Finished "The Drowned Girl" by Caitlín R. Kiernan
I wanted to like this more than I ended up doing because it looked very much as if it had all the hallmarks that normally float my boat. I'm fascinated by mental illness and like when it is incorporated into horror stories as a way of introducing ambiguity and increasing the unreliability of the narrator. But there were various aspects to the way the story was delivered that jarred with me a little.
The narrative is framed as an account of the protagonist relating her recently past haunting/mental breakdown and how it affected her and her relationships. Naturally one would expect such an account to be fragmentary and disjointed but it began to get wearing the extent to which the narrator would agonise over the verisimilitude of her account, especially when this repeatedly interrupts the flow, often an very inopportune moments.
In the end, I couldn't help feeling that the whole idea was somewhat over baked. It kept building up a big mystery and the expectation that there was going to be some kind of big surprise revelation by the end and it felt a little anti-climatic.
Apparently the author has also written some erotic fiction (which I haven't read) and it shows here as there were several very sexually explicit scenes that just felt a little gratuitous to me.
In the afterword the author describes how difficult this book was for her to write and, in some ways, it is also quite a difficult book to read. Some times it felt almost as agonising as it was supposed to feel for the narrator to relate her story. But it was certainly an interesting and engaging read despite these faults that I will accept may just reflect my own personal tastes more than anything else.
