The Drowning Girl by Caitlín R. Kiernan
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This one is dark and haunting, half a tribute to falling into art so deeply that it makes love to you and murders you, and half a deep treatise on madness and skirting the far edges of normality, all while feeling very much in one's own skin.

Most of the fun is simply trying to figure out whether it's a ghost story, a Ghost Story, or the ghost of a story, disjointed and cast adrift in time and faulty memory.

It's quite the interesting maze. Parts of the later novel is dreamlike and calls on us to reimagine all that had gone on before. It requires a bit of reflection, honestly, but even though this appears, at first glance, to be a quick and easy haunting of a novel, the truth is a bit more murky. Like looking into a disturbed pool of water and seeing yourself in the muddy swirls.

Then again, perhaps the wolves are real, Miss Riding Hood.

There's lots of symbolism and analysis in the novel, but no worries, almost all the work is done for us. It's the threads snaking in-between that require effort. :)

View all my reviews