The latest Countdown to Hallowe’en review from Randy is a recent novella, that he highly recommends:
The Signalman picks up one of the photographs, the one with his shadow in the frame, the one where some trick of the light makes a corpse appear to be smiling. Every time he looks at these, every time he touches them, he feels unclean. He went through decon with the rest of the response team, but he only has to revisit these souvenirs of a horror show to be reminded how some stains sink straight through to the soul and are never coming out.
— from Agents of Dreamland
Agents of Dreamland is a dense short novel/novella told in a non-linear fashion tying together two plot strands, one following the investigation by Signalman, an agent of a shadowy U.S. organization, of an incident in a ranch house on the Salton Sea. The agents on the scene, including Signalman, are appalled when they find the bodies of the victims of an outbreak, one still living. Aided with information from an agent of an equally mysterious British organization, the intriguingly named Immaculata Sexton (Immaculata = pure, and refers to the Immaculate Conception; Sexton = churchyard caretaker, sometimes gravedigger) who seems able to discern the future, or a future, Signalman’s investigation leads him to more and more disturbing conclusions.
The second plot strand follows Chloe, wooed into a cult by Drew, who is charismatic and warm, before she becomes the lone living victim found by the agents.
Really, that’s about the plot. In the meantime, Kiernan alludes to Lovecraft’s “The Whisperer in Darkness,” Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse 5, a (fictional) movie with a screenplay by Edgar Rice Burroughs and directed by James Whale (Frankenstein; Bride of Frankenstein; The Invisible Man), the plot of which has echoes elsewhere in the story; Kiernan also alludes, I think, to aspects of one of William Hope Hodgson’s short stories and/or one of the Quatermass screenplays by Nigel Kneale, though identifying either might be a spoiler.
Following Signalman, Kiernan’s writing has a touch of the hard-boiled, feeling at least in part like a slightly softer Laird Barron, and I think reading it in conjunction with Barron’s “Old Virginia” among others would set off some interesting resonances. Chloe’s voice is softer, more lyrical, the voice of a young woman who had lost hope in addiction and had gained hope through her connection with Drew.
Kiernan covers a great deal of ground here in a short space, and so thoroughly that this novella becomes an impressive display of story-telling compression, with a deeply unsettling ending.
Have I raved about Kiernan lately?
Agents of Dreamland by Caitlin Kiernan
Published by Tor, February 2017
128 pages
ISBN: 978-0765394323
Other suggested reading
The Red Tree & The Drowning Girl & To Charles Fort, With Love by Caitlin Kiernan
The Croning & The Imago Sequence and Other Stories by Laird Barron
We Are All Completely Fine & Harrison Squared by Daryl Gregory
