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This just might be the scariest book I’ve ever read. Reading it in January, along with Wylding Hall, makes for a great year of reading horror even if I don’t read anything else in that league for the rest of the year.
The Red Tree is one of my favorite horror genres, the “found manuscript.” This one is especially satisfying in that manner because it involves found manuscripts within found manuscripts within found manuscripts.
It begins with an introduction by the editor of deceased writer Sarah Crowe, explaining that the journal she kept in the last months before her suicide was mysteriously mailed to her. The editor then details her trip to the house in rural Rhode Island that Sarah had been renting when she died; she visits the tree that she says is often mentioned in the journal, but doesn’t dare go into the basement...
Is your skin creeping already? Mine was. But it gets exponentially scarier as it goes along. Similarly to Wylding Hall, this is the restrained, things-glimpsed-from-the-corner-of-your-eye, minimal gore type of horror. Which, to me, is nearly always the scariest kind.
Sarah rented the house on the pretense of finishing an overdue book which she’s completely blocked on, and also to escape from reminders of her ex-girlfriend Amanda’s suicide. She discovers after she’s already moved in that the house was previously occupied by Charles Harvey, a professor who also killed himself; in the extremely creepy basement, she discovers his unfinished work of nonfiction documenting the horror surrounding the red oak growing near the property, and also the typewriter and ream of onionskin paper he wrote it on. Using the same typewriter and same paper, Sarah begins a journal.
Then she learns that her landlord rented the attic of the house to Constance, an artist from Los Angeles. And that’s when things start to get really weird...
The Red Tree is incredibly atmospheric, beautifully written, and with an unusual, vivid main character in Sarah, who is hard to get along with and easy to love. It has the unusual quality of being both an easy read in terms of prose and extremely dense in terms of narrative complexity.
This is an extremely ambiguous book, which deploys multiple possible explanations, along with a total lack of explanation, to paradoxically satisfying effect.
Sarah is, at the very least, depressed. She has seizures, which can cause blackouts, and drinks despite medical advice not to. In her journal, she confesses to a number of lies in the past, in addition to sometimes outright claiming to have made up or fictionalized aspects of things she just wrote about. And, of course, she’s a fiction writer. In other words, she’s an extremely unreliable narrator.
But maybe she’s not that unreliable. There is a ton of local lore about that tree. Maybe it’s all true. But how reliable is the manuscript she finds? Sarah says she can’t find sources for much of what’s in it.
And then there’s Constance. She’s present for a number of the creepy supernatural moments. But there’s reasons to question her reliability, too.
This rundown makes the book sound like a “magic or madness?” type of story, but that’s much too simplistic. The Red Tree resists simple explanation, instead opening up layers and layers of horror, grief, obsession, history, myth, identity confusion, dreams, and art. It rewards close attention, and I’m sure it will reward re-reading, but not to find straightforward answers. There are none.
Huge spoilers below. I’d love to discuss this book and hear others’ thoughts on it!
There’s a lot of identity confusion and characters/themes echoing each other.
The long line of suicides: the timeslip woman Constance supposedly saved, Bettina the artist who was the lover of the man who became a serial killer to rescue her from the hellish underworld, Amanda, and finally Sarah herself. Not to mention the black-haired girl in the quarry pond, who almost certainly wasn’t a suicide but who did go under the water and never come up.
Sarah echoing Harvey: two writers living in the same house, writing unfinished books on the same typewriter detailing their dealings with the red oak. Sarah notes of both Harvey and herself that as writers, they are prone to digression.
Constance echoes Amanda so much that if she’s a real woman, and not a fictional version of Amanda, her ghost, an evil tree spirit mimicking her, or a grief-induced hallucination, at the very least Sarah is projecting a lot of Amanda on to her. She knows things that Constance can’t know, and Amanda does; her story about the timeslip suicide, in its fiction-worthy neatness, recalls Sarah’s lie to Amanda about the sea turtle in Greece. (Constance knows about the turtle, too.) She has the sexual allure and prickly brittleness of Amanda. And, of course, they’re both visual artists.
Constance also has jet-black hair like the quarry pond girl, and the red-brown eyes (what human has red-brown eyes) like terracotta clay (earth, mud like the mud she appears covered in during one of the most terrifying sequences), and like the wolves that are linked to the tree.
I was expecting Constance to turn out to have never existed, so it was unsurprising when the attic was uninhabited and had never been inhabited. In fact that was a bit of a relief: okay, she was definitely not a real woman. Then I re-read the introduction and discovered that she's not only real, but she really is a painter, the paintings Sarah describes are really hers, and there's no mention of anyone (like the landlord) contradicting Sarah's account of her being there. (She has art shown in Culver City, where I live!)
Suddenly Sarah seeing the empty attic became about 1000% creepier than when I assumed that Constance was completely unreal/supernatural and the empty attic was the reality.
It was particularly disorienting to be reminded, when I re-read the prologue, that "Amanda" was a pseudonym! We literally never even learn her name.
The early sequence where Sarah goes down to the tree alone and finds it totally normal and lies down on the rock and almost dozes off is unutterably creepy, even before she learned that the rock was possibly a sacrificial altar.
But not as terrifying as the part where Sarah finds Constance naked and covered in mud and talking about men with hammers, and then she hears a noise behind her, and then we never find out what she saw because she has a seizure while trying to write it up!
Or the HUMAN JAWBONE that turns up in Sarah’s jeans pocket.
Or the FUCKING DOGS that look in windows and turn up at the foot of her bed.
Sarah mentions "a hiding place I won't reveal here" where she put stuff... WHERE WAS IT?
What did you make of the “Pony” story? Or of the snippet of Sarah’s novel at the end?
ETA: Forgot to say what I think. I definitely think supernatural stuff was going on, and that it was shaped by Sarah's personal baggage.
My best theory is that Constance is real (she has to be, she literally exists in LA) and was there (Sarah accurately describes her paintings), but that a lot of what she did and how she was described was shaped by Sarah's perceptions and supernatural forces fucking with Sarah's perceptions. Which suggests that similar stuff happened to Constance - maybe she saw Sarah as an avatar of someone she left behind in LA?
I lean to believing that the lost picnic really happened, Constance naked and muddy really happened, and Constance left while Sarah stayed. The house/tree showed Sarah Constance's actual paintings, though they weren't physically present at that point. No idea about the blank canvases with the notes.
BOY would I love Constance's POV - now I'm tempted to request it next Yuletide.
This was the first thing I'd read by Kiernan, and now I want to read everything.
The Red Tree
This should win some kind of prize for most inappropriate cover. It looks like a standard urban fantasy, and it is not even remotely that. It needs a cover indicating literary horror. This sort of thing:
The Red Tree is one of my favorite horror genres, the “found manuscript.” This one is especially satisfying in that manner because it involves found manuscripts within found manuscripts within found manuscripts.
It begins with an introduction by the editor of deceased writer Sarah Crowe, explaining that the journal she kept in the last months before her suicide was mysteriously mailed to her. The editor then details her trip to the house in rural Rhode Island that Sarah had been renting when she died; she visits the tree that she says is often mentioned in the journal, but doesn’t dare go into the basement...
Is your skin creeping already? Mine was. But it gets exponentially scarier as it goes along. Similarly to Wylding Hall, this is the restrained, things-glimpsed-from-the-corner-of-your-eye, minimal gore type of horror. Which, to me, is nearly always the scariest kind.
Sarah rented the house on the pretense of finishing an overdue book which she’s completely blocked on, and also to escape from reminders of her ex-girlfriend Amanda’s suicide. She discovers after she’s already moved in that the house was previously occupied by Charles Harvey, a professor who also killed himself; in the extremely creepy basement, she discovers his unfinished work of nonfiction documenting the horror surrounding the red oak growing near the property, and also the typewriter and ream of onionskin paper he wrote it on. Using the same typewriter and same paper, Sarah begins a journal.
Then she learns that her landlord rented the attic of the house to Constance, an artist from Los Angeles. And that’s when things start to get really weird...
The Red Tree is incredibly atmospheric, beautifully written, and with an unusual, vivid main character in Sarah, who is hard to get along with and easy to love. It has the unusual quality of being both an easy read in terms of prose and extremely dense in terms of narrative complexity.
This is an extremely ambiguous book, which deploys multiple possible explanations, along with a total lack of explanation, to paradoxically satisfying effect.
Sarah is, at the very least, depressed. She has seizures, which can cause blackouts, and drinks despite medical advice not to. In her journal, she confesses to a number of lies in the past, in addition to sometimes outright claiming to have made up or fictionalized aspects of things she just wrote about. And, of course, she’s a fiction writer. In other words, she’s an extremely unreliable narrator.
But maybe she’s not that unreliable. There is a ton of local lore about that tree. Maybe it’s all true. But how reliable is the manuscript she finds? Sarah says she can’t find sources for much of what’s in it.
And then there’s Constance. She’s present for a number of the creepy supernatural moments. But there’s reasons to question her reliability, too.
This rundown makes the book sound like a “magic or madness?” type of story, but that’s much too simplistic. The Red Tree resists simple explanation, instead opening up layers and layers of horror, grief, obsession, history, myth, identity confusion, dreams, and art. It rewards close attention, and I’m sure it will reward re-reading, but not to find straightforward answers. There are none.
Huge spoilers below. I’d love to discuss this book and hear others’ thoughts on it!
There’s a lot of identity confusion and characters/themes echoing each other.
The long line of suicides: the timeslip woman Constance supposedly saved, Bettina the artist who was the lover of the man who became a serial killer to rescue her from the hellish underworld, Amanda, and finally Sarah herself. Not to mention the black-haired girl in the quarry pond, who almost certainly wasn’t a suicide but who did go under the water and never come up.
Sarah echoing Harvey: two writers living in the same house, writing unfinished books on the same typewriter detailing their dealings with the red oak. Sarah notes of both Harvey and herself that as writers, they are prone to digression.
Constance echoes Amanda so much that if she’s a real woman, and not a fictional version of Amanda, her ghost, an evil tree spirit mimicking her, or a grief-induced hallucination, at the very least Sarah is projecting a lot of Amanda on to her. She knows things that Constance can’t know, and Amanda does; her story about the timeslip suicide, in its fiction-worthy neatness, recalls Sarah’s lie to Amanda about the sea turtle in Greece. (Constance knows about the turtle, too.) She has the sexual allure and prickly brittleness of Amanda. And, of course, they’re both visual artists.
Constance also has jet-black hair like the quarry pond girl, and the red-brown eyes (what human has red-brown eyes) like terracotta clay (earth, mud like the mud she appears covered in during one of the most terrifying sequences), and like the wolves that are linked to the tree.
I was expecting Constance to turn out to have never existed, so it was unsurprising when the attic was uninhabited and had never been inhabited. In fact that was a bit of a relief: okay, she was definitely not a real woman. Then I re-read the introduction and discovered that she's not only real, but she really is a painter, the paintings Sarah describes are really hers, and there's no mention of anyone (like the landlord) contradicting Sarah's account of her being there. (She has art shown in Culver City, where I live!)
Suddenly Sarah seeing the empty attic became about 1000% creepier than when I assumed that Constance was completely unreal/supernatural and the empty attic was the reality.
It was particularly disorienting to be reminded, when I re-read the prologue, that "Amanda" was a pseudonym! We literally never even learn her name.
The early sequence where Sarah goes down to the tree alone and finds it totally normal and lies down on the rock and almost dozes off is unutterably creepy, even before she learned that the rock was possibly a sacrificial altar.
But not as terrifying as the part where Sarah finds Constance naked and covered in mud and talking about men with hammers, and then she hears a noise behind her, and then we never find out what she saw because she has a seizure while trying to write it up!
Or the HUMAN JAWBONE that turns up in Sarah’s jeans pocket.
Or the FUCKING DOGS that look in windows and turn up at the foot of her bed.
Sarah mentions "a hiding place I won't reveal here" where she put stuff... WHERE WAS IT?
What did you make of the “Pony” story? Or of the snippet of Sarah’s novel at the end?
ETA: Forgot to say what I think. I definitely think supernatural stuff was going on, and that it was shaped by Sarah's personal baggage.
My best theory is that Constance is real (she has to be, she literally exists in LA) and was there (Sarah accurately describes her paintings), but that a lot of what she did and how she was described was shaped by Sarah's perceptions and supernatural forces fucking with Sarah's perceptions. Which suggests that similar stuff happened to Constance - maybe she saw Sarah as an avatar of someone she left behind in LA?
I lean to believing that the lost picnic really happened, Constance naked and muddy really happened, and Constance left while Sarah stayed. The house/tree showed Sarah Constance's actual paintings, though they weren't physically present at that point. No idea about the blank canvases with the notes.
BOY would I love Constance's POV - now I'm tempted to request it next Yuletide.
This was the first thing I'd read by Kiernan, and now I want to read everything.
The Red Tree
This should win some kind of prize for most inappropriate cover. It looks like a standard urban fantasy, and it is not even remotely that. It needs a cover indicating literary horror. This sort of thing:
