The Drowning Girl [Paperback]

"The Drowning Girl" is a book that doesn't fit neatly into any category -- it's a haunting, dreamlike novel awash in mermaids, werewolves, fairy tales, art and schizophrenia. Caitlin Kiernan is at the peak of her wordcrafting powers in this story, weaving together a truly spellbinding fantasy in which nothing is quite as it seems.

Schizophrenia runs in India Morgan Phelp's (aka Imp) family. Her mother committed suicide because of it, and she still struggles on a daily basis -- especially since she can't trust her own memories. It also gives her some oddities, including a fascination with the Red Riding Hood fairytale, drowning victims and a painting called "The Drowning Girl."

But one night, she finds a naked woman named Eva Canning out by the river. Much to the dismay of her girlfriend Abalyn, Imp brings her home to shower off.

From then on, Imp is haunted by Eva Canning, who may be a mermaid, a werewolf, or two different women altogether. As her relationship and her sanity crumble, Imp must somehow put the fragmented pieces of her psyche together and discover the secrets of Eva Canning, and how much of this magical sea woman comes from insanity...

Reading "The Drowning Girl" is akin to slowly being pulled into a crystalline whirlpool, only to be just as slowly swept out onto a moonlit beach. Caitlin Kiernan immerses you into Imp's mind until -- like her -- you can't tell fantasy from reality, magic from madness. Memories are unreliable, truth becomes fluid.

The plot revolves around four very different women. Imp is a brilliant, fragmented woman haunted by countless things, and she's being tugged between the world of sanity (Dr. Ogilvie) and the world of enthralling, magical madness (Eva). The one rock in her life is Abalyn, a beautiful, feisty transsexual woman who loves Imp passionately despite her mental problems.

And Kiernan's writing is the most beautiful here that I have ever seen it -- lush, sensual and quirkily evocative (Imp's headache is "gremlins running around in my skull banging on pots and pans"). She spins up some spellbinding images with her words ("the pale, scale-dappled form of a woman bobbing in the frothing waves, her wet black hair tangled with wriggling crabs and fish").

But she also scatters it with sharp, glassy glimpses of Imp's madness, including a whole chapter written in a manic, hallucinatory style. She immerses you into Imp's mind until you feel all her uncertainty, her pain, her fragility. It's brilliant, but hard to read.

"The Drowning Girl" is a spellbinding, sea-scented depiction of love, madness and art -- and it will leave you feeling changed. Definitely one of the year's must-reads.

Review courtesy of All Things Urban Fantasy.

By the purest definition of the rating, THE DROWNING GIRL is indisputably 5bats. A few chapters in, I was already reading passages aloud to friends. I already knew who would be receiving my own copy, budgeting for who I could send others. This had less to do with any enjoyment of the book than a sense of haunting that perfectly mirrors the main character's own experiences. Does anyone else see what I see? Am I crazy, am I alone?

THE DROWNING GIRL introduces concepts and stories and images that are impossible to shake, and the thought of being able to discuss them with others is comforting. Even more so, the line between fantasy and reality is blurred more in this book than any other I've read. Which of the "facts" relayed by Imp are from our world, which from hers? While the fantasy elements of this story are arguably the product of Imp's illness, the way she expresses her story is so beautifully crafted as to make me doubt even that. This charismatic but unreliable narrator, like any true artist, is able to convey the feeling of her own insanity without ever giving me the sense that I had unraveled it's mystery. As I read, trying to match dates and references to reality, I realized I was falling into Imp's own habits, desperately trying to impose order on fragmented and flawed mind. Like Russian dolls, stories and paintings and quotes nest themselves into the narrative in a way that is as enthralling as it is inscrutable.

Kiernan creates a new definition for "haunting", while at the same time infecting me with the same. With so much discussion of different types of art (short stories, paintings, sculpture, content...), THE DROWNING GIRL delivers it's own message with a slight of the hand that is devastating. What part of this book implanted this haunted feeling? What page, what paragraph, has left me so shaken? Equal parts INFINITE JEST and ghost story, though THE DROWNING GIRL was not a restful read, nor the type of entertainment I normally look for in fantasy, it is most certainly unforgettable.

Sexual Content: References to sex, descriptions of oral sex and sex toys.

This is a ghost story, and this is not a ghost story.

How two things can be simultaneously true and real, true and factual, is at the core of this haunting (yes, literally) novel, Kiernan's latest forray into the weird and fringe. Imp--India Morgan Phelps--is a schizophrenic woman living in Providence, RI with her girlfriend when she finds a naked woman standing by the side of the road. She does what a any good citizen might, except that maybe she didn't--because she meets the woman Eva months later once again, as if it's the first time. We might chalk this up to the unreliable narrator, but Imp is so candid and clear that it would be hard to disbelieve her entirely. That's one of the strengths of this novel, that we think we can see the delusions for what they really are and divide them from the truth, while all the while Imp confesses her unsurety. Eva's uncanny presence and the tethering sanity of Imp's practical girlfriend pull us in yet more directions, elegantly blurring the truth.

Kiernan not only toes the line between "reality" and "delusion" (while asking what those categories really mean, I might add), she shaves that line so thin it all but dissolves, and like any razor's edge, it's sharp enough to cut you.

Certainly Kiernan bled into this novel. It positively drips with her devotion and painstaking effort, and yet the narrative voice is effortless. Is this a paradox? Perhaps so, but just as there are two Evas and two meetings, there are two authors here: the earnest and lonely Imp, and the haunting Kiernan behind her, puling all the strings until they snap. Imp is so real it hurts; she's not a character, she's a person, with all the attendant contradiction and doubt and yes, even humor. (It's a sort of blunt, naive humor, but amusing all the same.) The setting and the events are signature Kiernan, grim and gradual, building to some inevitable confrontation with the horror of the world. It's a subtle horror, mostly unseen, and as far as you can get from the Horror genre. And, as always, there's a bit of her horror of the real: Imp struggles to pay the rent, to pay her much-needed psychiatrist, to understand her transgender girlfriend who has likewise taken more than her fair share of society's abuse. Imp writes all of this, and Kiernan behind her writes all the terror and the magic of what Imp knew, and thought she knew, and wants to know.

I say magic, but there's only circumstantial evidence of that. Magic might just be the product of a broken brain's pieces lovingly heaped into some kind of sense; magic might be real magic, magic not tamed by magicians. As ever, Kiernan's work is a wild thing, going where it wants and le