Mea (partly) culpa

Caitlin R. Kiernan responded on her blog to a couple of points I made in my GMR review of her novel, Low Red Moon. (Her points come in the middle of a longer post.)

On the first point she raises, she’s one hundred percent correct: in praising her crafting of a keen sense of time-and-place in her novel, I referred to it as “summertime”, which is totally wrong. The book takes place in autumn. I really don’t have much defense here, since the time the book takes place really is pretty obvious and I darned well knew it. As she notes, the book’s very first sentences set the season, and the very last image of the book is of a character extinguishing the candles in the jack-o-lanterns the day after Halloween. I chalk that up to a slippage of the brain when I wrote the review, partly resulting from my Northerner’s idea that seasons in the South consist of Summer for ten months followed by two months of, well, “Not-Summer”. An error’s an error, and I regret it.

Her second point is a tiny bit harder: she takes me (slightly) to task because I faulted the book a bit on what I felt was a bit of non-clarity. I don’t want to get into specifics, but generally I didn’t find all of the characters’ motivations and desires as clear as they might have been, and there were a few points about the book’s denouement that left me going, “What was that about?” Kiernan says that a lot of that is actually intentional. Here, I suppose, I’d have to disagree with her slightly (although not that much). There’s a fine line to walk between leaving the unknown unexplained, and not giving the reader enough to share in the fear. I suppose this is because I don’t share Kiernan’s belief that the ultimate fear is fear of the unknown; I’d say fear of death for oneself or for one’s loves is worse. Of course, fear of death probably derives from death actually being the “ultimate unknown”, but even then I think explanation of the why’s surrounding a patina of death are important.

My feeling that things weren’t sufficiently explained isn’t because I didn’t get what Deacon and Narcissa and the other characters in the book were trying to do, but rather that I felt the background of all that was foggy: the book gives me a sense that these characters are just the latest entrants into a very ancient and probably unending struggle, but that struggle is never explored much. So to an extent, I felt sort of like if The Lord of the Rings had started with the Hobbits arriving in Bree, with none of the preceding stuff really explained. That’s not a very good example, but it’s the best I can come up with.

That sounds snarky, and I don’t really mean it to be that way, since I actually recommended Low Red Moon highly (and still do – I absolutely intend to read more of Kiernan’s work). I genuinely do appreciate the necessity of leaving things unanswered. I couldn’t have survived watching all nine seasons of The X-Files if I didn’t! But in this case, I do think that just a tiny bit too much was left unexplained.

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