Happiness Is...

[annuin]

Happiness is:

Finally* receiving a box from Subterranean Press with Caitlín Kiernan's The Dry Salvages, Low Red Moon and Poppy Z. Brite & Christa Faust's Triads.

More reading material for the pile, yay!






* From a pre-order dating back to 2004, with most items released in 2005. And it only took over a dozen emails, a letter, a fax and a message on their answering machine to finally receive it.

Comments

[leonatos.livejournal.com]

I read Kiernan's book Murder of Angels and didn't like it. Half Brite, half Gaiman and a game of "count the goth references" at the start. What are her other books like?

[tanthe.livejournal.com]

Her writing is a bit of an acquired taste at times I guess. I'm actually in the process of reading Murder of Angels (having a kid puts you way behind on reading). I've been reading her stuff since like 97/98 when she really started popping up on the scene. Her books have been described as "goth noir" sometimes, though I'm not always sure how I find that label, lol.

There doesn't really seem to be much of a middle ground with her writing, there are people who love it, and people who hate it. A lot of the hating of it seems to come from people's preconceived notions about how "likeable" characters should be, and how stories should progress and end and all that. And with the earlier books people had problems with her wordcrafting, as she would glue words together in descriptions.

I don't know, I guess I'm the wrong person to ask, lol. MoA is kind of one in a "series" so I would start with Silk, then Threshold, then <>Low Red Moon and then Murder of Angels. And then there are plenty of her short stories that touch on some of the characters in the novels.

Silk is certainly gothier than the later novels, just so you know.

Maybe a trip to the library (again?)?

[leonatos.livejournal.com]

Or a trip to the second hand bookshop where I got it. We in Ireland aren't as gothy as you in the U.S. (The scene has "huge potential for growth amd improvement" as they say in P.R.) so a lot of goth horror turns up there.

I wasn't put off by the likeability of her characters, but I did find the pace of the plot rather poor, a few places where things fast foward and it's hard to work out what happened in between, and the main thing was the style of prose, which seemed to me like a carbon copy of Brite. I enjoyed Brite's Exquisite Corpse though. Not to mention cheesy pulp vampire stuff from the 19th century onwards and the historic adventure novel as well.

[tanthe.livejournal.com]

What of Brite's are you comparing it to? EC?

Most of the Brite I'm reading is her current work, the Liquor books.

And Caitlín's earlier work has a different prose style. The newer work is more streamlined prose-wise I guess. I'm not much of a reviewer, heh. But I think there's a difference sometimes if you've been with an author from the beginning, or just stepping in there.

As for the scene... trust me, it's got room for improvement everywhere.

[leonatos.livejournal.com]

Yeah, EC. That's the only one of her books I've read so far. Most books come from that second hand bookshop, so go figure.

Well, actually it is practically non-existent in Ireland. There's no club night here in Galway and only one in the two biggest cities which play everything, and it is somewhat offputting. Plus I live in the third biggest city, and I'm the only goth I know and make regular contact(spookykids and doomcookies excepted). Granted, there are a few cases where they might be goth, and the fogeys, but that's it and I don't know any others.

Fuck it though. The local House/Funk pub is better then the local rock/metal place

[tanthe.livejournal.com]

We live near NYC and even there, in "the city that never sleeps" (oh, such a joke), the scene is pretty dismal. Lots of stories about the hey day in the late 90s and such, with clubs that are long gone now. You'd think that here of all places they'd manage to have a decent scene, but no.

Okay, not that I've been near a club since before Dashiell was born, but that's so beside the point :P

Back to books... EC is a 98/99 publication I think? so things have changed there a bit, mostly in subject matter. To the despair of some fans, Poppy has moved onto different subjects, stories set in the restaurant world. Personally, I've always enjoyed her writing, her style, so the change in subject matter doesn't bother me. I don't read certain authors solely because they write in a certain genre. There's the added bonus that I used to work in my cousin's restaurant, so there's a little bit of stuff that I recognise too. I can highly recommend her work from any genre really.

The book that got her the most reknown, Lost Souls, "the vampire book" clutched desperately by some spookykids, isn't my favourite of hers. I enjoyed it, don't get me wrong, but of the work she did in that period, Drawing Blood appealed to me more.

It's hard for me to compare current Kiernan with older Brite, because I haven't read Exquisite Corpse in quite a few years, and with both authors I've followed their stylistic and even genre progressions over the past 8 or so years, so it's a lot more gradual for me. Maybe if I read them shortly after one another it'd smack me in the face more... but I barely have enough time to get through the new books in my To Read stack, let alone re-read much, lol.