You don’t need to have read or seen everything the novel references–though it would add up to a pretty good library list–and that keeps the book from feeling too esoteric. Kiernan cites a lot of the influences in an afterword–everything from House of Leaves to The Great God Pan and “The Willows” to Picnic at Hanging Rock and The Haunting of Hill House–but she also cites a lot of them in the story itself, as Sarah struggles to make sense of what happens to her during the long, hot summer in her rented farmhouse in rural New England. None of The Red Tree‘s metafictional games are especially new, and Kiernan knows that–in fact, she knows it to the extent that I imagine there are people who dislike the book because of how conscious it is of its genre history. In short, it might as well have a blog post wrapped around it … especially one written under a pseudonym.

(And, depending on your edition, it all comes with a cover that suggests Sarah’s going to slay some vampries.) Sarah Crowe, the protagonist, diarist, and general Kiernan stand-in–several of the stories Sarah references as her own, like “The Ammonite Violin,” are really Kiernan’s–freely admits to both losses and lapses of memory, and alternates between couching and qualifying her narrative because of it or simply inventing, as writers do, and telling us afterwards that a large chunk of what we just read was, even in her world, pure fiction.

This is a novel that already comes with a built-in introduction that’s really the hidden start of the book, framing everything that follows as a lightly edited found manuscript, a diary the diary contains excerpts of another found manuscript, an academic folklore study, and it also pauses at one point to insert a short story. Kiernan’s The Red Tree feels a little like fictionalizing myself.

The red tree caitlin r kiernan