Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #319805 in Books
• Published on: 2007-07-26
• Released on: 2007-08-07
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 384 pages

From Publishers Weekly
More conventional than Threshold (2001), Kiernan's atmospheric tale of cosmic terror, this horror thriller brings back psychic sensitive Deacon Silvey and paleontologist Chance Matthews, now married and expecting their first child. Deke reluctantly applies his psychometric skills at a crime scene and has a vision of an inhuman killer. About the same time, Chance begins hallucinating bleeding stigmata. The ominous significance of these portents come as no surprise to the reader, who has already been introduced, through intercut scenes, to serial murderess Narcissa Snow, a woman of seemingly supernatural pedigree who has fixated on Deke and Chance's unborn child as a blood offering to her gods. The novel unfolds in fast-paced chase sequences, first with Narcissa cutting a bloody swath to the Silvey home, and then with Deke pursuing Narcissa after she's abducted Chance to the place of sacrifice. The author tends to overdo the talk and action, though fortunately not at the expense of her effective evocations of the supernatural. Narcissa is a creature "snared between the unseeing world of men and the unseen world of monsters," and as she pulls characters into her sphere, they experience unsettling glimpses of horrors that lurk just beyond the borders of the ordinary. Vividly described, these moments give the novel unusual power, and make it a memorable expansion of the author's unique fictional universe.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Customer Reviews

Oh What Is The Land Of Dreams...
When a psychic tracks down a serial killer and saves a victim most would call it a job well done. But for Deacon Silvey it turns into a nightmare. Asked to do a favor for the Birmingham police, Deacon becomes the target of a dark hunt, facing both the revenge of the old ones and the hopes of another killer to fulfill a dream of ascension. Had he been the only target, Deacon might have been able to stand firm, but the demon with yellow eyes has a ritual to perform - on those that Deacon loves.

Deacon is an ex-alcoholic, trying to start a new life with Chance, his very pregnant young wife. When he seeks help with the dark visions that have begun to plague him, death follows his trail. Chance is a practical woman and a scientist - a paleontologist. She barely believes in her husbands powers and now finds she is having visions of her own. She is torn between her own bloody nightmares and her fears that Deacon will succumb to his own demons. A deep wedge is being driven between them and only catastrophe can follow.

My first encounter with Caitlen Kiernan was Silk, her freshman novel. While chilling and interesting in its own right, Silk pales beside Low Red Moon, Kiernan's third. The events of this novel would be terrifying on their own, but Kiernan has learned to blend subconscious fears and a modern mythology with echoes of Lovecraft into a concoction as suspenseful and doom-filled as anything I've read in years.

Dream and reality crisscross in splashes of blood, characters refuse to follow any stereotype, and the Southern gothic horror story gets an infusion of new ideas. Kiernan displays a command of language that transcends her chosen genre. The reader, of course, is the beneficiary, nose buried in a book that is both too chilling to read and impossible to put down. If this is your introduction to Kiernan, brace yourself, you will soon be hunting up everything she has written.

"HEY PRETTY! WANT TO TAKE A RIDE WITH ME?"
The moody and impressionistic "Low Red Moon," is Caitlin R. Kiernan's third, and best novel yet. This time out she brings back many of the Southern Gothic Birmingham characters from her previous novels and introduces them to an escapee from Lovecraft country, serial killer and psychotic Narcissa Snow. She wants to please and appease folks you would definitely not want to invite to your place.

But Narcissa, arrested adolescent that she is, wants to be in with this ghoulish in crowd (they apparently are headquartered in a strange house in Providence) and so she sets off Southward to Birmingham on a killing spree (all the while listening in her head to the voices of the people she killed), and an attempt to steal the baby of eight-month-pregnant Chance, from "Threshold," who's now married to recovering alcoholic Deacon Silvey. Narcissa wants to give the baby over to the in crowd as a ticket of admission. After many surprises, the chilling finale takes place back north in Lovecraft country as the sun sets and that low red moon rises on Halloween Night, 2001 a night when, as Ms. Kiernan assures us in her note in the front, the moon actually was full.

The author expertly blends standard slasheriana (Don't go out for a cigarette, Alice! Why isn't there a police car at the rear entrance? Will you just hear the guy out before punching him in the nose, Deacon? A dark and stormy night? Oh oh!) with her own unique visions and her intoxicating prose style (she writes of "old-fashioned lampposts along the street, gaslights with electric hearts") and brews up something rich and strange, fresh and piquant. She knows the concoction calls for certain required elements, but her garnishments are what make the difference. Its flavor will leave you spellbound.

Notes and asides: On p. 18 you'll learn why Ms. Kiernan has abandoned her trademark technique of running words together. The Low Red Moon, occurring as it does on the last day of the month, was also a blue moon. Not for children under 13.

Extraordinary!
I've been an avid reader of Caitlin Kiernan's work since her first novel SILK, but LOW RED MOON surpasses everything she's done previously. This is simply a brilliant novel, in every way. Though more mature than its predecessors, LOW RED MOON still delivers all those things we've come to expect from her. There is no one writing dark fiction today who has more skill as an author, and I can't wait to see what she does next!!