The Red Tree -- Caitlin R. Kiernan
I keep thinking about this book. It is, frankly, a haunting novel. I think I’m gonna go ahead and start reading it again, because it practically begs you to do that. And it’ll be a different book the second time around, and I wonder what that book will be.
The Red Tree displays its literary influences proudly: Edgar Allen Poe, Shirley Jackson, H.P. Lovecraft, Stephen King. I’m sure there are others that I didn’t recognize, given my limited knowledge of the genre. And it does it without being a pastiche or derivative; instead Kiernan has created something entirely her own, distinctive. Sarah Crowe’s ordeal at the Wight farm, her bizarre relationship with the red tree, is so compelling, so haunting. It’s an effortless synthesis of classic horror and gothic elements. It also manages to be an emotionally gripping, deeply satisfiying postmodern piece of meta-fiction. It’s fricking amazing.
Kiernan takes the psychological ambiguity of Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House and runs with it. In Hill House, we’re not sure about the reality of Eleanor’s experiences; in The Red Tree, we’re not sure about the reality of the text itself. Like Eleanor, Sarah Crowe’s madness - or rather, mental state, since its not really clear if she’s mad or not - is symbiotic with the paranormal events of the plot. Each seems to influence the other. But in The Red Tree, reality is blurred to such an extent it calls into question the nature of the book itself. It’s a novel, which according to its own internal logic, is explicity not a novel. It begins as a diary, turns into a confession, and becomes a research paper at various points, as well as a record of dreams. Unless, as the fictional editor of the book suggests, it’s an elaborate hoax, in which case maybe the text Sarah Crowe created is a novel after all.
The editor adds another layer of complexity; she’s an intrusive presence who provides footnotes and arbritrary chapter divisions - “for the sake of convention”, she claims. Which could stand as a metaphor for the whole novel. The editor tries to make sense of Sarah’s text, Sarah tries to make sense of her lover’s suicide, Charles L. Harvey’s manuscript tries to make sense of the red tree. All these attempts to make safe and comprehensible that which is unknowable, to resolve the inexplicable, are doomed to fail. Kiernan’s editorial preface lets us know from the start that such attempts only confuse things even further. It’s not even certain that Sarah committed suicide, although the editor maintains that claim from the first page. “We know how she died” states the editor - except the reader of the book doesn’t know this at all. It’s never described. This book continually undermines what the reader assumes to be true and reliable. There’s a scene, towards the end, in the attic, that made my hair stand on end it was so unnerveing.
Significant parts of the novel are taken from-or at least correllate with-Kiernan’s own life. How much of the book is baldly autobiographical, and how much merely seems to be, is a question she dangles before the reader throughout the text. How much of Elizabeth Tillman Aldridge (to whom the book is dedicated) is in “Amanda”, her fictional counterpart? How do we tell the difference between facts and inventions? Reality, Kiernan seems to suggest, is entirely in the eye of the beholder.
Ironically, the atrocious cover for the book simply adds to the metatextual uncertainty. The cover is typical of a standard superficial urban fantasy; the book within it is anything but. Nothing is what it seems. The closer you get to the red tree, the more unreal the world becomes.