So I was loaned a copy of this book from last year’s releases, and I felt a desire to remark on it as I’ve been in a bit of a blur of reading one book after another this last month (consequently, apologies for the long break in posts…I lost my grandmother in mid-July after a protracted illness and that sort of put a halt to clear thinking for a few weeks, appreciate as always your patience).

“The Red Tree” by Caitlin R. Kiernan is metafiction dressed as fiction; a strange melánge of dream, nightmare, biography and examination of the greater cosmic horrors that are often hidden behind the trappings of “old folksy superstitions.”

It’s daring writing, nothing less than you’d expect from as accomplished an author as Kiernan, and while it doesn’t always work in my opinion, it’s worth an attempt at reading through for anyone who wants to see something different from the usual romantic-vampire-clever-zombie pap that’s filling so many bookstore shelves these days.

The book is essentially the last journal and testament of now-dead pop author Sarah Crowe.  She apparently ended her life and her editor discovered this manuscript as the last days of her descent into something that could either be her private madness, or her discovery of a much darker and ancient power emanating from the titular plant that dominates the New England farmhouse property where she moved to try and finish her latest and long-overdue novel for her publishers.

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