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To the residents of her small southern city, second-hand store owner Spyder Baxter is crazy. But her friends and followers know better. Something lives within Spder's brain. Something powerful. Something wonderful. Something dangerous. Pray it never escapes.
Caitlin R. Kiernan, with Silk, shows that she possesses originality, power, passion, and magic far beyond what one could expect from a first novelist. Her voice is one of extraordinary resonance, deep sensitivity, and disturbing intensity.
The first one hundred pages of Silk introduce its characters: alienated young people -- musicians and freaks -- living on the ragged border of society. Urban punks and Goths, junkies and queers -- they are not charming bohemians who will appeal to those blithely comfortable with society. But for readers with an understanding of the misfit and sympathy for the outsider they are fascinating creations one quickly regards with acceptance and even affection.
The plot -- although intricately structured and clearly defined as the spiders' webs integral to it -- is as indescribable as music by Philip Glass, as impossible to synopsize as a Frank Zappa guitar riff. Music, in fact, is not only a metaphor, but an authentic and important part of the novel. Three of the main characters comprise the punk band Stiff Kitten. Mentions of an assortment of music from Tom Waits to Dead Can Dance become a soundtrack running through the novel. Set in Birmingham, Alabama, Silk pivots around Spyder Baxter, her companions and those who become ensnared in the web of her existence. Spyder is an enigma -- charismatic, spooky, psychotic -- haunted and powerful at the same time.
Spyder's home is a funky substitute for a decaying ancestral home full of family secrets. Since Kiernan's rich descriptive style often verges on the poetic, there is a sense of the literary Gothic pervading Silk -- although it's romanticism is replaced with Modernist perception and style.
As the story develops, the reader is never quite sure if its source is supernatural or madness. In this realm of the unknown Kiernan does not so much build suspense as evoke an atmosphere of fear, a miasma of uncertainty and dread. As Lovecraft knew, it is that atmosphere that most effectively creates the sensation we call "horror."
Inevitable parallels will be drawn with Poppy Z. Brite's Lost Souls, but just as apt are comparisons with the work Peter Straub. Like Straub and Brite, Kiernan is a vastly intelligent and superlatively imaginative. If Silk is the beginning of Kiernan's journey, we can anticipate a magnificent trip into the new millennium.
— darkecho.com
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Posted October 8, 2011
A beautifully written gothic tale that you won't be able to put down.
Was this review helpful? Yes NoThank you for your feedback. Report this reviewThank you, this review has been flagged.A dark story where there doesn't appear to be heroes or villains in a traditional sense, just people struggling against a horrifying element that is unbelievable and captivating at the same time. There is this quality of blended phrasing/wording that makes you reread parts just to get the meaning beyond what appears obvious. Her characters are believable as every day people, the horrors they face surprising with elements of the supernatural mixed with mental instability that drags you along trying to determine which is the real truth. Cheers for the dark and skittering!
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Posted May 13, 2003
SILK was one of the best books I've read in a while. I could not put it down. I grew so involved with the characters I felt as if the story was taking place in my own back yard.
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Posted April 5, 2000
Are you afraid of spiders? Well, this is one magnificently spidery book. Though the author is a master (or is that mistress?) of lyrical prose, exquisite characterization, mood, and subtext (quantum physics *and* Orpheus in one book!), Silk still manages to touch a lot of our most basic fears and takes full advantage of them. Kiernan's portrait of Birmingham, Alabama, as a brooding post-industrial wasteland is as chilling as the shadowy creatures that may (or may not) stalk its nights. The author's familiarity with the youth subcultures of the early 1990s adds another marvelous dimension to what may be the coolest spooky novel I've read since Poppy Z. Brite's Lost Souls. This novel *proves* once and for all that a book can be scary as hell *and* extremely intelligent at the same time. It certainly deserves the awards it's won and the praise its received from 'big name' authors like Clive Barker and Neil Gaiman.
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Overview
To the residents of her small southern city, second-hand store owner Spyder Baxter is crazy. But her friends and followers know better. Something lives within Spder's brain. Something powerful. Something wonderful. Something dangerous. Pray it never escapes.