Review of 'Two Worlds and In Between: The Best of Caitlin R. Kiernan (Volume One)' on 'Goodreads'
3 stars
Kiernan is a writer who puts me in a difficult position. I really really love her and really really don't like her.
She is, without a doubt, one of the best writers I have ever read when it comes to description or establishing a mood. Her stories are CREEPY. I am not easily freaked out by books and I find everything she writes to be incredibly spine-tingling.
At the same time, I find her plotting to be simply terrible. Characters appear and then disappear with seemingly no relevance to the story at hand. Even worse, she just doesn't know how to write a good ending. One or two stories like this can be ok; nearly 600 pages of open ended stories (one of which is a novella, so there's really no excuse) makes for almost unbearable reading.
Kiernan touches on this aspect of her writing in her afterward to the …
Kiernan is a writer who puts me in a difficult position. I really really love her and really really don't like her.
She is, without a doubt, one of the best writers I have ever read when it comes to description or establishing a mood. Her stories are CREEPY. I am not easily freaked out by books and I find everything she writes to be incredibly spine-tingling.
At the same time, I find her plotting to be simply terrible. Characters appear and then disappear with seemingly no relevance to the story at hand. Even worse, she just doesn't know how to write a good ending. One or two stories like this can be ok; nearly 600 pages of open ended stories (one of which is a novella, so there's really no excuse) makes for almost unbearable reading.
Kiernan touches on this aspect of her writing in her afterward to the story, "Onion". She describes attempting to adapt this into a script, only to be told by the producer that she'd only written "half the story." It's a fair criticism.
So I don't quite know how to review her. To me, she is simultaneously the best and the worst of the new weird fiction writers. I'll keep reading her--i'm just not sure exactly why.
