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chloraminecolles's review against another edition
4.0
I'd just like to add my voice to the chorus, and confirm that the butt-ugly cover has nothing to do with the book itself, and the mismatch is astounding. As for the novel, it's by no means perfect -- the language is so-so, I had the impression that the author wanted to create atmosphere through descriptions, but they often fell short and felt uninspired, for example -- but altogether it's a deliciously weird and unsettling read, and it gets more and more engrossing as it goes on. Recommended.
naokamiya's review against another edition
5.0
CW:
Holy shit this was immensely fucking engrossing from the very first page to the very end and probably has finally solidified Kiernan as one of my favorite authors. My familiarity with their work has til now been entirely in short story format, but I've long considered them to be one of the most original and skilled contemporary prose stylists in the weird fiction genre based on the quality of their shorts alone; if anything is to be gleamed from "The Red Tree", it's that Kiernan's writing may flourish even more in novel format. This is intellectually and philosophically stimulating, cleverly constructed and detailed with the eye of a poet, and unexpectedly for me (as I very rarely expect to be frightened by horror, despite my love for the genre), genuinely fucking chilling. There is a goldmine of thematic and textural material to be mined from here, far more than I could possibly fit into a review after only a single reading, and this is a work that seems designed to reward rereads. But, regardless, here goes. (Also, spoilers abound; I find it difficult to talk about what I love about this book without discussing it in detail. I will try to keep actual story spoilers to a minimum, but with this kind of work it may prove difficult.)
The narrative of "The Red Tree" is built on several layers of metatextual deceit. At the beginning of the novel we experience the narration of a documentarian who investigates the death of Sarah Crowe, a speculative fiction novelist who had moved up to New England from Atlanta and rented a house on a storied property in rural Rhode Island known as the Wight Farm, where she would eventually commit suicide (congruent with a string of suicides related to former occupants of the home, dating back centuries). Said (unnamed) documentarian archives Sarah Crowe's diary stretching from the beginning of her short-lived stay at the home to the final entry before her death, and it is within these journal entries where we learn about Sarah as a person and the bizarre, inexplicable events preceding her suicide. Another layer to the foundation occurs in Sarah's entries proper, revolving around her discovery of an unfinished manuscript by the home's most recent tenant (also dead), which contains references to the mysterious red oak several yards into the property which has supposedly been the site of hysteria and allegedly preternatural intrigue for generations. Said manuscript is filled with references to historical events, excerpts from fictional and non-fictional works pertaining in some way to the folklore, citations existent and nonexistent, etc. Sarah occasionally pitches in to write down excerpts from the manuscript, and sometimes adds her own editor's notes, to contextualize further her experiences on the property and her life.
These are, of course, seasoned attributes of metafictional works, and seeing as clever and sharply conceived as its inclusion is, on its own this would make for an interesting novel. But there are further layers of metatext and narrative disorientation at work here, ones that go beyond sheer literary form. For one thing, Sarah admits very early on that she has no aversion to embellishment and that she will make things up or leave things out depending on what she is trying to express/contextualize, and that she is like anyone in that she cannot reasonably expect her memory to be faultless when recounting events. In addition to this, she's in an extremely bad spot in her life (as one could assume via her suicide), between the recent death of her girlfriend (with whom she had a volatile, toxic relationship), lack of connections and isolation, and a novel that just isn't getting written. Alone, this could be enough to make one wonder at the legitimacy of the disturbing supernatural experiences she has on the Wight Farm; the extent of how much of it is real and how much is a Sarah filling in the blanks with fantasy.
But going even further, there's also Sarah's fiction, and her status as a struggling novelist in general, to take into account. We know that Sarah is intimately familiar with New England and its local histories, traditions, and folklore, and also of the writers of its locale such as Lovecraft, whom she takes inspiration from in her writing, including many other classic authors of "weird fiction" (Machen is also mentioned several times as are others). The supernatural experiences she describes are distinctly odd and distinctly New England, suffused with that sense of regional awe and disquiet that comes in its wilderness and local legends. She even transcribes a short story she has written (unknowingly; you will know what that means in the book's context) into her diary, and in this story-in-a-story we can see where her literary influences lie. In context of Sarah's admittance to embellishment and exaggeration, are the unexplainable events detailed in her journal, is she deliberately creating a constructed fiction to act as some way to explain and give weight to her inner demons? Or is it all really happening, albeit with some lies and half-truths, and there's really no way to get an accurate map on what the real story of Sarah Crowe is, by the very nature of not only an unreliable narrator but, as Sarah posits at one point in the book, the very presence of any first person narrator?
But it gets even deeper than that (and it's only as I'm writing this do the "Alice in Wonderland" quotes at one point in the novel make a bit more sense). There's no doubt that, in some senses, the character of Sarah Crowe is autobiographical - the deep New England knowledge and the interest in archaeology and geography, the studenthood of Lovecraft and weird fiction, the struggles with the writing process - all things that Kiernan has talked about both personally and can be inferred through their previous works of fiction. The short story Sarah transcribes, "Pony", is itself a work Kiernan had written years before (and includes many of their recognizable trademarks) and included as part of this novel's metanarrative (and there's also a nod to Kiernan's anthology "The Ammonite Violin", which here is also written by Sarah and which she briefly finds a copy of in the local library). So is Sarah Crowe, in fact, Caitlin R. Kiernan? Is Kiernan constructing a layered story of fiction-on-fiction to come to terms with their writer's block and other issues? Very rarely do I find it acceptable to psychoanalyze artists (in fact I often find it repugnant), but here Kiernan is seemingly inviting this psychoanalysis, if not necessarily for others to do so as much as for theirself to do so. There's no doubting that, the more the layers of this novel are unraveled (in lieu of this I like the repeated mentions that the typewriter paper Sarah uses to write the diary is "onionskin", just as an aside), that this is a highly personal work and at least partially based on the author's own life. Reality and fiction weave over and into each other in a languid pattern of deceit and uncertainty, from the may-or-may-not-be reality of the supernatural phenomena to a metatext stretching as far as to include the real life of the author themselves. Reality is as fluid as fiction and in more senses than we realize, they may even be completely inseparable.
And even setting aside all that, regardless of how one personally interprets the reality or unreality of the events in the novel, I have to emphasize what I said in the beginning that this book, for me at least, is seriously fucking creepy. The supernatural events, however much is fabricated or however much is truthful, are illustrated with an unbelievable amount of sinister unknowability and dread, and add that to the paranoia of uncertainty and not knowing what to believe as well as Kiernan's incredible talent for poetic detail, and the imagery in this novel becomes seriously fucking powerful at establishing itself. The atmosphere of isolated, backwoods New England, in the vein of all the best stylists of weird fiction and all the best northeastern folk tales, is conjured masterfully by Kiernan's pen; the wilderness and its mysteries are chilling, beckoning Sarah and the reader to discover just what may or may not lie just beyond the bounds of perception. I got chills - actual goosebumps - at multiple scenes throughout this book, just because Kiernan is so skilled at tension and mining the fear out of the unknown, and every bizarre encounter in the book has so much weight that, if Sarah is completely fabricating it, she is doing an incredibly convincing job, where it's so vivid I myself would go "she can't be making this up". One scene in particular, involving a childhood memory of Sarah's involving an inexplicable encounter in the woods at a lake, seriously made it hard for me to sleep when I read it in the early hours of the morning before the sun had fully risen. I don't think I've ever read a novel that's made me as jumpy as this one and it's a very rare treat where I can come across a work of fiction that actually gets under my skin, especially one that does so with as much layers to that disquiet that this one provides.
This is one of the most engaging full length weird fiction novels I have thus far encountered and it has absolutely cemented my vague plans to read everything Kiernan has released. There's even more I want to say here from the poignant and empathetic grappling with Sarah's mental health, her vividly detailed relationships, and Kiernan's captivating lyrical prose style, but I think I'm going to save those discussions for further readings of this novel, because this book absolutely invites them, and this by a longshot won't be the only time I engage with this. I also suppose I have to mention the cover art, which is terrible, but I assume in no way Kiernan's decision, so I will just say this: ignore the misleading cover and engage with this for what it is, because this is some of the most vivacious and intelligent weird fiction you're ever going to find. Read it, read it, read it, and then read everything Kiernan has ever written, because they are at the absolute top of the line in contemporary speculative fiction.
"We speak in whimsy, or to children, and it all appears so uncomplicated, no matter how outlandish or monstrous a given scene may be. Me, I can't even seem to manage the tongue of madness without constant recourse to the perspective of reason, though I know it's long since ceased to be pertinent to my situation and circumstances."
Spoiler
suicideHoly shit this was immensely fucking engrossing from the very first page to the very end and probably has finally solidified Kiernan as one of my favorite authors. My familiarity with their work has til now been entirely in short story format, but I've long considered them to be one of the most original and skilled contemporary prose stylists in the weird fiction genre based on the quality of their shorts alone; if anything is to be gleamed from "The Red Tree", it's that Kiernan's writing may flourish even more in novel format. This is intellectually and philosophically stimulating, cleverly constructed and detailed with the eye of a poet, and unexpectedly for me (as I very rarely expect to be frightened by horror, despite my love for the genre), genuinely fucking chilling. There is a goldmine of thematic and textural material to be mined from here, far more than I could possibly fit into a review after only a single reading, and this is a work that seems designed to reward rereads. But, regardless, here goes. (Also, spoilers abound; I find it difficult to talk about what I love about this book without discussing it in detail. I will try to keep actual story spoilers to a minimum, but with this kind of work it may prove difficult.)
The narrative of "The Red Tree" is built on several layers of metatextual deceit. At the beginning of the novel we experience the narration of a documentarian who investigates the death of Sarah Crowe, a speculative fiction novelist who had moved up to New England from Atlanta and rented a house on a storied property in rural Rhode Island known as the Wight Farm, where she would eventually commit suicide (congruent with a string of suicides related to former occupants of the home, dating back centuries). Said (unnamed) documentarian archives Sarah Crowe's diary stretching from the beginning of her short-lived stay at the home to the final entry before her death, and it is within these journal entries where we learn about Sarah as a person and the bizarre, inexplicable events preceding her suicide. Another layer to the foundation occurs in Sarah's entries proper, revolving around her discovery of an unfinished manuscript by the home's most recent tenant (also dead), which contains references to the mysterious red oak several yards into the property which has supposedly been the site of hysteria and allegedly preternatural intrigue for generations. Said manuscript is filled with references to historical events, excerpts from fictional and non-fictional works pertaining in some way to the folklore, citations existent and nonexistent, etc. Sarah occasionally pitches in to write down excerpts from the manuscript, and sometimes adds her own editor's notes, to contextualize further her experiences on the property and her life.
These are, of course, seasoned attributes of metafictional works, and seeing as clever and sharply conceived as its inclusion is, on its own this would make for an interesting novel. But there are further layers of metatext and narrative disorientation at work here, ones that go beyond sheer literary form. For one thing, Sarah admits very early on that she has no aversion to embellishment and that she will make things up or leave things out depending on what she is trying to express/contextualize, and that she is like anyone in that she cannot reasonably expect her memory to be faultless when recounting events. In addition to this, she's in an extremely bad spot in her life (as one could assume via her suicide), between the recent death of her girlfriend (with whom she had a volatile, toxic relationship), lack of connections and isolation, and a novel that just isn't getting written. Alone, this could be enough to make one wonder at the legitimacy of the disturbing supernatural experiences she has on the Wight Farm; the extent of how much of it is real and how much is a Sarah filling in the blanks with fantasy.
But going even further, there's also Sarah's fiction, and her status as a struggling novelist in general, to take into account. We know that Sarah is intimately familiar with New England and its local histories, traditions, and folklore, and also of the writers of its locale such as Lovecraft, whom she takes inspiration from in her writing, including many other classic authors of "weird fiction" (Machen is also mentioned several times as are others). The supernatural experiences she describes are distinctly odd and distinctly New England, suffused with that sense of regional awe and disquiet that comes in its wilderness and local legends. She even transcribes a short story she has written (unknowingly; you will know what that means in the book's context) into her diary, and in this story-in-a-story we can see where her literary influences lie. In context of Sarah's admittance to embellishment and exaggeration, are the unexplainable events detailed in her journal, is she deliberately creating a constructed fiction to act as some way to explain and give weight to her inner demons? Or is it all really happening, albeit with some lies and half-truths, and there's really no way to get an accurate map on what the real story of Sarah Crowe is, by the very nature of not only an unreliable narrator but, as Sarah posits at one point in the book, the very presence of any first person narrator?
But it gets even deeper than that (and it's only as I'm writing this do the "Alice in Wonderland" quotes at one point in the novel make a bit more sense). There's no doubt that, in some senses, the character of Sarah Crowe is autobiographical - the deep New England knowledge and the interest in archaeology and geography, the studenthood of Lovecraft and weird fiction, the struggles with the writing process - all things that Kiernan has talked about both personally and can be inferred through their previous works of fiction. The short story Sarah transcribes, "Pony", is itself a work Kiernan had written years before (and includes many of their recognizable trademarks) and included as part of this novel's metanarrative (and there's also a nod to Kiernan's anthology "The Ammonite Violin", which here is also written by Sarah and which she briefly finds a copy of in the local library). So is Sarah Crowe, in fact, Caitlin R. Kiernan? Is Kiernan constructing a layered story of fiction-on-fiction to come to terms with their writer's block and other issues? Very rarely do I find it acceptable to psychoanalyze artists (in fact I often find it repugnant), but here Kiernan is seemingly inviting this psychoanalysis, if not necessarily for others to do so as much as for theirself to do so. There's no doubting that, the more the layers of this novel are unraveled (in lieu of this I like the repeated mentions that the typewriter paper Sarah uses to write the diary is "onionskin", just as an aside), that this is a highly personal work and at least partially based on the author's own life. Reality and fiction weave over and into each other in a languid pattern of deceit and uncertainty, from the may-or-may-not-be reality of the supernatural phenomena to a metatext stretching as far as to include the real life of the author themselves. Reality is as fluid as fiction and in more senses than we realize, they may even be completely inseparable.
And even setting aside all that, regardless of how one personally interprets the reality or unreality of the events in the novel, I have to emphasize what I said in the beginning that this book, for me at least, is seriously fucking creepy. The supernatural events, however much is fabricated or however much is truthful, are illustrated with an unbelievable amount of sinister unknowability and dread, and add that to the paranoia of uncertainty and not knowing what to believe as well as Kiernan's incredible talent for poetic detail, and the imagery in this novel becomes seriously fucking powerful at establishing itself. The atmosphere of isolated, backwoods New England, in the vein of all the best stylists of weird fiction and all the best northeastern folk tales, is conjured masterfully by Kiernan's pen; the wilderness and its mysteries are chilling, beckoning Sarah and the reader to discover just what may or may not lie just beyond the bounds of perception. I got chills - actual goosebumps - at multiple scenes throughout this book, just because Kiernan is so skilled at tension and mining the fear out of the unknown, and every bizarre encounter in the book has so much weight that, if Sarah is completely fabricating it, she is doing an incredibly convincing job, where it's so vivid I myself would go "she can't be making this up". One scene in particular, involving a childhood memory of Sarah's involving an inexplicable encounter in the woods at a lake, seriously made it hard for me to sleep when I read it in the early hours of the morning before the sun had fully risen. I don't think I've ever read a novel that's made me as jumpy as this one and it's a very rare treat where I can come across a work of fiction that actually gets under my skin, especially one that does so with as much layers to that disquiet that this one provides.
This is one of the most engaging full length weird fiction novels I have thus far encountered and it has absolutely cemented my vague plans to read everything Kiernan has released. There's even more I want to say here from the poignant and empathetic grappling with Sarah's mental health, her vividly detailed relationships, and Kiernan's captivating lyrical prose style, but I think I'm going to save those discussions for further readings of this novel, because this book absolutely invites them, and this by a longshot won't be the only time I engage with this. I also suppose I have to mention the cover art, which is terrible, but I assume in no way Kiernan's decision, so I will just say this: ignore the misleading cover and engage with this for what it is, because this is some of the most vivacious and intelligent weird fiction you're ever going to find. Read it, read it, read it, and then read everything Kiernan has ever written, because they are at the absolute top of the line in contemporary speculative fiction.
"We speak in whimsy, or to children, and it all appears so uncomplicated, no matter how outlandish or monstrous a given scene may be. Me, I can't even seem to manage the tongue of madness without constant recourse to the perspective of reason, though I know it's long since ceased to be pertinent to my situation and circumstances."
sandeestarlite's review against another edition
The book's narrator writers about how bored she is and how she's prone to digress and ramble. True enough! I was bored of her rambling.
megapolisomancy's review against another edition
4.0
Sarah Crowe, mid-list author of fantasy novels and short stories, has left Atlanta after a bitter breakup (culminating in the suicide of her ex-girlfriend) and decamped to the middle of nowhere in Rhode Island. Unfortunately for her (but fortunately for Kiernan’s reader), the house she’s rented has a troubling history that centers on an enormous red tree set nearby, linked to centuries of sacrifice, hauntings, werewolves, and death. Much of this history is relayed through - what else? - a manuscript found in the house. Things get even more complicated when Constance Hopkins, an artist, arrives and unexpectedly takes up residence in the attic of the house, and provides a catalyst for Crowe/Kiernan’s musings on the trauma of human relationships.
There’s a tinge of metafiction at work here - Sarah Crowe isn’t exactly Caitlin Kiernan, but she isn’t exactly not Caitlin Kiernan either - both authors/paleontologists who grew up gay in the Deep South, now transplanted to New England - and a story “by Crowe” (published previously by Kiernan) takes up the middle of the novel (and also the nadir of the novel), and Crowe mentions having authored at least one other story written and published by Kiernan in real life. As this is a descent-into-madness narrative in the Lovecraftian confessional mode (culminating in Crowe’s suicide), this sense of authenticity is effectively unsettling. Alienation and misery are constant themes throughout Kiernan’s work (and, therefore, Crowe’s life), and are constantly reflected here in Crowe’s physical isolation, with nothing but ghosts and her own imagination to keep her company much of the time. This is a brutally downtrodden story.
An epistolary work, The Red Tree opens with an introduction by Crowe’s editor, is mostly taken up by Crowe’s journal, has said short story interjected in the middle, and closes with an excerpt from one of Crowe’s novels. Crowe’s journal also quotes liberally from the manuscript written by the house’s previous occupant, an academic working on a history of the house and tree. The voice of the journal was my chief complaint with the novel - I suppose it’s possible that authors keep journals like this, but the prose vacillated a little too wildly between Kiernan’s usual lyricism and an overly prosaic/conversational tone (“And why the hell am I writing all this crap down? Oh yeah, boredom.”) I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention the rock-bottom intersection of those tendencies: an attack on critics and Amazon reviewers who complain about dream sequences in her fiction. Of course, it wouldn’t be an epistolary novel of weird horror if there wasn’t some degree of unreliability, so: how much of what Crowe is telling us is real? What’s supernatural, and what’s only in her head? Who really wrote that manuscript she found? How big is the basement of the house, really? Who wrote that short story? and etc. While I freely admit that I am a sucker for an unreliable narrator, I’m not entirely convinced that this sort of madness-versus-supernatural is ever entirely convincing - who reads things like this and thinks "oh, poor thing, it was all in her head" and opts for the mundane, less-interesting reading? This book, existing down in the gloom and the murk of Crowe's depression and misery, walks the line more convincingly than most, though.
That short story (which turns up in the house, although Crowe has no memory of writing it) is reproduced in its entirety as part of Crowe’s manuscript, and it is the definite low point of the novel - it combines Kiernan’s (good) tendency toward works that circle a never-clearly-delineated weirdness and her (bad) tendency toward the self-consciously outre and endlessly-squabbling couples. Kiernan’s characters, both here and elsewhere, tend not to have conversations so much as arguments of varying heat (and varying pettiness). It wears thin.
Complaints aside, this is a book that has really stuck with me. The protagonist of “Pony” at one points reflects on a ghost story “[m]ore like something an Arthur Machen might have written, or an Algernon Blackwood, something more mood and suggestion than anything else,” and The Red Tree is a worthy addition to this lineage. Its most obvious antecedent, though, is Oliver Onions’ “The Beckoning Fair One,” with its miserable, possibly-unhinged author protagonist and creepy house. Kiernan is one of the modern masters of this branch of weird fiction that largely avoids an explicit explosion of horror in favor of uncanny, inexplicable wrongnesses just beyond the narrator/reader’s perception/understanding (see, perhaps especially, her “The Long Hall on the Top Floor” (1999) and “Houses Under the Sea” (2006), which remains her greatest achievement).
I think I say this every time I comment on a piece of her fiction, but I find Kiernan to be incredibly frustrating. I think her interests in writing and my interests in reading are sometimes wholly compatible (ie unreliable narrators, descents into madness, everything in the above paragraph) and sometimes wholly incompatible (ie horror erotica, outsiderdom verging on solipsism), but rarely anything in between those two extremes. When she’s writing the sort of thing that I like, though, it is the sort of thing I really like.
PS - how about that cover?
There’s a tinge of metafiction at work here - Sarah Crowe isn’t exactly Caitlin Kiernan, but she isn’t exactly not Caitlin Kiernan either - both authors/paleontologists who grew up gay in the Deep South, now transplanted to New England - and a story “by Crowe” (published previously by Kiernan) takes up the middle of the novel (and also the nadir of the novel), and Crowe mentions having authored at least one other story written and published by Kiernan in real life. As this is a descent-into-madness narrative in the Lovecraftian confessional mode (culminating in Crowe’s suicide), this sense of authenticity is effectively unsettling. Alienation and misery are constant themes throughout Kiernan’s work (and, therefore, Crowe’s life), and are constantly reflected here in Crowe’s physical isolation, with nothing but ghosts and her own imagination to keep her company much of the time. This is a brutally downtrodden story.
An epistolary work, The Red Tree opens with an introduction by Crowe’s editor, is mostly taken up by Crowe’s journal, has said short story interjected in the middle, and closes with an excerpt from one of Crowe’s novels. Crowe’s journal also quotes liberally from the manuscript written by the house’s previous occupant, an academic working on a history of the house and tree. The voice of the journal was my chief complaint with the novel - I suppose it’s possible that authors keep journals like this, but the prose vacillated a little too wildly between Kiernan’s usual lyricism and an overly prosaic/conversational tone (“And why the hell am I writing all this crap down? Oh yeah, boredom.”) I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention the rock-bottom intersection of those tendencies: an attack on critics and Amazon reviewers who complain about dream sequences in her fiction. Of course, it wouldn’t be an epistolary novel of weird horror if there wasn’t some degree of unreliability, so: how much of what Crowe is telling us is real? What’s supernatural, and what’s only in her head? Who really wrote that manuscript she found? How big is the basement of the house, really? Who wrote that short story? and etc. While I freely admit that I am a sucker for an unreliable narrator, I’m not entirely convinced that this sort of madness-versus-supernatural is ever entirely convincing - who reads things like this and thinks "oh, poor thing, it was all in her head" and opts for the mundane, less-interesting reading? This book, existing down in the gloom and the murk of Crowe's depression and misery, walks the line more convincingly than most, though.
That short story (which turns up in the house, although Crowe has no memory of writing it) is reproduced in its entirety as part of Crowe’s manuscript, and it is the definite low point of the novel - it combines Kiernan’s (good) tendency toward works that circle a never-clearly-delineated weirdness and her (bad) tendency toward the self-consciously outre and endlessly-squabbling couples. Kiernan’s characters, both here and elsewhere, tend not to have conversations so much as arguments of varying heat (and varying pettiness). It wears thin.
Complaints aside, this is a book that has really stuck with me. The protagonist of “Pony” at one points reflects on a ghost story “[m]ore like something an Arthur Machen might have written, or an Algernon Blackwood, something more mood and suggestion than anything else,” and The Red Tree is a worthy addition to this lineage. Its most obvious antecedent, though, is Oliver Onions’ “The Beckoning Fair One,” with its miserable, possibly-unhinged author protagonist and creepy house. Kiernan is one of the modern masters of this branch of weird fiction that largely avoids an explicit explosion of horror in favor of uncanny, inexplicable wrongnesses just beyond the narrator/reader’s perception/understanding (see, perhaps especially, her “The Long Hall on the Top Floor” (1999) and “Houses Under the Sea” (2006), which remains her greatest achievement).
I think I say this every time I comment on a piece of her fiction, but I find Kiernan to be incredibly frustrating. I think her interests in writing and my interests in reading are sometimes wholly compatible (ie unreliable narrators, descents into madness, everything in the above paragraph) and sometimes wholly incompatible (ie horror erotica, outsiderdom verging on solipsism), but rarely anything in between those two extremes. When she’s writing the sort of thing that I like, though, it is the sort of thing I really like.
PS - how about that cover?
otherworlds's review against another edition
mysterious
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? No
- Loveable characters? No
- Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
2.0
This was honestly such a disappointment for me. In this book, Kiernan heavily overused quotes from other authors, and I felt like the plot itself was too derivative of House of Leaves yet without recapturing what made House of Leaves scary or good.
Also, the way Indigenous people were talked about in this book made me distinctly uncomfortable. It repeated some tired, racist horror cliches about ~scary, mysterious~ Indigenous folklore.
The ending was also so anticlimactic for the convoluted build-up I've been trudging through for over, what, two weeks? I don't even remember anymore.
Also, the way Indigenous people were talked about in this book made me distinctly uncomfortable. It repeated some tired, racist horror cliches about ~scary, mysterious~ Indigenous folklore.
The ending was also so anticlimactic for the convoluted build-up I've been trudging through for over, what, two weeks? I don't even remember anymore.
alexao's review against another edition
dark
emotional
mysterious
sad
tense
fast-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
3.0
beloved_paperbacks's review against another edition
I’m so sad! I wanted to like this one so much, but I feel like I didn’t fully understand this one... There is also a lot to unpack with The Red Tree, so maybe things will click in a few days when I’ve had time to sit with it. But I do have some thoughts for now:
The good:
• I loved that our main character is a lesbian and also has a disability! I love seeing diversity in horror!
• The creepy scenes were so well written and stuck with me!
• I love stories with an unreliable narrator & Sarah’s character was the most dubious character I’ve ever read. It was fun trying to pick apart what was real!
The bad:
• My biggest complaint about The Red Tree is the parts with the manuscript that Sarah finds in the walls. The font that the manuscript was written in was so hard to read, it pulled me out of the story. I get why it was done like that but it was *infuriating* and took me forever to get through.
• There were SO many stories within the story. I appreciated it at first but after a while, I just wanted the story to get to the point.
Overall, I feel like I need to reread The Red Tree. I felt a little underwhelmed when the story was over. I don’t think it’s the author’s fault, I just think that I didn’t get everything out of it like I was hoping to. Maybe the audiobook will work better for me!
The good:
• I loved that our main character is a lesbian and also has a disability! I love seeing diversity in horror!
• The creepy scenes were so well written and stuck with me!
• I love stories with an unreliable narrator & Sarah’s character was the most dubious character I’ve ever read. It was fun trying to pick apart what was real!
The bad:
• My biggest complaint about The Red Tree is the parts with the manuscript that Sarah finds in the walls. The font that the manuscript was written in was so hard to read, it pulled me out of the story. I get why it was done like that but it was *infuriating* and took me forever to get through.
• There were SO many stories within the story. I appreciated it at first but after a while, I just wanted the story to get to the point.
Overall, I feel like I need to reread The Red Tree. I felt a little underwhelmed when the story was over. I don’t think it’s the author’s fault, I just think that I didn’t get everything out of it like I was hoping to. Maybe the audiobook will work better for me!
gynocyber's review against another edition
2.0
an epistolary trudge thru fugue states and fallible memories ... reminded me a lot of stephen king tbh, especially the relentless intertextual referencing (aka namedropping) and obnoxiously voicey internal monologue. not rly sure what this is up to overall - it seems in large part like a way for the author to lash out at her critics. lots of grotty sex scenes as related by our miserable narrator. i kinda felt the same way about kiernan’s the drowning girl, which i dropped halfway thru
trebel's review against another edition
dark
mysterious
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
5.0
colls's review against another edition
3.0
The format of this book was interesting. It was written as a journal published posthumously following the suicide of the (fictional) author, which seems to serve as an excuse for the rambling tangents Sarah Crow goes through.
The tale was creepy and there were several sections which had me on the edge of my seat. I liked the way she teased out details about the tree's past. There were a lot of holes though, things that could've been explored a bit more and instead a bunch of seemingly unimportant details that added nothing to the story. I also didn't connect with the main character as much as I would've liked.
The tale was creepy and there were several sections which had me on the edge of my seat. I liked the way she teased out details about the tree's past. There were a lot of holes though, things that could've been explored a bit more and instead a bunch of seemingly unimportant details that added nothing to the story. I also didn't connect with the main character as much as I would've liked.