If one gives a look online (and yes, you’re supposed to, I’ll explain why) would discover that Caitlín R. All this is at the same time simplified and complicated by a strong meta-narrative. Without another authoritative point of view the reader can only cling to the voice of the diary, trust it, and go through the most unnerving parts as in a first-person narration, making it quite effective. The basic form is the diary so everything comes through an unreliable narrator and a fragmented narrative that can leave gaps of days and then only re-interpret and fictionalize what happened. So it’s up to the reader to take an active role and second-guess and interpret/rebuild what is going on. The book is structured in a way similar to Danielewski’s House of Leaves, with nested texts, stories within stories, and dreams that leak into reality. What it achieves is about recovering the deeper and most powerful elements of that tradition and reveal that they are not dusty, opaque and antique, but still alive today, relatively uncompromised. It is not conceived or delivered as an homage or imitation, it’s not a book existing in a “shadow” of something else, nor it is one that uses conventions to break out of their prison and open on a new, “modern” world. “The Red Tree” is a supernatural, horror, psychological journey that borrows heavily from the long and solid tradition in the respective genres and whose best parallel in themes, atmosphere and development is Lovecraft. So I’ll do some cut & paste and restructuring. The biggest problem was that I wrote my comments just an hour after finishing the book and I started to understand the book better while writing those comments, which caused them to be even more rambling than usual. I usually adjust a few things after I post one but in this case I was less satisfied than usual because I gave too much importance to certain aspects and almost ignored others that I think are more important. Another attempt at polishing the review I’ve written.

The Red Tree by Caitlín R. Kiernan