I hope The Red Tree provided a satisfyingly spooky October read, and I’m excited to hear everyone’s thoughts on this dark, thorny mess of horror tropes and references. I’ll do a bullet-pointed list of potential discussion topics, but first, I wanted to express my appreciation for two things I think the book does particularly well.

The first and rarest is the presentation of queer female sexuality in a complex—and often jagged-edged—way. Too often, fiction and in general—and sometimes SFF genre fiction in particular, in a laudable attempt at progressiveness—sand off all the potential roughness; any bi or lesbian characters have to have mutually pleasant, rewarding relationships with each other. They must neatly overcome their flaws by the end of the story, and those flaws should ideally be imposed from without: signs of damage from living in a heteronormative society. (I often think about Ice Cream Planet’s great Year of the Month article on Mulholland Drive and its point about the virtues of queer sexuality existing alongside tragedy without causing the tragedy.) That’s really, really not the case here. Sarah’s desire is an important part of her perspective, but the fact that it’s directed towards women isn’t what dooms her—and it also isn’t a factor that compels Kiernan to save her. It doesn’t determine her treatment by the narrative as either a good or a bad person, and consequently, her relationships can be messy, toxic, earthy, and full of longing in a much more universally human way.

The second big appeal of the novel for me is in how it fits into a niche I like to think of as “the horror of reference,” which dovetails nicely with the lengthy account of influences Kiernan places in the acknowledgements. This is a subgenre of horror that rejects any kind of meta rah-rah cheer for the power of story—even as reference horror is often saturated with an appreciation for stories. Here, Sarah has a thorough compendium of red oak-related folklore and an even more thorough mental compendium of horror and fantasy stories that evoke and foreshadow her situation, and none of that information and none of her ability to analyze it does anything to save her. The horror of reference is about the awful, dread-filled realization that everything you know only reveals exactly how fucked you already are. In the end, all of your knowledge has just been counting the teeth in the shark’s mouth right as it devours you.

Additional points of interest:

•       Sarah is a “difficult” character, and she would probably put in much plainer and more explicit language than that. She’s impatient, rude, bristling, and almost singularly ungenerous as a conversational partner—and, weirdly, these traits are mirrored to an uncanny degree in the two women in her life, her (dead) ex Amanda and the new lodger Constance. All three share the same volatility and edgy, passive-aggressive argumentativeness, and it boggles my mind that Amanda immediately knows to try to pick Sarah up by insulting her book (which she actually hasn’t read) and that Sarah could coincidentally find herself living with someone with whom she could have a barbed argument over Tennessee Williams. The possible answer to this is that Kiernan just failed to differentiate the characters very much, but in that case, it’s interesting that she does summon genuinely distinct voices for the characters outside Sarah’s immediate orbit: the editor, Blanchard, and the librarian don’t sound like her at all. Amanda says that her photo montages all evoke “Narcissus staring into that damn pool,” and Sarah’s relationships with her lovers—and maybe even their reality—have that same feeling. They stretch out like an accordion but may collapse into one person. (At one point, Sarah even records, seemingly without recognizing it, a time when she calls Constance by her own name. Which could, of course, be a typo—but the book makes you wonder.)
•       What really happened with Constance? One of the most baffling details of the book is the footnote in the introduction that establishes Constance’s reality, her brief residence at Wight Farm (concurrent with Sarah’s stay), and states that Constance’s gallery show contains some of the pieces Sarah wrote about. Aside from that, it would be easy to conclude that Constance isn’t real, or else never arrived/never had any interactions with Sarah. Certainly Sarah’s final discovery of the dusty attic would imply that—or is that the unreal part? Or does this all relate to Constance’s own belief in the way time could collapse, bringing fraught people together?
•       I like the way the book includes several different kinds of artists, ones who not only work in different mediums—novels/short stories, photo montage, and paintings—but who also work in different professional ways—on contract, via individual commission, or independently. All of their art seems to fold into the book’s concerns: Amanda’s blurring of fantasy and reality to make a kind of sexually charged deepfake montage, Constance’s painting layered on top of another painting, and Sarah’s digressions and dream sequences and reflexive fictionalizing.
•       There’s an intriguing subtext in The Red Tree that we have an obligation to believe each other’s mysteries or, at least, to respect them; you certainly have to admit to them. That infused “Pony,” the short story that Sarah apparently writes without realizing it and which (to her eyes) serves as a kind of confession of how she failed Amanda. And it appears in her conversation with Constance re: ghosts, where she pounces first to impress Constance with terms and then to dismiss her story with not only a rational explanation but (more damningly) the implication that it’s all kind of tired and she’s heard it all before. She does not, tellingly, contribute her own ghost story to the conversation, even though we know she has one. If there’s a central besetting sin that invites her fate, it would seem to be this secretive unkindness, this refusal to live with someone else in a shared mystery.
•       One of my favorite lines in the book is Sarah thinking back on her troubled relationship with Amanda and defending that there were good things in it, despite everything, even though “no one we knew ever believed that there was anything between us but the sex and some virulent allure, my dirty dishwater circling the drain of you.” It’s a good enough description to also seem accurate, especially about a particular kind of self-aggrandizingly self-destructive relationship.
•       I love fake folklore and fake analysis, so Harvey’s manuscript about the red tree was a smorgasbord that I found satisfyingly detailed and convincing. I like the authentic messiness of it, where the constant is the malign presence of the tree but the exact expression of evil and strangeness varies wildly—this is just a place where bad things happen, not a single narrative that the locals have turned into a comfortable ghost story. It also rings true with what little we (possibly) get of an ultimate explanation, which is the cosmic horror notion of the tree as a door—a conscious one, even—between worlds, one which could invite in anything.
•       Sarah paraphrases Joseph Campbell at one point: “Draw a circle around a stone and thereafter the stone will become an incarnation of mystery.” She’s noting that she’s done the same thing with the red tree, and the book also seems to use this strategy, drawing metaphorical circles around certain details and lines of dialogue and repeating them until they take on a kind of eerie poetic weight: Constance’s terracotta-colored eyes, “someone has turned the ponies out again,” “two billion trees,” etc. This gives the novel some of the feeling of The Picnic at Hanging Rock—the sense that the characters are trapped in a kind of poem, surrounded by reverberations of meaning they can’t quite understand.
•       Finally and most simply, this novel does have several sections that provide a real horror frisson for me. My top two might be Sarah’s discovery of Constance’s “art installation”—first the minimalist canvases with the out-of-context quotes (I find “By Evil, I mean that which makes us useful” especially haunting; for the record, it apparently comes from Charles Fort, whom Sarah has read and Constance hasn’t) and then the layered, Francis Bacon-like works with the caked-on paint and the Bettina Hirsch attribution—and the psychopomp-in-movie-form that Sarah sees on TCM on the night of Amanda’s death. Folk horror analyst Howard David Ingham has talked about how central the notion “it was you they wanted all along” is to the genre, and the psychopomp belatedly gives the whole book that feeling for me. It feels like Sarah’s life was shaped by the red tree long before she ever rented that house… and that makes me wonder, a little, what Amanda might have seen (or created) in the days leading up to her suicide.

I’d love to hear anyone’s thoughts, positive or negative, and I’m glad we can have this discussion to lead us into Halloween. And aren’t you glad I didn’t interrupt this essay with notes about my own rambling, discursive prose style or reminders that my memory is imperfect?

For November, Julius Kassendorf will be leading our conversation on Italo Calvino’s If On a Winter’s Night a Traveler, so tune in.