As Women in Horror Month draws to a close, today we turn our attention to the work of Caitlin R. Kiernan. Whilst Kiernan has been at pains to point out that she doesn’t consider herself a horror writer per se, she has provided regular contributions to the field of Lovecraftian weird fiction - one of the most recent being her novella Agents of Dreamland (and one of my favourite reads from 2017).
Like much of Kiernan’s work, Agents of Dreamland is oblique in terms of its resolution: its plot flows across multiple narratives with jumping - sometimes non-linear - timelines, not all of which necessarily intertwine and conclude neatly. But this being a work informed by the Cthulhu mythos, Kiernan’s discomposition of an anthropocentric narrative structure is incredibly effective in heigtening the unsettling and inhuman weirdness of the tale - whose elements involve the Signalman (represenative of a shadowy government agency investigating ostensibly alien phenomena), an interplanetary probe which disappears near Pluto, a contactee UFO cult, and intimations of humanity’s final passing. In all an excellent and beautifully-crafted work which exemplifies some of the new and challenging trajectories which Lovecraftian literature is following in the 21st century. Black Helicopters, a companion piece to Agents of Dreamland, is released in the UK this May.
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