The Red Tree

I read Kiernan’s book only recently and found it entrancing. It’s a novel that defies any easy description. In a way, it’s about a grieving writer who takes up residence in an isolated house to try to recover from the death of her partner and to try to start writing again. Nothing more happens except her occasional drives to the local village and walks to the nearby red tree. But the book bursts with richness–with complex storytelling and, we slowly realize, with an increasingly unreliable narrator. As the narrator finds, reads, and transcribes a manuscript of local folklore she found… show more.

Kiernan is, without question, one of the best practitioners of dark weird fiction working today. I’ve been reading their work almost since I started writing myself and will happily – and gratefully – admit to the early influence on my own writing. While their short stories always held a greater attraction for me personally, The Red Tree is a powerful and ambitious novel that brings together everything I love about their work. Sarah Crowe is burned-out writer fleeing from all her life contains, including herself, and the old, isolated farmhouse chosen as a refuge proves to be precisely the opposite.… show more.

I love novels that take me deep inside a protagonist’s haunted brain. In The Red Tree the protagonist (Sarah Crowe) must use her haunted brain to make sense of a haunted landscape in the aftermath of her girlfriend’s suicide.

Yes, this is a dark book; an emotionally honest book about the nature of grief and trauma. It also seems to capture how it really feels when a person, minding their own business, stumbles into the paranormal. For example, we see Sarah seesaw between belief and skepticism. (Alas, in The Red Tree, both are fueled by paranoia.)