The five books I’m going to cover here start at the horror end of the spectrum and eventually metamorphosize into urban fantasy that leans heavily on the fantasy. They remind me of Justine Musk‘s two BloodAngel novels.
Silk kicks things off with an intriguing story split among several viewpoints. The fantasy aspects are at their most subdued here, mostly taking the form of general horror and alternate perceptions. It’s nicely self-contained and simply works… for the most part. Having Niki spontaneously turn bisexual is a fairly abrupt plot development when you consider the reason she washed up in Birmingham in the first place.
Threshold features both a different set of characters and a different set of antagonistic mythology, the latter of which will only appear in the later novels once in passing. Here the balance starts to shift away from horror and into more conventional urban fantasy. The antagonists have much more clearly physical manifestations and while there is still a bit of twisting perception, what occurs happens in a relatively straight-forward manner. The ending is unfortunate on a great many levels and sets a nasty precedent that will be revisited in Daughter of Hounds.
Low Red Moon I feel is the best out of the five, striking the cleanest balance between reality and misconception with a nicely paced story filled with intriguing developments. It features different versions of the same characters from Threshold and yet another change of antagonistic forces.
Murder of Angels is my least favorite of this bunch. It’s very, very close to being almost pure fantasy and picks up a decade or so after the ending of Silk with the same characters (along with a transplant from Low Red Moon). This takes what occurred in Silk and turns it into a half-bit imitation of grand fantasy. It’s fairly terrible all-around and painfully contrived (turning Daria into a pseudo-bisexual, Scarborough making his re-appearance, everything about the Dragon and the Weaver, etc.).
Finally we come to Daughter of Hounds, which picks up years after Low Red Moon and revisits the horrid contrivance that ended Threshold; the ability to rewind time. There are few, very few plot devices cheaper than waving away everything that’s happened and simply pretending it didn’t. Time-fiddling aside, this novel takes a step back from the heavy-fantasy abyss of Murder of Angels to be slightly more grounded in the ‘real world’. It still has a significant focus on fantasy lands and wizards/witches, but presents them in a much less oversaturating fashion.
All told, I’m rather glad I decided to check out Kiernan’s work. For the longest time I thought that I wouldn’t come across anything else like BloodAngel and these scratched that itch nicely.
