This should be less a book of stories and more a collection of vignettes. Many of the works here do not follow the traditional narrative structure we associate with "story;" they describe an even, perhaps investigate some problem, but often times go nowhere near any kind of resolution.

This is not meant to be a mark against Ms. Kiernan's work here, as the craft and language of the works is lush, artful, and moving. Every story in this book is worth at least a read, and some are worthy of deep consideration. However, at times (especially in "Shambling toward the city of glass coffins") the language experimentation gets in the way of the reader. In the Author's Notes this is mentioned as a "superficial exploration of linguistic drift" but it is handled in such a way as to give no traction for investigation. In addition, the recurrent ham-handed way she deals with Japanese (a language I know) gives me little confidence in her treatment of Spanish or Chinese (languages I do not know). So.

At the very least, enjoy these as the works of someone who clearly and deeply loves language and the art of writing. ( )

Having enjoyed the stories of Caitlin R. Kiernan in certain horror anthologies, usually Lovecraftian, I opted to review this edition. My copy is an advance uncorrected proof of the hardcover.

There is an introduction in which the author chats about anthologies and hopes we will enjoy the fourteen stories here. Then there are thirteen stories. Perhaps the corrected proof had fourteen or an amended introduction. After the stories, there are some interesting notes about their origins and publishing history.

First up, ‘The Steam Dancer (1896)’ is the tale of Missouri Banks, who survived a bad childhood as a street urchin when her mother died and her father committed suicide in grief. She was rescued by a mechanic but had gangrene in one leg, one arm and one eye. A Chinese man designed a new eye and her limbs were replaced with steam-powered substitutes. She dances in a brothel to make money to pay back the kindly mechanic, now her husband. The story is mostly narration and relies on the quality of the writing and the atmosphere to bring it home. They do the job but in one way this is a misleading introduction to the book as the sex is between a man and a woman. No more of that nonsense from now on!

Unicorns are common in fantasy, as are demons out of Hell but the two are bought together in a sort of noir film style in ‘The Maltese Unicorn’. Natalie runs a bookshop but is funded by Harpootlian, the demonic brothel keeper. When the gorgeous Ellen Andrews turns up at the shop and tells Nat that Harpootlian wants her to go to Jimmy Fong’s Chinese Apothecary and pick up a passage it isn’t a great surprise. She is often asked to run such errands. Things get complicated when she finds Jimmy Fong dead. I don’t know what Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler would have made of this but I thought it was great fun.

The strange female creature appears in the next two stories. ‘One Tree Hill (The World As Cataclysm)’ has a science journalist investigating a lightning strike on a New England hilltop that blasted a tree and a house. Some creature speaks to her up there but she never dares turn to look at it.

In ‘The Colliers’ Venus (1898)’, Professor Ogilvy, curator of his own museum in Cherry Creek, a coal-mining town. He is recruited by his friend Dora to investigate strange happenings down the mine and the culprit is another female creature, black-skinned with blacker hair and a black tongue. As the boss of the Ogilvy Gallery of Natural Antiquities, he is used to thinking in geological time spans, which may help. Airships and other trappings make this steampunk of a sort but Kiernan carries it off better than most because she has the vocabulary to imitate 19th-century prose

Space is a good venue for monsters and the unknown. ‘Galápagos’ has the oft used opening of a first-person narrator in a lunatic asylum, a modern one and not so brutal as those in Victorian horror fiction. She was an astronaut on a mission to Mars and encountered strange creatures. Once again, a description of the plot doesn’t do justice to the power of the author’s writing and her ability to create a haunting atmosphere.

That skill is apparent again in ‘As Red As Red’, a slightly different take on the vampire legend that was maybe a little too long for its plot.

‘Hydraguros’ is Science Fiction again. This time it’s a low-life drug courier in a depressing future who keeps seeing people leaking silver. The story rolls along nicely carried by the first-person narrator’s lively language. This time he’s a male homosexual and ‘adult themes’ are touched on. I mention this only to warn readers who are put off by that kind of thing. As usual, the storytelling is reward enough for the time spent but I would have preferred a clearer ending.

‘Slouching Towards The House Of Glass Coffins’ is set on a future Mars, where life is hard and made harder by slave traffickers who raid settlements and take pretty girls captive. Nobody dares challenge the fierce Maafa usually but Alieka Ferenczi goes after them when they steal a girl called Muirgheal, who she secretly loves. This was excellent with a surprising twist and a satisfying conclusion. Kiernan is trained as a vertebrate palaeontologist and has had work published in scientific journals so she is perfectly qualified to write Science Fiction. Not that you need qualifications. ‘Slouching Towards The House Of Glass Coffins’ was my favourite in this book.

Like most fantasies, ‘Tidal Forces’ sounds dotty when boldly described. Emma and Charlotte live by the sea. After a strange incident, Charlotte has a hole in her torso, a black hole which doesn’t hurt but keeps getting bigger. Emma’s narration skips back and forth over about a week. Her assignation of different playing cards for each day while telling the tale is something I could have done without but it doesn’t spoil the story and the ending is terrific

‘The Sea Troll’s Daughter’ is sword and sorcery with a difference. The hero kills a troll that has been taking tribute from a village but as the defeated monster’s corpse is washed away in an undercurrent has no proof that the deed was done. The conqueror stays at the village, gets drunk and takes the barmaid to bed. Surprise, surprise, the hero is a woman named Malmury. The story breaks with convention in more ways than one and is quite an enjoyable sort of romp. According to the notes, the author rates it very highly and thinks it should have won awards. Can’t say I agree but it was pretty good.

One bad apple don’t spoil the whole bunch, they say, but ‘Random Thoughts Before A Fatal Crash’ was not my favourite by a long shot. Fairy tale obsessed artist Albert Perrault is apparently a recurring character in Kiernan’s fiction. He’s a homosexual who pursues rent boys and transvestites in the mean streets of Paris. Reasonably familiar with the mean streets of Paris, I enjoyed the first few pages as they bought back some interesting memories, not that I pursued the same activities as Albert. After a while, his perverse ramblings grated and eventually, I didn’t even finish the story. I guess when a writer does this ‘edgy’ stuff it’s bound to go over the edge for some readers.

The book concludes with the title story ‘The Ape’s Wife’ which is about Ann Darrow, the blonde with whom mighty Kong fell in love. In a sort of dream sequence, we follow Ann through several alternative futures after Kong before finally settling on the ‘real’ one. It’s hard to tell what’s real in this sort of tale. The notes say that this was voted ‘readers favourite’ for 2007 when it appeared in ‘Clarkesworld’ magazine. I don’t agree but my preference is for more traditional narratives, the types that become best sellers.

Caitlin R. Kiernan admits in the introduction she isn’t a best-seller and so has to write seven days a week to eke out a living. Practice makes her pretty damn perfect at it but there’s a limited market for fantasy, Science Fiction and horror, even if you can cast a spell like Lovecraft. Like him, she lays in on a bit too thick sometimes but she’s a very powerful writer, gets you in the gut rather than the head (not always pleasantly) so every story has an impact. Such powerful medicine is probably best taken in small doses, no more than one story a day or less and it won’t suit all tastes. Be warned, too, that strong language and frank sexual references are abundant and they‘re usually about the love that dared not speak its name once but now shouts it from the rooftops. Only the first story has heterosexual partners.

The prolific Kiernan is pretty well-known among short story readers by now and for anyone who likes her style, this volume is worth a look. It might please you, it might annoy you or even make you feel a bit ill but it certainly won’t bore you.

Eamonn Murphy
This review first appeared at https://www.sfcrowsnest.info/ ( )

*** The Steam Dancer
More of an introduction to a character than a story. Out in a Steampunk Old West, we meet Missouri Banks. She's had a hard life, but after being ill, abandoned, and left for dead, she had the luck to be picked up by a mechanic, who fitted her out with steam-powered prostheses. Now - although some people would find her situation intensely depressing, she retains a remarkable optimism. Although she's dependent on the help of her mechanic lover, she does seem to care for her. Although some people would regard her job as an exotic stripper as a dehumanizing freak show, she truly loves dancing...
Interesting piece, although not much happens. It felt very familiar; I'm not sure if I'd read it before, or read something with similar themes.
It's available for free, here: http://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/fiction/the-steam-dancer-1896/

**** The Maltese Unicorn
You know what the world was lacking, until now? A retelling of Dashiell Hammett's 'Maltese Falcon' with plenty of black magic and lesbian sex. Tongue-in-cheek, and very entertaining.

**** One Tree Hill (The World as Cataclysm)
The aesthetics of Lovecraft meet a modern-day sensibility, in this tale of a small-time journalist who becomes obsessed with a small-town unsolved mystery. Very nice.

*** The Colliers' Venus
A paleontologist's ex-lover, a hard-working, hard-talking miner, brings him in to investigate strange stories of 'fossils' found living, encased in stone.

*** Galapagos
Previously read in 'Eclipse 3.' "A woman is summoned or sent on a mission to a possibly-derelict spaceship, because her lover may or may not be the only surviving crewmember. In store for her are horrors unspeakable - as we can guess, since the story is narrated from her bed in a psychiatric ward."

*** Tall Bodies
A strangely solitary woman, living in a small New England town, sees glimpses of strange beings. A mood piece with some nice ambiguity.

**** As Red as Red
A researcher, investigating reported cases of vampirism in 18th-century New England, meets an elusive and strangely compelling woman. Nicely eerie tale.

*****Hydraguros
A mobster's 'clean-up' guy lives a sordid life of drugs and violence - but he hides the nastier side of what he does even from his lover... and maybe even from himself. But he begins seeing weird glimpses of quicksilver... Gritty, but elegant and understatedly creepy.

**** Slouching Towards the House of Glass Coffins
On a bleak colony world, citizens live in fear of the Maafa - (a cult? gangsters? both?) who kidnap the young and beautiful, who are never seen again. One woman goes on a hopeless quest to rescue the object of her unrequited love from their headquarters. The story is full of unanswered questions - but they don't really need to be answered; they kind of become irrelevant.

**** Tidal Forces
Previously read in "The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year: Volume Six." "More horror than sci-fi, this reminded me a bit of Kathe Koja's 'The Cipher.' In both stories, a mysterious black hole appears, threatening to suck in all around it... Here, the atmosphere of threat and loneliness is built up quite well, and it's also quite effectively creepy - but the ending wasn't quite strong enough, for me." On a second read, I liked the ending better.

**** The Sea Troll's Daughter
An enjoyably subversive take on a classic 'dragonslayer' fantasy tale, with a romance between a hero and a bar wench.

*** Random Thoughts Before A Fatal Crash
A whoring artist relates some odd and disjointed experiences with mythic overtones.
(On a totally irrelevant note, I'd like to thank Kiernan for including lyrics from the 1930 song 'Brother, Have Your Got A Dime,' which suddenly explained a line in SoM's 'Lucretia, My Reflection...' (which I know the author's aware of...)

*** The Ape's Wife
The woman 'kidnapped' by King Kong explores different possibilities in different alternate realities, while lost in 'All-at-Once' time... and the story explores a lot of the fear and presumptions that 'King Kong' plays upon.


3.6 rounds up to 4.
( )

I had already read at least four stories, one as a Cervantean insert in Red Delicious,her latest urban fantasy novel; the other three, in her wonderful e-mail magazine. She thanks the subscribers to the latter for their help in keeping her psychologically and financially solvent. She is welcome.

She includes here stories of steampunk, urban fantasy, high fantasy, supernatural noir, cosmic horror, antiquarian horror, sci-fi horror, literary horror, and pop culture homages, most of them in the category of "weird," stories with dark fantasy elements but not the usual horrors of ghosts or werewolves or zombies. She does one vampire story, but she does it her way. She has a very unique voice, despite her obvious debts to Algernon Blackwood and H.P. Lovecraft and Ray Bradbury. I don't really have a favorite in this bag of goodies but I will call attention to the title story, in which she has King Kong character Ann Darrow trapped in a place where she experiences alternative endings to her adventure. ( )

2.5 Stars ( )