The Red Tree

The Red Tree, Caitlin R. Kiernan, 2009

This was recommended to me by a good friend whose tastes in books tends more towards the sci-fi, SF, horror and fantasy than mine.

This gothic horror novel is set in contemporary Rhode Island. The main character is writer Sarah Crowe, a novelist, and a failed one at that.  Her growing obsession with a sinister red oak near an old farmhouse in which she’s staying ends with her suicide (not a spoiler, we discover this in the first few pages).

The atmosphere Kiernan creates certainly is chilling, especially for one not familiar with the genre. However, I found the skipping between narrators to be distracting rather than illuminating. What I did love however, was the incredibly strong sense of place - this farm, this house, this tree, this dark and frightening basement. As Sarah’s world shrinks, so the tension builds. The horror here is abstract and unexplained – no grisly monsters or physical manifestations of our darkest fears – rather the damage we inflict on ourselves, and the disintegration of self that results as reality frays to breaking point.

I’m not a huge fan of horror, and don’t much like films of the genre either. If you’re like me, you might enjoy this list of 25 Things You Should Know About Writing Horror which includes such gems as:

1. At the heart of every tale, a squirming knot of worms

Every story is, in its tiny way, a horror story. Horror is about fear and tragedy, and whether or not one is capable of overcoming those things. It’s not all about severed heads or blood-glutton vampires. It’s an existential thing, a tragic thing, and somewhere in every story this dark heart beats. You feel horror when John McClane sees he’s got to cross over a floor of broken glass in his bare feet. We feel the fear of Harry and Sally, a fear that they’re going to ruin what they have by getting too close or by not getting too close, a fear that’s multiplied by knowing you’re growing older and have nobody to love you. In the Snooki book, we experience revulsion as we see Snooki bed countless bodybuilders and gym-sluts, her alien syphilis fast degrading their bodies until soon she can use their marrowless bones as straws with which to slurp up her latest Windex-colored drink. *insert Hannibal Lecter noise here*

…

5. We’re all afraid of the dark

We fear the unknown because we fear the dark. We fear the dark because we’re biologically programmed to do so: at some point we gain the awareness that outside the light of our fire lurks — well, who fucking knows? Sabretooth tigers. Serial killers. The Octomom. Horror often operates best when it plays off this core notion that the unknown is a far freakier quantity than the known. The more we know the less frightening it becomes. Lovecraft is like a really advanced version of this. Our sanity is the firelight, and beyond it lurks not sabretooth tigers but a whole giant squirming seething pantheon of madness whose very existence is too much for mortal man’s mind to parse.

Go and check it out – it’s very funny (See 12. Horror and Humor are Gym Buddies).