And part of this is that people would go into a bookstore and pick up the novels without first even bothering to see what the books were like, buying them because they like the sorts of “ParaRom” and “shifter” stuff that those covers signify. This got much better with The Drowning Girl: A Memoir, a cover I actually like. Only, my books began getting slapped with the same sort of covers, and some were truly awful and bore little relation to the text.

In that sense, those horrid covers do the books justice. And the books are almost always as formulaic as the covers. I’ve been watching, over the last decade or so, as dark fantasy became supplanted by these idiotic books with their ubiquitous “tramp-stamp” covers: usually, a woman in some supposedly sexy pose, usually holding a weapon, often standing near a motorcycle or the like, often sporting tattoos. You’ve said that the “point of the book is, largely, to lampoon and undermine the tropes and clichés of ‘paranormal romance’ and what readers and publishers have allowed urban fantasy to become.” Why was this important for you to do? She fronted the band “Death’s Little Sister” and currently makes her home in Providence, RI. She has worked as a vertebrate paleontologist and has published in numerous scientific journals. Award Honoree, and Barnes and Noble Maiden Voyage Award), praised, inter alia, by Gaiman (“a gift for language that borders on the scary”), and The New York Times (“one of our essential writers of dark fiction”), and translated into ten languages. Her creativity and vision has been recognized with numerous awards (four International Horror Guild Awards, James Tiptree, Jr. Kiernan (b.1964) has written the dark and the weird in multiple genres and formats: fantasy, science fiction, erotica, graphic novels, and a screenplay novelization. From her first fiction publication in 1995 (her SF short story “Persephone” in Aberrations (#27)) to her latest book, Blood Oranges (coming out Februunder her Kathleen Tierney pseudonym), Caitlín R.

The Red Tree by Caitlín R. Kiernan