It’s been eleven long years now since Caitlín R. Kiernan’s first novel, Silk (1998), heralded her arrival as a new savant of the weird and darkly fantastic. Accompanied by the praise of such luminaries as Neil Gaiman, Clive Barker, and Peter Straub, Silk created the sort of splash that leaves readers and publishers asking, “Sure, but can she do it again?” The answer, Threshold (2001), was a resounding yes, and in the years since, Kiernan has proven one of the most prolific and consistently satisfying authors of speculative fiction working today. Also, possibly, one of the most criminally underappreciated. We’ve watched her mature as a writer. The trademark Impressionism of her earlier work, such as the stories collected in Tales of Pain and Wonder (2001, 2007), a mad swirl of portmanteaux and shattered sentences, was gradually replaced by a more conventional, stripped-down voice. But no less vital, no less baroque. Even at her most economical, her prose continues to dazzle. And as her style morphed so did the focus of her prose, pulling readers into increasingly strange and marvelous worlds, in novels such as Daughter of Hounds and her recent sf collection, A is for Alien. In 2005, Kiernan turned to what she calls “weird erotica,” and a small fraction of that work, which is usually first published in her monthly ezine Sirenia Digest, has been collected in Frog Toes and Tentacles and Tales from the Woeful Platypus, as well as showing up in various anthologies. Now, more than a decade after the release of Silk, Kiernan’s seventh novel is on the shelves, The Red Tree is yet another pleasant and disquieting surprise from an author who refuses to be categorized.

AN: I’m not going to ask you to give us some idea of what The Red Tree holds in store plot-wise, because I know how much you hate synopses. But I will ask, how does this novel differ from your earlier books?

CRK: Well, it’s not like this is some absolute, clearly delineated break with what I’ve been doing all along. It isn’t that. I think some people have gotten the impression it will be, and it isn’t. But it is, I think, a much more mature novel. I’ll say that. That’s what first comes to mind when someone asks me how The Red Tree is different. Before I began writing the book, I had to make a decision about the age of the protagonist. I knew readers had come to expect younger characters from me, but I was starting to feel very silly, in my early forties and still writing teens and twenty somethings. I’d go so far as to say that it was beginning to feel disingenuous. Not the act of writing younger characters, but pretty much never writing from the POV of characters my own age, as if that was somehow invalid. I’d just done a short story “Salammbô Redux” for the new Subterranean Press edition of Tales of Pain and Wonder, a story where I revisit a character who was a child when I first wrote her, but in the new story, she’s fifty-three. Going into The Red Tree, there was almost a sort of fear, that the Cult of Youth in America is so great that an older protagonist, one my own age, would be rejected out of hand. I thought on this for days and days, and then I finally said screw it, and so Sarah Crowe is the age I suspected I would be when I finished the book, forty-four.

Also, this is the first time I’ve written a novel-length work of fiction in first person. It’s just never felt right before. I always want first person to justify itself. Why has someone bothered to set down this long story? Who are they addressing? But with The Red Tree, the answers to these questions are self evident. I found first person oddly liberating, I have to admit. It allowed instant access to a sort of immediacy and intimacy that was absolutely crucial in order for the book to work.

AN: Do you believe this is your best book yet?

CRK: That’s a wicked, wicked question to ask someone. Of course, I do. I always think the new book is the best. I always think, for at least a little while, that I’ve finally figured out how to get it right. Until I begin the next novel, at which point it becomes my favorite.

AN: I’ve read The Red Tree, and what strikes me, comparing it with your blog, is that this is a very autobiographical book. I think you’ve even come out and said that in the blog.

CRK: I have said that, yes, and it is. In some ways, all my books are autobiographical. Silk was, very much so. It was me writing about the mess that was my twenties. To varying degrees, I’m always writing autobiography. I’m not a journalist, going out into the world and objectively reporting back what I see. I’m a fiction writer, at least on my good days. It’s all little slivers and bits of me. It’s all the product of manic introspection. I can never truly know any mind but my own, so how could I ever hope to write a mind, a character, who is not me to some degree or another? And I expect I’ve said that before, in the blog and in other interviews.

AN: The Red Tree is very much concerned with New England folklore, isn’t it?

CRK: It is. You can’t swing a dead cat in Rhode Island or Massachusetts or Connecticut without smacking a ghost or something of the sort. But it wasn’t inspired by any given story I’d heard or read. During the summer of 2006, that August, when I was still living in Atlanta, I spent a month in Rhode Island. And one day my partner and I were out walking in the woods not far from the Exeter Grange Hall. Now, if you know anything about weird New England, you’ll have heard about the vampire scare in the late 1900s, and you might even have heard about Mercy Brown, probably the most widely known of all those TB cases that sparked the vampire stories. The Exeter Grange Hall is near the Chestnut Hill Baptist Church, where Mercy Brown is buried, and also where, in March of 1892, her family exhumed the body, cut out the heart, and burned it, in an attempt to stop her spirit from preying on the souls of her family while they slept.

Kathryn and I are both very familiar with the Mercy Brown story, and we knew we were near the cemetery that day. We’d even been talking about Mercy Brown, as we dodged tangles of green briars and poison ivy, so our heads were already in the spooky-story place. And then we came upon this huge, and I mean really huge, oak tree. Must have been centuries old. Arranged all around the trunk of the tree there was all this junk. Dismembered plastic dolls, plastic flowers that the sun had bleached all the color from, empty wine bottles corked up with the stubs of candles. I found most of a New Testament, missing the cover. Stuff like that. And it gave us both the creeps. The tree and the scatter of artifacts had this “pet cemetery” vibe to it. And we didn’t linger there very long.

AN: So, that was your inspiration for The Red Tree?

CRK: Well, only in part. Two years later, it came back to me. Maybe it had never really left. I don’t know. But I was re-reading a bunch of short fiction I’d not read in years, including Karl Edward Wagner’s “Sticks’ and Borges’ “The Garden of Forking Paths,” and The Red Tree suddenly occurred to me, pretty much fully formed, which almost never happens, especially with long stories. With novels. So, while the big oak tree we saw that day might have planted the acorn, so to speak, it sat around in my head for two years until those two stories triggered it. Oh, and I’d also just recently read folklorist Michael E. Bell’s wonderful book on vampirism in New England, Food for the Dead, and I’m sure that played an important role, as well.

AN: In some ways, is it fair to say that The Red Tree is metafictional?

CRK: I suppose so. I certainly won’t balk at anyone calling it a metafiction. I can think of a couple of elements that often get labeled metafictional that are central to The Red Tree.

AN: Such as the book-within-a-book device?

CRK: Sure. That’s probably the most obvious example of a device that is sometimes considered metafictional. This entire novel revolves around a dead woman’s posthumously published manuscript, which, we learn, is based, in turn, upon the unfinished manuscript of a suicide, which she discovered after taking up residence in this old house in the woods of western Rhode Island. That was one of the most enjoyable aspects of writing the book, really. Moving between the voice of Sarah Crowe, and the voice of Charles Harvey, the man who wrote the manuscript that she’s stumbled upon.

AN: I could think of other metafictional devices present in The Red Tree, but I think exposing them might count as spoilers. So I won’t.

CRK: Thank you.

AN: And I won’t call it a horror novel, because I know how you feel about that label.

CRK: Look. Here’s my thing about the horror label. Do I write stories that are often horrific? Sure. I can’t deny that. But to say that I’m a horror writer, or that The Red Tree is a horror novel is so hopelessly reductive. If we have to have genres, if we have to have categories for fiction, horror’s simply not accurate for most of what I write. Fantasy and science fiction, I’m usually fine with those. And the main reason is that they’re not so prescriptive. There’s something undeniably prescriptive about the horror tag. Readers expect you to scare them, which has gotten harder and harder in this society. It’s like people who dare each other to eat spicy food. Oh, you can’t come up with anything so hot it’ll bother me. Oh, I watched Cloverfield and Let the Right One In and laughed all the way through both of them. That sort of attitude. In The Red Tree, there are a lot of things I set out to do, but scare people isn’t one of them. Nonetheless, Amazon.com has slapped that horror label on the book, creating expectations that I never promised to fulfill. Right now, more than anything, that’s why I’m not happy with being considered genre horror.

AN: I’m very much enjoying the way you’ve revamped the website to focus on The Red Tree. It looks like you’re actually having fun with it.

CRK: I am. It’s been a lot of fun, and really, the whole concept for the website grew out of things I wish I could have included in the book–illustrations, old photographs, and so forth–but it just wasn’t practical. I’d love to do a whole book of ancillary material, there’s so much of it floating around my head, so much of this secret history of the red tree and the old Wight Place. But that’s what we’re going to be doing with the website, getting some of that stuff out of my head. In some ways, I think of this novel as a puzzle I’ve made, and it’s up to the reader to solve it. To work out the equation. And the website is just offering a few more data points, a few more clues. It also gives readers a chance to help with promotion. There’s a downloadable flier, that’s actually the first page of the typescript that Sarah discovers.

AN: And your making a book trailer for The Red Tree?

CRK: Yes, though, at this point, honestly, it’s beginning to look more like I’m making a very short film, not what most people think of when they think “book trailer.” We’re still shooting, and there’s editing to be done, and all that, but it should go up on the website, and at YouTube and wherever else, on August 14th. I’m very excited about this. It adds an whole new dimension to the novel.

AN: So, to wrap this up, what have you got on your plate right now? And I mean besides promotional work for The Red Tree.

CRK: Sirenia Digest is ongoing. I’m working on Number 44, which comes out at the end of July. Just keeping the digest going, that’s a fulltime job. And it pays the rent, so it’s not something I can neglect. But I need to start the next novel in September. I was going to start in June, but asked for more time, so I’d have more freedom to promote The Red Tree. Next year, Subterranean Press will be releasing The Ammonite Violin & Others, my next short fiction collection, and also Confessions of a Five-Chambered Heart, the third, and probably final, collection of my weird erotica. Three just seems like a good place to stop. And I have short story deadlines for a number of anthologies. Right now, I have only an inkling what the next novel’s going to be, and that needs to change. Maybe I need to take a long walk in the woods.