Candles for Elizabeth

Caitlin R. Kiernan

MM Publishing, aka Meisha Merlin Publications, has quietly become one of the driving forces in publishing the cutting edge in fantasy and horror. Fantasy fans will probably recognize the name; the same company put out the painfully expensive (and just as gorgeous) limited editions of George R. R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire novels a few years back, but their origins were not nearly so bold. Candles for Elizabeth, a chapbook-sized short story collection from uberauthor Cait Kiernan, was one of their first offerings. And damn and blast, is it a fine one.

Kiernan is one of the new generation of “horror of absence” authors, a realm populated by such luminaries as Patrick McGrath, Kathe Koja, and Lucius Shepard. While Koja takes her best inspiration from Andre Breton, Shepard worships at the altar of H. Rider Haggard, and McGrath has spent more time (‘twould seem) browsing through the works of Agatha Christie, Kiernan's influence is the most logical for a genre like this—Sartre and his contemporaries. The dreck being spewed out by such hallowed authors as Bret Easton Ellis and Jay McInerney is not the new generation of existentialist fiction. Cait Kiernan is.

If Sartre were alive and writing Roads to Freedom today, one could probably find the characters in these three stories in the fringes. They wouldn't be main characters; Sartre was too wrapped up in the petit bourgeois to have given these folks more than a couple of paragraphs of screen time. But he would have been fascinated with them, just as we are today; the homeless, the outcasts, those who live on the fringes of society, taking nothing from it, but willing to give in return if anyone would allow them to. Poppy Z. Brite writes in her introduction to this collection that the characters therein “would still love to believe in magic and happiness, but don't dare let themselves.” Indeed.

In “The Last Child of Lir,” three homeless twentysomethings, one of them dying of an unspecified disease (Kiernan hints that it might be pneumonia), are referred to an abandoned warehouse by a crack-addicted acquaintance as a place to spend a few days out of the cold. “A Story for Edward Gorey” is also of the homeless-person variety, this one a nineteen-year-old butch lesbian obsessed with a purple curtain in an upstairs window, and the things she finds when she finally is allowed to venture behind it. “Postcards from the King of Tides,” the most “traditional” horror story in the bunch (it bears the scars of Bradbury's “Something Wicked This Way Comes,” by way of Koja's The Cipher) doesn't tell us if its protagonists are homeless, as they're on a roadtrip. In all three cases, the events of the stories are designed to give us, though not the characters themselves, insight into their own humanity more than they are to scare. That what they find in their dreams and introspections is not that much different than what the characters in such would-be existentialist writers as Ellis find is beside the point (and, in fact, becomes somewhat admirable given the method of delivery); it's how they come about the knowledge, and whether they know enough to grasp what they see, that counts.

One of the things that makes Kiernan's characters so attractive in the horror milieu is that they're not your typical horror story protagonist; these are the kids horror fans have been waiting for for thirty years, the ones who grew up in a post-Night of the Living Dead world. They're not scared by the usual mean-and-nasties, as (for some odd reason) most horror story protagonists still are. Kiernan's characters, like those of Koja, McGrath, Thomas Ligotti, et al. before her, are scared by what's inside, not what's outside. And that makes all the difference.