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To Charles Fort, With Love
To Charles Fort, With Love is award-winning fantasist Caitlín R. Kiernan's third collection of short fiction, a haunting parade of the terrible things which may lie beyond the boundaries of science, the minds which may exist beyond psychology, and the forbidden places which will never be located in any orthodox globe. To quote the object of Kiernan's affection, meta-poet and arch-enemy of dogma Charles Hoy Fort, "The little harlots will caper, and freaks will distract attention, and the clowns will break the rhythm of the whole with their buffooneries—but the solidity of the procession as a the impressiveness of things that pass and pass and pass, and keep on and keep on and keep on coming." A deceptively even dozen, this collection includes Kiernan's celebrated stories "Onion" and "Andromeda Among the Stones," as well as a number of more obscure pieces. Though Kiernan was recently praised as "the new Lovecraft," these stories stand as testimony that she will never be merely the "new" anyone, that hers is a unique and demanding voice entirely unlike any other.
306 pages, Kindle Edition
Published October 17, 2022
About the author
Caitlín R. Kiernan
422 books1,704 followersCaitlín Rebekah Kiernan is an Irish-born American published paleontologist and author of science fiction and dark fantasy works, including ten novels, series of comic books, and more than two hundred and fifty published short stories, novellas, and vignettes.
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
August 30, 2023
Charles Hoy Fort's infamous work, "The book of the Damned" was first published in 1919, 86 years later this declaration of love comes out. In his book Charles Fort wrote, "By the damned, I mean the excluded."Kiernan replies in this preface "I would mark that as one of the single most powerful sentences in 20th-Century literature." And later, Neil Gaiman notes that Kiernan is "the bard of the lost and the Damned."
This is a collection of short stories written shortly after the author's debut novel Silk. So it is the early Kirnan we meet here. This is probably why Fort fits so well into this collection of texts about the forgotten, the lost. Because just like Fort, Kirnan works with that witch dos not fit easely on the map, that witch does not fit into our frameworks and is left out in the cold, to be damned. This is a recurring theme that the author still works with today. What makes it clear that this is one of the early works, is not any inability of the author, not any stylistic or narrative incompetence, rather this is a holy and masterful sense of all the skills of writing, no, it is the gothic tone that the author later backtracks from. And I love it.
Don't get me wrong, it's not your parents' Gothic, no doomed castles or pale noblewomen fainting on a Chaise Longue. Instead, we are met with a run-down urban landscape where sex is exchanged for drugs. Where the money is never enough to meet the rent and where The Cure and Bauhaus play in the background. But still, things are things that don't fit in.A child who goes down to the basement and finds a way into another world, not Narnia, but something much darker. Memories of a childhood and a lost sister in a therapy room and maybe she was murdered, maybe abducted by fairies A cursed painting and a mysterious statue. A classroom under a cemetery and a sabotaged palaeontological dig. Many of the characters we meet in the later novels and stories by the same author. And, as always, the weird elements are something that draws people's lives into themselves, two strands in the same text, the life of the characters and the darkness inside and outside. A black hole that attracts everything around it.
But the strange elements never, or rarely, take over completely. Instead, we enter a world like ours, and in dazzlingly expretionistic prose we encounter a world just like ours where people are excluded. Being condemned. But we don't stop at the noblewomen, we spend time with those who have been drawn into their web. In the shadow of abandoned castles lie equally abandoned industrial premises and underneath them underground passages. And having Kirnan as a guide there is a true delight.
This is a collection of short stories written shortly after the author's debut novel Silk. So it is the early Kirnan we meet here. This is probably why Fort fits so well into this collection of texts about the forgotten, the lost. Because just like Fort, Kirnan works with that witch dos not fit easely on the map, that witch does not fit into our frameworks and is left out in the cold, to be damned. This is a recurring theme that the author still works with today. What makes it clear that this is one of the early works, is not any inability of the author, not any stylistic or narrative incompetence, rather this is a holy and masterful sense of all the skills of writing, no, it is the gothic tone that the author later backtracks from. And I love it.
Don't get me wrong, it's not your parents' Gothic, no doomed castles or pale noblewomen fainting on a Chaise Longue. Instead, we are met with a run-down urban landscape where sex is exchanged for drugs. Where the money is never enough to meet the rent and where The Cure and Bauhaus play in the background. But still, things are things that don't fit in.A child who goes down to the basement and finds a way into another world, not Narnia, but something much darker. Memories of a childhood and a lost sister in a therapy room and maybe she was murdered, maybe abducted by fairies A cursed painting and a mysterious statue. A classroom under a cemetery and a sabotaged palaeontological dig. Many of the characters we meet in the later novels and stories by the same author. And, as always, the weird elements are something that draws people's lives into themselves, two strands in the same text, the life of the characters and the darkness inside and outside. A black hole that attracts everything around it.
But the strange elements never, or rarely, take over completely. Instead, we enter a world like ours, and in dazzlingly expretionistic prose we encounter a world just like ours where people are excluded. Being condemned. But we don't stop at the noblewomen, we spend time with those who have been drawn into their web. In the shadow of abandoned castles lie equally abandoned industrial premises and underneath them underground passages. And having Kirnan as a guide there is a true delight.
August 19, 2023
If you love short stories and a Lovecraftian sense of dread, this book might be the one for you.
All the short stories are thrilling and full of suspense, but the pacing was sometimes hit or miss depending on the story. I did enjoy that not all had clear endings, leaving a lot to the imagination - that works great with the general feel and adds to the atmosphere. There are also author's notes about each story providing context about how and when it was created or published, which I found informative.
A lovely collection, it just didn't have a special element to set it apart for me.
All the short stories are thrilling and full of suspense, but the pacing was sometimes hit or miss depending on the story. I did enjoy that not all had clear endings, leaving a lot to the imagination - that works great with the general feel and adds to the atmosphere. There are also author's notes about each story providing context about how and when it was created or published, which I found informative.
A lovely collection, it just didn't have a special element to set it apart for me.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews