The Drowning Girl
After completing her 2009 novel, The Red Tree, Caitlin R. Kiernan had mentioned in her blog that she was considering not writing another novel. Writing the deeply-personal book had been a hard process that she wasn’t sure she could continue doing.
In the wake of The Red Tree’s publication though, another novel began to take shape. It was another highly personal story, and another journey into madness. It was also one of the greatest works by a truly genius author.
Kiernan’s style has become increasingly more polished over the years since her debut, but her voice is still distinct and could easily be picked up out of a line-up. Her signature poetic style and dark, brooding tone fill the book, and helps tell a story that only she could.
The narrative is not simple and linear. The story is told as a memoir, with snippets of short stories and frequent references to films and works of art that tie into the phenomena being described. Some chapters are broken into acts, while others are in the frantic style of a woman losing her grip. The narrator is a young woman who suffers from severe schizophrenia, and her stories often lapse into fantasies of her own making, causing the reader to question what is and is not real.
Our narrator – Imp – is being stalked by what she believes to be a ghost. The entity causes her to lose her grip on her already-fragile sense of reality, and puts enormous strain on the life she is creating with her girlfriend. To face the threat head-on, she tries to learn the truth about the apparition, while also trying to determine how much of the threat is of her own troubled mind’s making.
As Kiernan’s frequent readers have come to expect, the characters in The Drowning Girl are realistic and deeply-flawed individuals who the reader will find themselves rooting against, as often as they root for them.
There is nothing simple or predictable about the plot. It’s a book that should be read and reread, to fully understand every small twist and turn.
A common criticism of the book is that it is similar to The Red Tree. Both are about a slow downward slide, brought on by a subtle and gripping otherworldly influence, but they are far from the same story. The force that haunts the women in both books may very well read the same – all the more reason to read the two and compare – but The Drowning Girl is more of a spiritual successor to The Red Tree than a replica.
The Drowning Girl is a ghost story. It is a journey of self-discovery. It is a love story. It’s an account of mental illness. It is a peek into the dark corners of the subconscious. It’s all that and more, and it’s the kind of book that I cannot recommend highly enough.
