The Red Tree by Caitlin R. Kiernan

Wow. I was truly blown away by this insidiously spooky, goose-flesh-prickling ghost story/psychological thriller.

Caitlin R. Kiernan has 9 novels published so far. The Red Tree is her newest. She specializes in developing characters that are marginalized outsiders, lost, complex, confused, struggling, in pain, flawed, dirty, raw, and unfinished. She also does a great deal of research to create a richly detailed, multi-layered  story filled with fascinating references, historical details, and evocative quotations from classical authors.  Her writing is magnificent. She is able to describe places and events and evoke atmospheres and moods in a completely convincing manner.

The more I read, the more I was hypnotized by and sucked into the story, and into the world and experiences of the protagonist. I found myself forgetting that I was reading a journal written by a writer that was written about by a writer. I became tense and anxious and honestly frightened as the character herself felt those emotions. I worried for the character while she lived completely isolated in an ancient New England farmhouse, too bogged down by depression to write her next novel, pressured by a publishing deadline she will never meet, haunted by the ghost of her suicide girlfriend, increasingly obsessed with a wicked demi-demon-deity of a tree and a phantasmagoria of ghouls, werewolves and ancient spirits, and confused by ambiguous experiences where the lines between truth, fact, evidence, reality, memory, fantasy, fiction, nightmare, dissociation, and hallucination become completely blurred. By the end of the story I was as disoriented and uncertain as the protagonist as to what really had happened.

There are multiple narrative voices within this novel. It's sort of like finding a treasure box within a treasure box within a treasure box, a frame within a frame within a frame, or a reflection within a reflection within a reflection on and on into infinity. Reading this novel is definitely an "Alice through the Looking Glass" type of experience (which is heavily referred to and drawn upon in the novel.) There is the voice of the writer-protagonist, the voice of Dr. Harvey's academic manuscript which she reads (an anthropologist and folklorist who lived at the farmhouse five years before and who hung himself from the oak tree), newspaper articles and various historical documentation about the tree and other people in the past who had horrific and catastrophic experiences with it, a short story apparently written by the writer-protagonist but she doesn't remember writing it, the writer-protagonist's journal, exerpts from Poe, Lewis Carroll, and various other famous authors, and the writer-protagonist's editor who writes at the beginning of the novel after the death of the writer-protagonist. At the end of the novel is a note by Kiernan writing in her own voice about what inspired her story.

It isn't very often that a book is able to scare me anymore, but this book was successful. When I finished reading it, I was uneasy turning out the light and worried about what I might "dream" about.

Four Talons. A truly excellent novel. A real keeper. Now to find and read her other novels!

Caitlin R. Kiernan can be found on the following websites:
www.caitlinrkiernan.com
greygirlbeast.livejournal.com

Interesting trivia about the author:
Before Caitlin became a novelist she was trained as a vertebrate paleontologist.
She currently makes her home in Providence Rhode Island.