this world without a little something scary? (less)

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“Ghosts are those memories that are too strong to be forgotten for good, echoing across the years and refusing to be obliterated by time.” — 12 people liked it

“No story has a beginning, and no story has an end. Beginnings and endings may be conceived to serve a purpose, to serve a momentary and transient intent, but they are, in their fundamental nature, arbitrary and exist solely as a convenient construct in the minds of man. Lives are messy, and when we set out to relate them, or parts of them, we cannot ever discern precise and objective moments when any given event began. All beginnings are arbitrary.” — 5 people liked it

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