People and paintings and animal bones appear and disappear proportions and distances are warped the brittle, chain-smoking protagonists labor under constant, sapping heat and suffer from surreal nightmares. The horror is creeping and primal, almost inarticulable. It’s a jagged, rattling, hurtful book, and incredibly atmospheric. I’m not quite sure what I was expecting when I started it (probably something more lushly Gothic, like Alabaster), but what I read wasn’t what I was expecting, and then it was better than what I expected. The Red Tree is one of the best books I’ve read all year, and I’ve already been itching to go back to it and let it screw with my head some more. And as there’s a red oak outside my window, I took a picture of it looking appropriately old, red, and potentially carnivorous at about the same time that I finished the book: Kiernan‘s The Red Tree than do anything else. It’s raining, my socks are wet, and for these reasons I think I’d rather finish up my long-overdue review of Caitlín R. Date read: 10.31.09 (unintentional, but awesome)
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