#caitlín r. kiernan

[bigcats-birds-and-books]

Books of 2023. AGENTS OF DREAMLAND by Caitlín R Kiernan.

I don't always match my books to my yarn, but when I do it's because they're both VERY Aesthetic™. (The yarn is Madelinetosh Twist Light in Cardigan, for those who are interested!)

[bormgans]

BLACK HELICOPTERS IN A PERFECT VACUUM - Kiernan (2013) & Lem (1971) + JMH Berckmans (2021)

A post collecting three short reviews: two about books I didn’t finish, and one in Dutch on a short posthumous work by J.M.H. Berckmans. A PERFECT VACUUM – Stanisłav Lem (1971) So far, my experience with Polish author Lem has been a 50% succesrate. I liked Solaris, and absolutely loved The Cyberiad – I even included it in my list of favorites. But both this and Fiasco were let downs. I will…

[arctic-hands]

I hate mass market paperback books so fucking much this book is barely twenty years old and it's so fucking brittle and the pages are so brown it's hard to make out the black ink without getting serious eyestrain

[treeroutes]

what's up ! non-exhaustive list of stories featuring weird plants :

The Day of the Triffids, John Wyndham

The Night of the Triffids, Simon Clark

In the Tall Grass, Stephen King and Joe Hill

The Boats of the 'Glen Carrig', William Hope Hodgson

The Man Whom the Trees Loved, Algernon Blackwood

The Red Tree, Caitlín R. Kiernan

Annihilation, Jeff VanderMeer

The Willows, Algernon Blackwood

The Nature of Balance, Tim Lebbon

'Bloom', John Langan

The Ruins, Scott Smith

The Wise Friend, Ramsey Campbell

'The Green Man of Freetown', The Envious Nothing : A Collection of Literary Ruins, Curtis M. Lawson

The Beauty, Aliya Whiteley

The Ash-Tree, M.R. James

Canavan's Backyard, J.P. Brennan

Invasion of the Body Snatchers, Jack Finney

The Hollow Places, T. Kingfisher

'Reaching for Ruins', Crow Shine, Alan Baxter

'Vortex of Horror', Gaylord Sabatini

Hothouse, Brian W. Aldiss

Vaster than Empires and More Slow, Ursula K. Le Guin

Odd Attachment, Ian M. Banks

Deathworld #1, Harry Harrison

The Bridge, John Skipp and Craig Spector

'The Garden of Paris', Eric Williams

Apartment Building E, Malachi King

The Seed from the Sepulchre, Clark Ashton Smith

Rappaccini's Daughter, Nathaniel Hawthorne

The Nursery, Lewis Mallory

The Other Side of the Mountain, Michel Bernanos

The Vegetarian, Han Kang

Sisyphean, Dempow Torishima

The Root Witch, Debra Castaneda

Semiosis, Sue Burke

The Wolf in Winter, Charlie Parker #12, John Connolly

Perennials, Bryce Gibson

Relic, Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child

Gwen, in Green, Hugh Zachary

The Voice in the Night, William Hope Hodgson

Ordinary Horror, David Searcy

The Family Tree, Sheri S. Tepper

The Book of Koli, Rampart Trilogy #1, M.R. Carey

Seeders, A.J. Colucci

Concrete Jungle, Brett McBean

The Plant, Stephen King

Anthologies/collections :

The Roots of Evil: Weird Stories of Supernatural Plants, edited by Michel Parry

Chlorophobia: An Eco-Horror Anthology, edited by A.R. Ward

Roots of Evil: Beyond the Secret Life of Plants, edited by Carlos Cassaba

The Green Man: Tales from the Mythic Forest, edited by Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling

Sylvan Dread: Tales of Pastoral Darkness, Richard Gavin

Evil Roots: Killer Tales of the Botanical Gothic, edited by Daisy Butcher

Weird Woods: Tales From the Haunted Forests of Britain, edited by John Miller

'But fungi aren't plants' :

The Fungus, Harry Adam Knight

Growing Things and Other Stories, Paul Tremblay

The Girl with All the Gifts, M.R. Carey

Mexican Gothic, Silvia Moreno-Garcia

Fruiting Bodies, and Other Fungi, Brian Lumley

'The Black Mould', The Age of Decayed Futurity, Mark Samuels

What Moves the Dead, T. Kingfisher

The House Without a Summer, DeAnna Knippling

Mungwort, James Noll

Fungi, edited by Orrin Grey and Silvia Moreno-Garcia

Trouble with Lichen, John Wyndham

Notes :

all links lead to the goodreads page of the book, mostly because i like to look at book cover art ;

list features authors/books that i love (T. Kingfisher, Silvia Moreno-Garcia, Ursula K. Le Guin, the collections from the British Library Tales of the Weird, etc.), but also a few that i don't like and some that i have not yet read ;

if upon seeing that list the first novel you check out is by Stephen King's you have not understood the assignment ;

not all of those are strictly horror stories, some are 100% science fiction (Brian W. Aldiss' Hothouse for instance).

[ultraviolet-divergence]

“I thought you might still put in an appearance, Sabit, so I got drunker & waited for a glimpse of you in the crowd. & there was a man sitting next to me, Harvey somebody or another from Chicago, gray-haired with a mustache, & he talked & I listened, as best I could hear him over the music. I think the music was suffocating me. He said, That’s my granddaughter over there, what’s left of her, & he pointed thru the crush of bodies toward a stitchwork hanging from the warehouse ceiling, a dim chandelier of circuitry & bone & muscles flayed & rearranged. I’d looked at the piece on the way in—The Lighthouse of Francis Bacon, it was called. The old man told me he’d been following the show for months, but now he was almost broke & would have to head back to Chicago soon. He was only drinking ginger ale. I bought him a ginger ale & listened, leaning close so he didn’t have to shout to be heard. The chandelier had once been a student @ the Pritzker School of Medicine, but then, he said, “something happened.” I did not ask what. I decided if he wanted me to know, he would tell me. He didn’t. Didn’t tell me, I mean. He tried to buy me a drink, but I wouldn’t let him. The grandfather of The Lighthouse of Francis Bacon tried to buy me a drink, & I realized I was thinking like a journalist again, thinking you dumb fucks—here’s your goddamn story—not some bullshit hearsay about chicanery among the snips, no, this old man’s your goddamn story, this poor guy probably born way the fuck back before man even walked on the goddamn moon & now he’s sitting here at the end of the world, this anonymous old man rubbing his bony shoulders with the tourists and art critics & stitch fiends and freaks because his granddaughter decided she’d rather be a fucking light fixture than a gynecologist.”

Excerpt from "A Season of Broken Dolls" by Caitlín R. Kiernan, originally published in 2007 by Subterranean Online, since collected in several anthologies

[nostalgebraist]

Rereading The Drowning Girl. It's so, so good. Forgot just how good it was

I haven't read anything else by Caitlín R. Kiernan. I should, though.

But she's written a lot, and most of it is billed as "horror" or "gothic" fiction in a way that would normally make me think "I doubt I would like this," if it were a different author. So it's hard to know in advance which of her other work would appeal to me, either in the same way The Drowning Girl does or in some other way. Advice on this would be welcome

[devotion-that-corrupts]

i saw the 2025 book bingo on my dash and wanted to fill it out as well :)

ohh i've got a bingo!! nice. i'll update it when i'll be able to check other entries, maybe. 👀

book bingo by @batmanisagatewaydrug

putting the list of books i read for the checked prompts under the cut bc it's a bit long

short story collection: the lottery and other stories by shirley jackson

20th century speculative fiction: of one blood: or, the hidden self by pauline hopkins

fantasy: the spear cuts through water by simon jimenez

published before 1950: the strange case of dr. jekyll and mr. hyde by robert louis stevenson

indie publisher: the very best of caitlín r. kiernan by caitlín r. kiernan, from tachyon publications

graphic novel, comic book, or manga: h. p. lovecraft's the shadow over innsmouth by gou tanabe, translated by zack davisson (it's a great adaptation btw, i quite enjoyed it)

animal on the cover: the last house on needless street by catriona ward has a kitty on the cover :) but is it really a kitty? who knows…

set in a country you have never visited: i mean, all of them. ig let me use this as another opportunity to brag that i persevered through the entirety of the complete works of h. p. lovecraft by h. p. lovecraft. i haven't been to us, or to the places where the elder ones used to dwell, or to the dream dimension ruled by the great ones (with the help of other gods, nyarlathotep, etc), or to australia

science fiction: i am legend by richard matheson

essay collection: the age of magical overthinking: notes on modern irrationality by amanda montell

horror: take your pick tbh. the woman in black by susan hill, to name one

historical fiction: the god of the woods by liz moore (the bingo's creator said this prompt was about reading something that takes place in the past relative to the time it was written. this book was published in 2024, and its events take place in 1975/1961, so it should count i think)

[jaxfromthatcircus]

✮ Get to know Coffee and tag 9 people you want to get to know better ✮

𝐅𝐀𝐕𝐎𝐑𝐈𝐓𝐄 𝐂𝐎𝐋𝐎𝐑(𝐒): Red, black, neon green

𝐅𝐀𝐕𝐎𝐑𝐈𝐓𝐄 𝐅𝐋𝐀𝐕𝐎𝐑(𝐒): MINT CHOCOLATE!!!

𝐅𝐀𝐕𝐎𝐑𝐈𝐓𝐄 𝐌𝐔𝐒𝐈𝐂: I Mostly rock and rock subcultures. My current favourite is Dani California by Red Hot Chili Peppers, but Muse, Queen, Korn, Linkin Park, Gorillaz and Against Me! are ALWAYS up there!

𝐅𝐀𝐕𝐎𝐑𝐈𝐓𝐄 𝐌𝐎𝐕𝐈𝐄(𝐒): Probably the Matrix!

𝐅𝐀𝐕𝐎𝐑𝐈𝐓𝐄 𝐒𝐄𝐑𝐈𝐄𝐒: Sonic Prime, Sonic Boom and Community

𝐋𝐀𝐒𝐓 𝐒𝐎𝐍𝐆: The Drug In Me Is You by Falling in Reverse

𝐋𝐀𝐒𝐓 𝐒𝐄𝐑𝐈𝐄𝐒: Doctor who marathon!

𝐋𝐀𝐒𝐓 𝐌𝐎𝐕𝐈𝐄: NIMONA. PLEASE WATCH NIMONA.

𝐂𝐔𝐑𝐑𝐄𝐍𝐓𝐋𝐘 𝐑𝐄𝐀𝐃𝐈𝐍𝐆: The Drowning Girl by Caitlín R. Kiernan

𝐂𝐔𝐑𝐑𝐄𝐍𝐓𝐋𝐘 𝐖𝐀𝐓𝐂𝐇𝐈𝐍𝐆: This video over some wine: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sIvKrC5HZ7s

𝐂𝐔𝐑𝐑𝐄𝐍𝐓𝐋𝐘 𝐖𝐎𝐑𝐊𝐈𝐍𝐆 𝐎𝐍: MORE blogs LMAO

tagged by the most wonderful @keykeepingbastardtm, thanks!! ;)

tagging || @pomni-xddcc @dh-pomni @ringmaster-pomni @ask-abstracted-kaufmo @askthequeen @gangle-ribbon shh its not 9 i know please

[aeondeug]

anyway tamsyn muir and caitlín r kiernan thank you for writing books with crazy bitches as your protagonists. they have been comforting to me in these trying times and also have gotten me to gradually go 'huh maybe this isn't how everyone lives'.

[hezenkoss]

Hi margot do you have a list you'd share of the Hugo and nebula women? This is so in my vein and I've been feeling the itch to read more sf again also I hope you enjoy the female man I thought it was a fun whirlwind

Here: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1JgcIyXqcOJbAqMjXKEsGgTRCRBGm6ksCInb6nqFdeao/edit#gid=0

I'm expanding this to women and nonbinary authors, which was less of a concern when I was just doing pre-1980 books, but a few more these days.

Authors with an asterisk next to their name means they won the award for that year.

For the 50s-80s I actually checked every author, since a few (like Andre Norton) used pseudonyms. For the 90s on, I got lazy and mostly just assumed gender based on first name (I know, I know) and only checked ambiguous ones. May or may not be entirely accurate, and there might be a few I have or have not deleted that should be. But it's probably most of them.

Nonbinary authors I am aware of: Caitlín R. Kiernan, Annalee Newitz, Shelley Parker-Chan, and C.L. Polk. And there may be more! I admittedly was not being super thorough.

I removed Yoon Ha Lee, who is the only trans man I know of who's been nominated, but I do love his books so I want to give a shoutout here to the Machineries of Empire series anyway.

Charlie Jane Anders, Rachel Pollack, and Ryka Aoki are the trans woman I'm aware of on the list, though again, there may be more.

The second tab has all winners/nominees, including for a few other awards. (I did delete one entry for association with the Sad Puppies nonsense.)

Also if you have trouble finding any of the books, let me know and I can probably help! I've managed to track most of the older ones down. (I've had good luck with archive.org and libgen for the long out of print.)

[lady-inkyrius]

I keep on being indecisive about this, so I'll just let Tumblr choose for me. I have had some of these books sitting on my shelf for a while but just never got round to reading (Schild's Ladder and Rocannon's World especially) while some are very recent acquisitions (like Time War).

The oldest book here is Steppenwolf (1927), while the newest is Serious Weakness (2022). The shortest I'm pretty sure is Invisible Cities, and the longest is probably either Lanark or Serious Weakness.

I considered putting Worm in here, but god I do not have the energy for that at the moment, and also the rest of them are all physical books that I own.

¹ When I say Rocannon's World, I'll probably end up reading the entirety of the Worlds of Exile and Illusion volume that it's in (It would be the shortest book by a lot otherwise).

[arctic-hands]

The book I'm using it in rn is a horror novel so like not even remotely thematically compatible

If I doodle on some Bristol board with some alcohol markers to make a bookmark, would the ink transfer to the book pages?

[nostalgebraist]

Some questions from a fan about TNC, if you're not sick of providing answers. 1. Was A Voyage to Arcturus in any way on your mind? 2. Some of Salby’s quainter locutions (“This sure is a doozy, sis”) sound more American than British -- can anything be read into this? 3. What can you recommend by other authors that imparts a comparable creeping feeling that all is not well with the world, even after you look up from the page?

(1) No, I'm not familiar with it. (2) When thinking about Salby and writing "his" words, I took inspiration from a bunch of different real-world writers. Henry Darger was one of them.

The "gee-whiz American kids' comics dialogue" derives from Darger, as does the gigantism of the in-story TNC, and various other things. (3) I rarely if ever get that feeling from fiction. I guess I did get it from Infinite Jest, but it's been over a decade since I read that book and I'm not sure I'd still recommend it.

But more generally, if you liked TNC, there's a good chance you would like The Drowning Girl by Caitlín R. Kiernan. It's really good, and similar in a lot of ways. (I hadn't read it when I wrote TNC.)

[rogerclarkaudiobooks]

"Weird Tales Magazine No. 367: The Cosmic Horror Issue"

Authors: Jonathan Maberry, et al. Narrators: Scott Brick, Robert Fass, James Anderson Foster, Heath Miller, Neil Hellegers, Roger Clark, Joe Hempel, Edoardo Ballerini, Eunice Wong, Simon Vance, Holly Adams, Chris Henry Coffey, Ralph Lister, Natalie Naudus Release Date: July 11, 2023 Length: 5 hours, 56 minutes

Overview:

The first issue in the second century of Weird Tales features a new HELLBOY story by Mike Mignola and Christopher Golden. Editor Jonathan Maberry has built a collection of cosmic horror that will destabilize your worldview.

Listen to a sample of Roger's contribution to this collection:

Weird Tales No. 367 includes a variety of stories by different authors and narrators.

If you are interested in the story narrated by Roger in this collection, the tale Night Fishing by Caitlín R. Kiernan is the one you're looking for. Or if you have an interest in another tale, author or narrator, check out the table below.

Weird Tales No. 367 is available from:

Apple Books ✰ Audible ✰ Audiobooks.com ✰ AudiobooksNow ✰ AudiobookStore.com ✰ Barnes & Noble ✰ Chirp Books ✰ Downpour ✰ Everand ✰ Google Play ✰ Hoopla ✰ Libro.fm ✰ Overdrive + Libby ✰ Rakuten Kobo ✰

[jllongwrites]

State of the Reader: Horrors and Terror

For reasons maybe related to my personal mental state, maybe related to the state of Everything, maybe both, I've been on a real horror reading kick the last several months.

OUR BLACK HEARTS BEAT AS ONE by Brian Asman

This was a horromance (horror-romance), which is a weird little genre I really love. Had an interesting blend of psychological suspense that shifted to more cosmic horror and gore in the latter half of the story. Also, the most Heterosexual Male (non-derogatory) thing I've read in a while.

THE KING IN YELLOW by Robert W. Chambers

A wonderfully weird collection of short stories filled with creeping dread, unreliable narrators, and a mysterious play that may or may not be cursed. (Only the first four stories involve the titular King in Yellow.) Published in 1895, the framing narrative for the collection is set in the futuristic year of 1920. Also, very unfortunately, begins with an unhealthy dollop of antisemitism and racism (DEROGATORY).

THE GREAT GOD PAN by Arthur Machen

A classic of cosmic horror, and rightfully so. Lots of reliance on implication and not directly naming the Unnamable Horrors, which personally I really dig, but mileage likely will vary. Book's treatment of women is ... dismissive, at best (derogatory).

THE RED TREE by Caitlín R. Kiernan

Author directly cited The Haunting of Hill House and House of Leaves as inspirations, among others, and it shows (non-derogatory!). If you like either of those books, layered and unreliable narrative structures, unlikeable but relatable protagonists, and/or lesbians, then this book is for you.