2016 read #34: Threshold by Caitlín R. Kiernan.

Threshold: A Novel of Deep Time by Caitlín R. Kiernan
259 pages
Published 2001
Read from April 23 to April 26
Rating: ★★★ out of 5

In recent months, or years rather, I've discovered a fondness for a certain school of early urban fantasy, the sort of thing that dealt with a magical underworld beneath the lights and nightlife of a familiar everyday city, but hadn't yet been codified into vampire romances and werewolf detectives -- a young and still-malleable subgenre, already developing its inevitable superstructure of cliches and conventions but not entirely shackled to it. I'm thinking of Emma Bull's War for the Oaks, Megan Lindholm's Wizard of the Pigeons, Charles de Lint's Ottawa novels. None of them vital literature, and I mocked them just as often as I praised them, but they satisfied a receptor I hadn't even known was there. Junk food fiction, but a highly specific sort of junk food, that left me with a highly specific craving.

Threshold is, broadly speaking, a Lovecraftian horror tale, a rote reworking of impossible geometries and formless horrors from beyond time, but it can also be seen as a successor of sorts to the sort of mid-1980s urban fantasy I listed above. What Bull does with the Twin Cities, or Lindholm with Seattle, or de Lint with Ottawa of all places, Kiernan sort of does with Birmingham, Alabama -- mapping local landmarks and a pervasive, lived-in sense of place onto a fantasy of ancient forces beyond human knowledge. Of course, Kiernan presents her eldritch Birmingham within a world methodically stripped of any sense of joy or tenderness. The emotional palette is one Lego Batman would recognize: black, or sometimes really dark gray. Every character arrives fully steeped in misery: The geologist loses her family, one by one, to car crashes and suicide and meaningless biological inertia, all in the first chapter. The psychic who wandered in from a Stephen King novel medicates against the horrors he has seen with profound alcoholism. The magical backwoods albino is on the run from extradimensional horrors that destroyed her own family. The goth girl who gets mixed up in everyone else's troubles is the closest thing to a ray of sunshine in the entire book -- until (spoilers!) she summons the non-Euclidean intelligences with some black paint in the city park, and gets sucked into an eternal hell-void for her effort. The whole thing starts to seem like the Aristocrats, but with misery and death and broken coping skills as the special acts.

After a while, that single-note threnody grows mockable, and at last simply dreary. I read half of the book in what amounted to a single sitting the first night, but after that point, as it became clearer that it was going to stick in the gear of misery and not accelerate to any kind of cathartic buildup, I just wanted it to be done. There is no narrative momentum: everyone starts out miserable, and pretty much stays that way; whenever something like rising action threatens to develop, someone thinks better of it and avoids confronting any issues for another fifty pages.

That's not even getting to the prose issues. Present tense always annoys me, especially when sustained for so long. And Kiernan here has a tic of randomly, unnecessarily cramming adjectives into Germanic compound words, usually at least once a page, sometimes as often as three times a sentence. Awkward conglomerations like preciousthin, licoriceblack, cybergreen, ghostvoice, gulfdeep, suddensharp. My diagnosis: Earnest young novelist trying to force a distinctive style into being. Prognosis: Annoying.

And also there's, like, trilobites involved, which is the entire reason I picked this book up in the first place. (My previous exposure to Kiernan, a short story reviewed here, did not motivate me to seek out more of her material.) For a while I was worried that Kiernan was trying to make trilobites themselves into the ancient unthinkable horror, which is just silly -- there is no possible way to make trilobites scary. Instead they're just, like, a symbol of human thought of the deep past, which is what the timeless abominations want to prevent, or something? I'm not sure.

I give Threshold some points for the evident ambition behind it, even if it doesn't quite land, and also for the emotional earnestness behind its characters, even if that becomes more wearisome than compelling toward the back half. It was certainly a memorable reading experience, I'll give it that much.