Fruity Review

[bluegargantua]

Hey,

So I zipped through Blood Orange by Kathleen Tierney and Caitlin R. Kiernan.

Actually, let's stop there for a second. The book is really by Ms. Kiernan. Ms. Tierney is a pseudonym and it pretty much says so on the cover. I don't believe Ms. Kiernan has ever used the Tierney name before. I have no idea why anyone would go through so much effort to not actually conceal their identity. Seems like a huge waste.

Anyway, Ms. Kiernan writes some really nice, Lovecraft-tinged, New England-based horror fiction. I really enjoyed her book Daughter of Hounds. This book is quite deliberately her response to paranormal romance books (Buffy, Twilight, and half a dozen other series on the shelves). Sometimes the book is a little too crotchety about what it wants to set itself against, but when the book kicks, it really gets going.

Our protagonist is Siobahn Quinn, a runaway street kid and heroin junkie who discovers monsters are real and sets out to hunt them. She's doing pretty well right up until she gets bit by a werewolf and drained by a vampire and becomes the monster she hates. But an addiction to smack isn't much different from an addiction to blood and it doesn't take long for the moral justifications to set in. She still has to figure out what's going on and how to get back at the vampire who turned her.

Like I say, it's an engaging read. Quinn is an eminently unreliable narrator and kind of a terrible story teller. However, Ms. Kiernan actually makes that work -- an artful artlessness that still gets the story told with a modicum of back-tracking and mis-steps. As always, there's a wonderful sense of place (in this case Rhode Island and environs) and the characters are all interesting be they human monster or in between.

It bogs a bit when it's snarking on paranormal romance tropes instead of blowing them up through the story, but it was a fun read and certainly worth a look.

later
Tom

Comments

[ninjarat.livejournal.com]

I don't believe Ms. Kiernan has ever used the Tierney name before. I have no idea why anyone would go through so much effort to not actually conceal their identity. Seems like a huge waste.

Maybe. I usually see the writing as note for two reasons. The first is when an author or publisher wants to create a distinction between different writing styles or topics or simply to avoid saturating the market with a well-known author's "brand". Richard Bachman being one of the most well-known of the last type.

The second is when the publisher, rather than the author, owns the story and characters. Having both names gives the book a certain pedigree inherited from the well-known name while giving the publisher an easy way to change writers without changing the name on the cover.

[muffyjo]

So it's my understanding that she is a paleontologist and as such, probably wrote under a pseudonym so as to continue to be taken seriously as a scientist. Now that she is also taken seriously as a writer, it may behoove her to "come out" as it were. With being a transsexual as well, it may have originally been a better idea to only cross so many streams at one time. :) Just a thought.