by Alex Dueben
“Sometimes I fall very deeply in love with a character I’ve created.”
– Caitlin R. Kiernan
Caitlin R. Kiernan made a splash in 1998 when her novel Silk was released. Since then, Kiernan, who was trained as a vertebrate paleontologist, has written a number of novels including Murder of Angels and The Red Tree in addition to becoming a prolific short writer with more than half a dozen collections. Besides the dozens of magazines and anthologies she contributed to, Kiernan also releases Sirenia Digest, a monthly collection of “weird erotica.” She also was the regular writer for The Dreaming, the comic series which spun off of Neil Gaiman’s Sandman.
Kiernan just released The Drowning Girl: A Memoir, a novel that is arguably her best to date. The book centers around a schizophrenic woman, the new woman in her life, a nineteenth century painting, myth, family history, memory and truth, leaving one pondering what is real and what is not.
This month Dark Horse Comics released the first of five issues of a new comic series, Alabaster, which stars Dancy Flammarion, a character that Kiernan fans know from the novel Threshold and short story collection entitled Alabaster. For the uninitiated, Dancy is a young albino woman who has been sent by an angel to hunt monsters in haunted corners of the deep South. We reached Kiernan at her home in Rhode Island.
Read our exclusive interview with Caitlin R. Kiernan on SuicideGirls.com.
