Anyone who has followed my blog knows I love the works of Caitlin R. Kiernan. However, I don't love all of them. Some works are too sexualized, topical (with references to serial killers, snuff films), perhaps too modern or contemporary for me. But she writes enough works that I enjoy that I am always ready to read more. The themes I enjoy and which I think she does quite well at are science fiction, UFO conspiracy theories, Lovecraftian/mythos fiction and stories related to the work/ideas of Charles Fort. I have previously discussed the first volume in The Tinfoil Dossier series, Agents of Dreamland here
https://dunwichhorrors.blogspot.com/2017/04/agents-of-dreamland-by-caitlin-r-kiernan.html .
I will avoid repeating myself, so if you want to read my take on Kiernan's work, I suggest you start there. In the Author's Note to The Tindalos Asset, Kiernan provides information on the genesis of the three works and I will paraphrase it here. Agents of Dreamland was written in about six weeks in the summer of 2015. and was published by Tor 2017. Tor released volume two, Black Helicopters in May 2018. A shorter version appeared in the Subterranean Press collection Beneath an Oil-Dark Sea in 2015. I originally read this version in a latter Subterranean Press collection.
The original version of Black Helicopters, which I preferred, predated Agents of Dreamland. While some elements appear in both novels, the expanded Tor edition feels like it has shoehorned into the sequence which has become The Tinfoil Dossier. The Signalman does not appear until page 149 of the 196-page novel and even then seems perfunctory. Immacolata Sexton disappears, and instead, we have another deathless/long-lived Barbican operative called Ptolema, the Eygptian, Ancient of Days. One thing I noticed is that this story has multiple characters, primarily women, who seem to have a number of names. There are the albino twins Bete and Ivoire, their handler Dr. Twisley, and the soldier mathematical savant 66. Childhood and how it moulds identity does seem to be an important theme.
I will not discuss the plot in great detail. There are two main threads one deals with an invasion of shoggoths from the seas around Deer Island, Maine. The second revolves around the history of the twins and the efforts of various groups to control or destroy them. There is a lot of interplay between various agencies with conflicting and sometimes inexplicable agendas. The action does not proceed chronologically. The narrative moves between the past, the present and even the far future. Keirnan dates the chapters, and this does help. My wife and I watched the X-Files for many years, and I tended to prefer the standalone episodes, often with supernatural plotlines. The long, complex unfolding of conspiracies turned me off. Here I think the plot might have grown too convoluted for me. It seemed to grow more and more intricate like the origami swans Bete is obsessively making until I could not follow the pattern anymore. Not a bad read but it was my least favourite in the series
The third volume, The Tindalos Asset, was begun in 2017 and completed in 2019. Some sections appeared in Ellen Datlow's Children of Lovecraft (2015) as "Excerpts from An Eschatology Quadrille." I loved The Tindalos Asset. It is a wonderful homage to Charles Fort as well as a great continuation of the story of the Signalman and his fight against the end of the world. The story begins with a visit by the Signalman to Ellison Nicodemo. (The book is dedicated to, among others, In Memory of Harlan Ellison (1934-2018) Visionary. Hero. Mentor. Friend.) Nicodemo was once one of Albany's most effective assassins. However, something went horribly wrong, and I mean horribly, during an assignment in Atlanta. Now she is an alcoholic drug addict, slowly killing herself in a filthy apartment in LA's Koreatown. The Signalman, who was once Nicodemo's handler, has been sent by Albany to recruit her for one last assignment. It seems Jehosheba Talog, Mother Hydra's current best bud and Nicodemo's Atlanta target, has come back and in a big way. We have strange deaths, even stranger births, bizarre ritual murders, weird weather, extinct animals, cryptozoology, mass hysteria in asylums incuding the Butler hospital in Providence, R.I of course, outbreaks of nightmares and stuff falling from the sky. Lots of stuff, big stuff, "Why, that's nothing. Pshaw, even. We got a goddamn sixty-five-foot sperm whale-Moby-Dick's own great-great-grandkid-stretched across the Pennsylvania Turnpike. " (85). The pace at which the incidents detailed in the dossier is terrific, one breathtaking revelation layered on atop the other, each worth of Fort himself. Why does Albany think Nicodemo can help. Well, not only was she an effective assassin in her own right but when she is in danger, a "hound" appears from a handy angle to defend her. It is all here Kiernan at her best she has summoned Fort's legions,
“A procession of the damned: By the damned I mean the excluded. We shall have a procession of data that science has excluded. Battalions of the accursed, captained by pallid data that I have exhumed will march. You'll read them, or they'll march. Some of them livid and some of them fiery and some of them rotten. Some of them are corpses, skeletons, mummies, twitching, tottering, animated by companions that have been damned alive. There are giants that will walk by, though sound asleep. There are things that are theorems and things that are rags. (Charle Ford, The Book of the Damned.
She brings us quotes from Lewis Carroll and Tennyson. Keirnan's own background in palaeontology means her pallid data in often geological and marine-based. Her extensive knowledge of Lovecraft has us revisit the house on Benefit Street in Providence R.I., otherwise known as "The Shunned House." I have followed Kiernan's blog for years, and I know she does a great deal of research to add a level of reality to her otherwise fantastic tales. So we begin to know things about the recurring characters that bring them to life. What beer they drink, songs they listen to, movies they watch. On the plane, Nicodemo is drinking National Bohemian and smoking Chesterfields. The Signalman's mixtape includes Connie Francis and Kitty Wells, he references John Ford westerns, and his watch was "made in 1888 by the Elgin Watch Company of Elgin, Illinois. We get the scientific names of many of the critters that fall from the sky or the cutting edge materials used in the interrogation room. This level of detail is supplied to make the story live, but it is not laboured; the pace of the story is not slowed; it is just there. Without the details, the scientific names, the historical references, the quotes, the names of the songs or bands playing on the jukebox, a Kiernan story would seem incomplete or colourless. And how do all these elements fit together to make a mythos tale? Is a marriage of Charles Fort and HPL. made in heaven or hell?
“It is our expression that the flux between that which isn't and that which won't be, or the state that is commonly and absurdly called "existence," is a rhythm of heavens and hells: that the damned won't stay damned; that salvation only precedes perdition. The inference is that some day our accursed tatterdemalions will be sleek angels. Then the sub-inference is that some later day, back they'll go whence they came.”
- Charles Fort,The Book of the Damned
"Man rules now where They ruled once; They shall soon rule where man rules now. After summer is winter, after winter summer. They wait patient and potent, for here shall They reign again."
- H.P. Lovecraft, Necronomicon
I think they go very well together.
Cover Credits:
Beneath an Oil-Dark Sea, Illustration Lee Moyer, Photograph Kathryn A. Pollnac
Black Helicopters, photograph Don Seymour, design Christine Foltzer
Agents of Dreamland, design Christine Foltzer
The Tindalos Asset, design Christine Foltzer
The Hounds of Tindalos
Arkham House, Hannes Bok
Jove/HBJ, Rowena
Belmont, Uncredited
To Charles Fort With Love, Richard Kirk
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