Book: Threshold
May. 20th, 2013 07:56 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
livAuthor: Caitlín R Kiernan (![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
greygirlbeast)
Details: (c) Caitlín R Kiernan 2001; Pub ROC Horror 2001; ISBN 0-451-45858-3
Verdict: Threshold is very good, but too scary for me.
Reasons for reading it:rysmiel recommended it to me strongly, even knowing that I don't really read horror.
How it came into my hands: I bought it when I was visitingrysmiel in Montreal years ago, and then didn't get round to reading it because I kept looking at it and deciding I wasn't in the mood for horror. And then rysmiel saw it on my shelves and persuaded me again that it's worth reading even though it's scary.
Actually in some ways I kind of wish I hadn't letrysmiel talk me into this book. It is very well written in a range of respects, but it is also too distressing for me. It's too horror-ish and too gory, but I would have put up with those things were it not for the fact that it's also quite upsetting on a realistic, psychological level in addition to the horror elements. There's multiple suicides in the first dozen pages, and I really do not deal well with vivid descriptions of suicide. I should say that I'm not complaining; rysmiel has been very successfully recommending me books for years now, they're really good at judging both what I'll like and what will be too much for me, and this is the first time they've picked something that's just over that line.
The thing is, the very high quality prose makes the descriptions of all the horrors and monsters all the more emotionally real. And Kiernan makes you really care about the characters, so it's all the more upsetting when their lives inexorably get consumed by evil. There's also a lot of real-world awfulness as well as the more obviously monstrous stuff, poverty and loneliness and social exclusion and alcoholism and violence. And it follows the common horror trope that encountering the horrific things drives the characters mad, only Kiernan portrays this as actual, realistic mental illness, not Romantic madness.
I think that's a lot of the strength of Threshold, actually. It's taking the obvious horror tropes and making them seem psychologically realistic, not stylised or melodramatic. There's a whole arc about the archetypal Lovecraftian "non-Euclidean" forms and Kiernan manages to make the idea of a non-Euclidean figure actually horrifying. The characters have realistic, plot-related reasons to split up and go into the dark scary tunnel separately, they're not just being gratuitously stupid to make the plot happen. Chance is a wonderful viewpoint character, she fits in the horror trope of a Man of Reason who tries to apply scientific thinking to the inexplicable goings-on, but you can really believe in her as a scientist and it feels emotionally real when her rational, empirical approach fails her because what's going on is just not rational. Part of howrysmiel sold me the book is that Kiernan herself is a paleontologist, and she really uses her background both to create a plausible scientist character and to imagine ancient monsters.
Apart from the fact that I found the book just too upsetting, I was not totally convinced by the character of Dancy; I am not sure if she's subverting the "creepy albino" trope or just perpetuating it. I did like the fact that the story gives Dancy's point of view as well as showing her through the eyes of the other characters, so she's at least sympathetic as well as creepy. But I did feel a bit uncomfortable about it. I also don't get the ending at all, or rather there seem to be two endings, one the obvious horror one where everything ends in doom, and then a kind of alternative ending, which isn't quite "and then it turned out it was all a dream", it doesn't undermine the book quite that much, but it does somehow cast doubt on the previous ending. I think possibly the alternative ending is even more creepy if less of a disaster, but I confess I didn't properly understand what was going on.
The writing is really beautiful, almost poetic, without being mannered or hard to read. Kiernan does have one rather annoying tic which is that she keeps running words together, especially adjectives, like uglyblack instead of ugly, black. Sometimes this is successful and creates a strong sense impression and a rhythmic sentence distinct from just using standard English paired adjectives, but when it's several times on a page, it gets irritating.
It's taken me a month to read Threshold, and it's not long, mainly because a lot of the time I just couldn't quite bring myself to pick it up and start thinking about such awful things. But if you like horror at all, it's a really good example of the genre, it's both genre-aware and very much in dialogue with the traditional horror tropes.
greygirlbeast)Details: (c) Caitlín R Kiernan 2001; Pub ROC Horror 2001; ISBN 0-451-45858-3
Verdict: Threshold is very good, but too scary for me.
Reasons for reading it:
rysmiel recommended it to me strongly, even knowing that I don't really read horror. How it came into my hands: I bought it when I was visiting
rysmiel in Montreal years ago, and then didn't get round to reading it because I kept looking at it and deciding I wasn't in the mood for horror. And then rysmiel saw it on my shelves and persuaded me again that it's worth reading even though it's scary.Actually in some ways I kind of wish I hadn't let
rysmiel talk me into this book. It is very well written in a range of respects, but it is also too distressing for me. It's too horror-ish and too gory, but I would have put up with those things were it not for the fact that it's also quite upsetting on a realistic, psychological level in addition to the horror elements. There's multiple suicides in the first dozen pages, and I really do not deal well with vivid descriptions of suicide. I should say that I'm not complaining; rysmiel has been very successfully recommending me books for years now, they're really good at judging both what I'll like and what will be too much for me, and this is the first time they've picked something that's just over that line.The thing is, the very high quality prose makes the descriptions of all the horrors and monsters all the more emotionally real. And Kiernan makes you really care about the characters, so it's all the more upsetting when their lives inexorably get consumed by evil. There's also a lot of real-world awfulness as well as the more obviously monstrous stuff, poverty and loneliness and social exclusion and alcoholism and violence. And it follows the common horror trope that encountering the horrific things drives the characters mad, only Kiernan portrays this as actual, realistic mental illness, not Romantic madness.
I think that's a lot of the strength of Threshold, actually. It's taking the obvious horror tropes and making them seem psychologically realistic, not stylised or melodramatic. There's a whole arc about the archetypal Lovecraftian "non-Euclidean" forms and Kiernan manages to make the idea of a non-Euclidean figure actually horrifying. The characters have realistic, plot-related reasons to split up and go into the dark scary tunnel separately, they're not just being gratuitously stupid to make the plot happen. Chance is a wonderful viewpoint character, she fits in the horror trope of a Man of Reason who tries to apply scientific thinking to the inexplicable goings-on, but you can really believe in her as a scientist and it feels emotionally real when her rational, empirical approach fails her because what's going on is just not rational. Part of how
rysmiel sold me the book is that Kiernan herself is a paleontologist, and she really uses her background both to create a plausible scientist character and to imagine ancient monsters.Apart from the fact that I found the book just too upsetting, I was not totally convinced by the character of Dancy; I am not sure if she's subverting the "creepy albino" trope or just perpetuating it. I did like the fact that the story gives Dancy's point of view as well as showing her through the eyes of the other characters, so she's at least sympathetic as well as creepy. But I did feel a bit uncomfortable about it. I also don't get the ending at all, or rather there seem to be two endings, one the obvious horror one where everything ends in doom, and then a kind of alternative ending, which isn't quite "and then it turned out it was all a dream", it doesn't undermine the book quite that much, but it does somehow cast doubt on the previous ending. I think possibly the alternative ending is even more creepy if less of a disaster, but I confess I didn't properly understand what was going on.
The writing is really beautiful, almost poetic, without being mannered or hard to read. Kiernan does have one rather annoying tic which is that she keeps running words together, especially adjectives, like uglyblack instead of ugly, black. Sometimes this is successful and creates a strong sense impression and a rhythmic sentence distinct from just using standard English paired adjectives, but when it's several times on a page, it gets irritating.
It's taken me a month to read Threshold, and it's not long, mainly because a lot of the time I just couldn't quite bring myself to pick it up and start thinking about such awful things. But if you like horror at all, it's a really good example of the genre, it's both genre-aware and very much in dialogue with the traditional horror tropes.
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Date: 2013-05-21 01:57 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2013-05-21 11:48 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2013-05-22 03:25 pm (UTC)