Howard Hughes Gets Her Second Wind. (Part Two)

[greygirlbeast]

Er...yeah. So. Anyway. There's also a pretty good review of Alabaster out from Publisher's Weekly. I quote:

ALABASTERCaitlí­n R. Kiernan. Subterranean (www.subterraneanpress.com), $25 (160p) ISBN 1-59606-060-3

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Hemingway Filter

[mackatlaw]

Allow me to run this review through my “Hemingway Filter” and turn it into newspaper style, with shorter words, concrete nouns, and action verbs. See what you think.

Dancy Flammarion, an albino teenager, speaks to angels and slays monsters with human faces in the backwoods of modern Georgia. She is the heroine of five linked stories in Caitlin Kierna’s newest dark fantasy collection, “Alabaster.” Kiernan introduced Dancy as a mysterious waif in her novel “Threshold” (2001). Since then, the Southern writer has crafted a cosmology where the girl, an agent for mysterious beings, fights small battles with large consequences. This could remind readers of “Buffy the Vampire Slayer,” only it’s totally different and should have discussed. Dancy may be delusional, hearing actual supernatural voices, or some combination of the two. Her patrons in monster-slayer quite possibly have self-serving motives, and she is far from glamorous in looks or background.

In "Les Fleurs Empoisonnées” (French for “Poisonous Flowers”), a family of female witches and animal-like ghouls takes her captive in their decaying mansion. Actually, the witches live in the house; the ghouls live below in the catacombs. “Bainbridge” shows Dancy’s efforts to exorcise ancient evils (are there any other kind? Not in Kiernan’s works.) infesting an abandoned church. There are other short stories in this collection that the review writer didn’t bother to talk about.