The unconscious hides many things that don't want to be dragged out into the light of day for close examination. These things remain comfortably walled off from reality, but what if those walls were pulled down? What if the things hiding in our unconscious were real, malevolent, and got angry if we tried to pull those walls down? The consequences of blurring or rubbing out the line that divides the unconscious from the conscious aren't easy to predict, let alone to understand.
Speculating on the interaction between these worlds within the confines of a coherent plot is a difficult creative exercise, especially since an author trying this is following in the footsteps of many great writers who have also attempted this feat. Holding to the theme while maintaining one's originality is not easy.
Writing in a style that recalls authors of sixty or seventy years ago can be a stretch. An author walks a fine line between inspiration and simple imitation. Maintaining an original and distinctive work can be a challenge while holding to the desired style. Familiar ideas and themes can be very easily pressed into service with the potential for obscuring the original efforts by the author. Readers familiar with past works in the same style can be too ready to draw conclusions that are sometimes unflattering, raising a standard of comparison that is unfair without giving the new author a chance to make his or her case.
This was the way I approached Caitlin R. Kiernan's Threshold; however, the quality of the novel proved that I was completely mistaken in making any assumptions of this sort. Gripping me from the first page and not letting go until I had raced through the entire book, Kiernan easily demonstrated her ability to build on older works to create something new, dark, and powerful.
Threshold tells the story of Chance Matthews, a graduate student in paleontology at the University of Alabama-Birmingham. Raised by her geologist grandfather and paleontologist grandmother, Chance has spent her life immersed in rocks, fossils, and the vanished worlds and creatures they conjure up. Though her life has been filled with tragic deaths (her parents were killed in a car accident, her grandmother committed suicide, and her grandfather and a friend both died just prior to the events in Threshold), she has built a promising reputation as an up-and-coming paleontologist.
The death of her grandfather and the appearance of a mysterious albino girl named Dancy change all of this. Dancy knows things about Chance (and about Deacon) that she can't possibly know, leading Chance into an investigation of her grandmother's final research work and the mysterious events surrounding the mountain tunnel that Birmingham's water supply comes through. Events quickly draw in her former boyfriend, Deacon, and his current girlfriend, Sadie, who are also strongly affected by the appearance of Dancy. The lines between life and death, past and present, and fantasy and reality begin to blur as Chance and Deacon attempt to understand what ties all of them together with her dead grandmother and the nameless, ancient horror underneath the mountain -- something that doesn't want to be discovered.
Kiernan pulls together the influences of many different writers to construct Threshold. She credits a group of writers as specific influences for the book (Algernon Blackwood, Lewis Carroll, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Carl Jung, and Joseph Campbell, among others), but the novel resembles Jack Williamson's 1948 classic Darker Than You Think most strongly. The two books share many elements -- paleontologists as protagonists, fossils leading to the discovery of ancient enemies of man and an explanation for the ghosts and monsters of myth, and mind-altering antagonists who can bend reality to suit their needs.
Kiernan goes beyond Williamson's novel in scope and imagination, creating a fever dream setting that shifts and twists away from the reader's eye. Combined with this style is a Jungian collective unconscious that runs through Threshold, linking all of the major characters together. Strengthening the novel further, Campbell's mythical archetypes are woven directly into the fabric of the plot and the character development. These credited influences are used to great effect in the world that Kiernan imagines. Threshol is a perfect name for a book balanced on the knife-edge between dreams and the waking world where the distinction between the two is easily (and deliberately) lost.
"Some stories don't have endings ... in some stories, there aren't even answers." Dancy tells Deacon this at one point in Threshold, and the comment could just as well be applied to the novel itself. The reality-bending nature of the ancient nameless things Chance tries to fight spills over to inundate the entire book. An ending that leaves as many questions as answers puts the reader perfectly in Chance's place. Compelling and imaginative writing makes Threshold the kind of book worth sitting up late at night to read -- or the kind of book that could make you stay awake late at night after a long read. The dark monsters from the unconscious that Threshold drags up into the light of day don't rest easily.
More information on Caitlin Kiernan and her books can be found at her Web site. There is also a Usenet newsgroup for discussion of her works, alt.books.cait-r-kiernan.
