Although I had previously read and enjoyed several pieces of Kiernan short fiction, most of the stories in this collection were not my cup of tea.

What exactly is the difference between a love letter and a suicide note? Is there really any difference at all? These might be the questions posed by Dear Sweet Filthy World, Caitlin R. Kiernan's fourteenth collection of short fiction, comprised of twenty-eight uncollected and impossible-to-find stories.

This is my first experience with Kiernan's work. It was kind of hard making my way through this collection of twenty-eight short stories. Several of the stories were similar. The formula of the stories felt the same. Some of the writing felt out of my league, given the terminology for some of the subject matter. I had to grab a thesaurus on a couple of stories because I couldn't grasp the scientific terms being used.

With that being said, there are some great stories in this collection. Werewolf Smile, The Carnival is Dead and Gone, The Eighth Veil, and Interstate Lovesong (Murder Ballad No. 8) are just a few of my favorites. The stories touch on the strange, bizarre, erotic, and disturbing.

The writing is lyrical... sometimes too lyrical, making for a dull reading experience. I read one or two short stories at a time so that I wouldn't burn out on the collection.

3/5 stars!⭐⭐⭐

I received a copy from Netgalley.

This particular author is one of my favourites of dark and bizarre fiction. Most of the time I love her work, there are the odd ones that I really don’t like or get at all. This collection of short stories has been on my radar since I heard about it. I was thrilled when I got approved for it on Netgalley (a hardcover is nearly $30). After reading a few of the stories I knew I had to have a finished copy and I did purchase a finished Kindle version.

Stand out stories for me were:

Werewolf Smile – a narrator’s flighty girlfriend posing for a series of disturbing photos based on a Red Riding Hood theme. There was something so dark and powerful about the prose that made this story stick with me more than the others. First story in the collection.

Charcloth, Firesteel and Flint – this is about a dude who picks up a random girl hitchhiking and finds himself sharing her memories of violent acts throughout history. Very vivid and uncomfortable.

The Eighth Veil – I loved this one, I wanted a full novel of this one. A group of weird people gathering in a bar to watch some sort of stage show which seems to be an execution.

-30- This one is about a woman who receives an anonymous photo of some sort of monster – is it real? Where did it come from? Who sent it? What is it? An intriguing mystery though was a little disappointed with the end.

The Carnival is Dead and Gone – This was another favourite, dude and has friend visiting a carnival of oddities and freaks head into a special area where the strangest of creatures are held including some sort of quivering mass with theatricals that resemble a giant vagina following some strange sex act. It was another one that was quite uncomfortable but utterly compelling and erotic as it was disturbing. It feels wrong but you can’t take your eyes away. The audience of the show seemed to find it really erotic. Something like this should not be erotic, but it was and what does that say about the state of my mind?

Interstate Lovesong (Murder Ballard No 8) Two sisters who pick up randoms and kill them on their journey get a shock of their own when they pick up a girl with an attitude of her own. Gory and fascinating.

These were the stand outs for me.

This collection is a host of stories from the strange, the weird, the bizarre, disturbing, erotic and sometimes just plain what the fuck was that? 28 of them. Some of them I loved, some of them I hated. Some of them were just bland. One in particular - Tempest Witch - I read the whole thing and didn’t get a word of it. The writing is beautiful and lyrical, dark and dreamy.

A good mixed bag.

Thank you Netgalley and Subterranean Press for approving my request to view the title.

This was a treat! It was weird, wonderful and wacky. A couple of stories I wasn't entirely sold on, but the majority were excellent!

I'm always a fan of strange stories, and stories that then keep me thinking about them, and that is just what these did. I recommend them for something a little bit different and original, a little bit twisted, and a whole lot of strange!

This was a set of tales like few others I have ever read. Culled from so many different ideas, each one had it's own personality and feel. Yet through them all was the seamlessly flowing writing, the grim feel of desperation, and the delightful darkness I was hoping for when I picked up this title. Perfect little interludes of beautiful discomfort.

I've been dragging my feet on this for two months and I've decided to throw in the towel. I can't bring myself to read any more solid walls of text.

"Great swaths of the rocky seafloor rising up to meet her beneath a carpet of calcified cyanobacteria and the branching lobes and solitary cups of archaeocyath sponges.There are knotted clusters formed by problematic chancellorids, an enigma to taxonomists, who must place all organisms in this box or that box; the chancellorids may be only sponges, or they may be slug like halkieriids protected inside their skins of star shaped, calcareous sclerites."

I wanted to like this so much, but I just can't get into it.

*Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for the e-ARC, but since I did not finish, I do not feel it's fair for me to rate or review at this time.*

Caitlín R. Kiernan is an essential practitioner of weird fiction, one of those writers who combines a limitless imagination with a prodigious output: over a dozen novels and novellas, over two hundred short stories, successful runs on the comics Alabaster and The Dreaming, and an untold number of vignettes, not counting her scientific papers and nonfiction. She is one of the most inventive and daring authors in a genre that often prides itself on inventing new and interesting weirdness. Kiernan remains at the forefront of the Gothic fantastic; not only did she release the novella Agents of Dreamland earlier this month, her collection Dear Sweet Filthy World is shipping soon.

These 28 stories come from the pages of Kiernan’s own Sirenia Digest magazine, a subscription e-zine with the tagline “A Monthly Journal of the Weirdly Erotic.” And that’s exactly what you’ll find in this collection—a mix of unsettling passions and melancholic wonder, of obsessive lust and oppressive annihilation, the border realm where desire intersects madness. They are the middle ground where a love song becomes a suicide note, shrouded in ambiguity and mystery. Think H.R. Giger illustrating H.P. Lovecraft by way of Shirley Jackson or Angela Carter. Tales of the dark fantastique, weird fiction at its most sensual and surreal. Something that’s easier to experience than to describe.

Each of Kiernan’s stories is different—different views, perspectives, styles—but there are elements that recur from story to story. There are tales of sea monsters and drowned loves, of art and horror becoming one, of things beyond this world and of supplicants who willingly transform themselves for those otherworldly beings. In “Vicaria Draconis,” a woman becomes a dragon’s lover, a ritual in an ongoing battle waged between sun and moon. “Interstate Love Song (Murder Ballad No. 8)” follows two incestuous lesbian sisters as they murder their way across the highways of the American Southwest, a beautiful, gruesome love song written in lust and blood. And then there’s “– 30 –,” where a writer treks through the realm of faerie seeking the perfect end to a story that’s confounded her with its lack of finality.

“Shipwrecks Above” has the flavor of an old Gothic, its protagonist complete with a tragic back story and a curse forcing her to wander the briny deeps in search of revenge. It’s one of my favorites stories in the collection, one of several great stories showing Kiernan’s fascination with oceans and sea monsters. The excellent “Fairy Tale of the Maritime” is told by the ocean’s sentient fishes, a tale of a more-than-human woman banished from her village, who flees to the sea and becomes the wife of a Lovecraftian being deep below the waves. “Evensong” and “Scylla for Dummies” follow two different cults, each with their own rituals and supplicants worshiping aquatic monsters as deities. The minds of gods are immutable and unknowable, but sacrifices give up their lives in tribute to these monstrous deities.

“Another Tale of Two Cities” was a standout for me, another tale of willing transformation when a woman is infected by alien explorers—nano-machines, a spore or parasite, their origin isn’t explained. But they are in need of a home, and she offers herself up as their city; they process the iron in her blood and the calcium in her bones to build an empire out of her body, transforming her into a living city… until her supply of resources begins to run dry. She remains aware through the entire process, a distant observer of their culture, watching civilizations rise and fall in a matter of hours.

These are not tales for the prudish or faint-hearted, which should be obvious by now if it wasn’t already. These are stories of a darkening shadow world rich in atmosphere and imagination, grim little tales that envelope you with the cool embrace of the grave, or the fiery passions of lust and madness. They’re not like anything else in the genre, even when you can see elements of Lovecraft or Clark Ashton Smith or Ramsey Campbell in them. At their best, these stories are engrossing and disquieting, some top-shelf weird fiction from one of the greats. Fans of Kiernan and readers of weird fiction should enjoy this collection, one very much worth seeking out—or if not this volume, try the stories in The Ape’s Wife or Beneath an Oil-Dark Sea.

There are many things I like about Caitlín R. Kiernan's work ever since encountering it with “From Cabinet 34, Drawer 6” in Weird Shadows Over Innsmouth in 2005.

Her Lovecraft related fiction is always interesting. Her prose, as I said in my review of Threshold, is read-aloud beautiful. As with my Ambrose Bierce and Kathe Koja series, I started to read her novels when she was scheduled to appear at the local Arcana convention. She had to cancel, and I haven't read a novel of hers since. (Yet another  reading project to return to.)

She likes Charles Fort, naming one of her collections To Charles Fort With Love.

And she is a former paleontologist who drops a lot of references to geology into her fiction.

I’ll come back to geology at the end of the review.

Review: Dear Sweet Filthy World, coll. Caitlín R. Kiernan, 2017.

What can I tell you about the Dear Sweet Filthy World I have returned from?

I could tell you it is a land bordered by dangerous women prowling the interstates of America; one has a head stuffed with visions of conflagrations at Dresden and Hiroshima and Peshtigo and Chicago; two are incestuous twins in a roving church of murder and sex, orgasmic rites with knives and pliers.

Should I tell you of the caged woman unsure if she was once a dragon?

Should I tell you of lovers found in the liminal lands between earth and sea, one a demon from the sky and one a creature of the Earth?

Should I tell you of the women who give themselves in orgasmic embrace to giant trilobites and Cthulhoid monsters and giant orchids and dragons, willing lambs to ecstatic slaughter?

Should I tell you that I saw Mr. Lovecraft’s shoggoths and heard howling werewolves? That I saw the savage art of the Black Dahlia murder?

Should I tell you of the names I heard whispered: Dickens and Shakespeare, Giger and the Campbells Joseph and Ramsey, Neko Case and Charles Fort, T. S. Eliot, C. S. Lewis, Robert Frost, and Rob Bottin?

Should I tell you that in the abyss of this world’s seas are vampires and dryads?

Should I tell you of the cities of this world, a coal-blackened, fairyland London or something like a New York City where fairies and goblins trade amnesia for art?

Should I tell you of the woman filled with microscopic cities?

Should I tell you of a dildo disappearing into an invisible lover or of the artist cursed and bound by his model?

Should I tell you of all the women sacrificed in future carnivals and future forests and on seashores?

Should I tell you of woman wishing to be cocooned like an insect?

Should I tell you of the echo of this world’s sea in the blood of so many, of the terror and transformation it brings?

Should I tell you of the Hell of regret and guilt and its shadowy guards?

I could tell you of these things, but I would be telling you only about the bones of theme and imagery, the ligament marks of plot. You would be as close to understanding as a Victorian paleontologist and his chunky reconstruction of a T. Rex. He would not know the grace and the movements of the monster. You would not know the grace and movement and articulations of the Dirty Sweet Filthy World.

I could suggest that these fervent couplings with the Other, whether sterile mergings or consequential in birthing monsters to devour our future, these exchanges of bodily fluids, human with alien, are artesianal oozings from a dark and bitter and deep human well seeking racial extinction

I could suggest that the weaving streams of narrative, the fault lines where universes grind against each other in dislocations of setting and persona, where the boundaries between observer and participant crumble and mix, where stories end in sheer cliffs of insinuation or playfulness, are traces of Kiernan’s mind birthing this world under pressure of deadlines, jagged and raw orogenies not always covered by accretions of revisions and convention or eroded by editorial suggestion.

Should I tell you these things? Should I suggest these things?

I have told you these things. I do suggest these things.

But I cannot tell you if you should enter the Dear Sweet Filthy World.

It's a variegated land. I cannot tell you if you will find beauty or obscenity, verities of destruction and creation, or nacreous decadence.

Some Geological Poetry

Here’s a quote from “Latitude 41°2145.89”N, Longitude 71°29’0.62””, a title that hints at the precise geological and botanical descriptions in a story narrated by an ex-geologist:

 " … these chunks of magma cooled four hundred and fifty million years ago, the Iapetus oceanic plate colliding with and then beginning to sink beneath the North American craton in that cold Late Ordovician age, and here the protracted birth pains of the Appalachians begin. Recorded in the curve of this jetty and the bones of New England, writ in porphyritic textures, this plagioclase composition below my feet of alkali feldspar, quartz, pinkish, gray, almost white, almost black.

" … angry sea slams itself to pieces, jewel spray to, grain by grain, devour the stone, make of it sand, make it amnesiac granules to forget plutonic plumes so far below.

This just wasn't my kind of thing. I only read 35% of the book and quit. I won't be reviewing this book or author. I don't think it would be a fair review.

I really liked the story that this collection opened with - it was dark and creepy and a little sexy. Unfortunately from there I felt the collection took a downward turn. I felt like I was reading the same story over and over again - a story whose content I personally found quite squicky. If you can be bothered to trawl through this collection for the few interesting nuggets then power to you, but personally I didn't find the effort worthwhile.

Dear Sweet Filthy World by Caitlin Kiernan- Here we have twenty-eight almost impossible to find stories from Caitlin Kernan, published for the most part in her own online magazine and available only by subscription to die-hard fans. These are dark tales on the grim side, where nothing good happens to anyone. Werewolf Smile starts things off and is one of my favorites. It's a stream-of consciousness tale of an avant-garde artist designing an art piece using the Black Dahlia murder victim as his template and the narrator's familiar as his model. Yes, creepy. There's a lot more besides that, and everything is down and dirty to the last gory barb. As I've said before, I'm not much of a horror fan, but the writing here is so immediate, so challenging, it's hard to resist. Cast your eyes across a few opening lines and you find yourself deep into a shadow world that wraps around you and holds you in its cool embrace until it finally lets you go.

As the blurb says, this is a collection of strange stories. When I first read what the book was all about I was super intrigued and I'm so glad I went for it and read it. To say that the stories are not what your usually read would be is an understatement. They are, at least to me, a mix of wonder, sadness, craziness and simply something that will leave you thinking about strange things. Each story is unique, so you will never be bored or uninterested. But I have to warn you, these stories are not for the faint-hearted. They are messy, even dark and definitely not a light read. But I'm sure that in the end you will find yourself enjoying them. If not, then maybe it's just me who's strange enough to like them.

Full review posted to Pixelated Geek here: http://pixelatedgeek.com/2017/01/review-dear-sweet-filthy-world/