5 Stars... Caitlin Kiernan is one of my very favorite authors, she pretty much had me hooked when I read her for the first time (The Red Tree). This book is the sequel to Silk, a horror masterpiece that is a character driven novel that is filled with monsters, demons, angels, and lots of nasty spiders. In this one Niki Ky is our main protagonist even though Daria and Spyder still are present and have major parts to play. The Hierophant Niki is called, the last hope, the only possible Saviour to two worlds in the inevitable battle with the Dragon. The best thing about a Kiernan's novels are the depth and quality of her writing. For example a meaningful passage that I loved."The world shall burn, and from her ashes springNew Heaven and Earth, wherein the just shall dwell . . .No, not this earth. This earth shall only burn and then theashes lie cold and undisturbed another five or six billionyears, until a dying, supernova sun at last swallows theplanet whole. She’s never made a secret of that, has nevertried to hide from him the destruction of this earth. It’s lostanyway, she says. It’s never been anything else. You knowI’m telling you the truth, Walter."Kiernan's writing has a lyrical flow to it and her prose makes you want to savor every word that she writes. The subject matter is deep and meaningful, and her characters are strong and not cut from any normal everyday mold. Murder of Angels works on many levels even when you the reader are left with so few answers. Multi-verse, many worlds, birth and death, all told through the action and eyes of a very unreliable narrator. What is real, what is fantasy is never clear and never really resolved, and that is definitely alright by me. All Horror readers should already have read a Caitlin Kiernan novel, she is simply not to be missed. Fans of religious based apocalyptic horror would find a great delight in reading this book along with the first Silk.My highest recommendations!!!!!!!!
I'm torn between liking Kiernan's writing and the characters, and finding the actual plot (and, to a lesser extent, pacing) to be an absolute mess. Having read Silk and The Drowning Girl, I was expecting a large amount of explanation to come near the end, which kept me eagerly reading (I finished this in two days, fast by my standards), the problem being that those details never actually showed up. It's not that I don't understand what happened, just that the logic behind it doesn't work for me at all. I've read mediocre fanfiction with more internal consistency. And, while this would have been hard to avoid, I feel like Murder of Angels loses the really wonderful and creepy tone that Silk had by becoming more of an overt fantasy.The relationship between Niki and Daria is disappointingly underdeveloped, and I didn't find the characters actions to be entirely consistent. So why does it still get three stars? Well, the actual writing style is still strong, it's definitely a novel with a lot to say even if it doesn't always succeed at saying it, I still love the characters even if they would have been fleshed out more, and it did keep me interested. Murder of Angels isn't bad, it just suffers from being the sequel to a better book, as well as having lot of unfulfilled potential to be truly exceptional.
What do You think about Murder Of Angels (2004)?
I loved Silk, and Threshold, so I assumed that I'd really like this book too. Her books are always a bit of a challenge for me to wrap my head around, so I expected that, but I did find this one especially abstract. The characters from Silk felt so different to me that I didn't recognize them at all in this sequel, and my affections for them changed because of that. It does have some beautiful creativity that I've also come to expect from her work, in that for me, the line is not always quite clear what's real and what's not and that's magical in a way.
—Mina LaFleur
This was a different one for me. I usually lean toward the Horror/Fantasy stories that are somewhat grounded in reality (King, Saul, etc). The story, in a nutshell, is about 3 lesbian girls (one a rock star, one a goth and the other a diagnosed schizophrenic under the care of a gay nurse (the author is homosexual) who all play a part in a extra-dimensional power struggle to open a doorway between this world and another in order to dispatch a seemingly evil, devil-like entity whom we never get to see. As I said, I'm not really used to this kind of Dark Fantasy, and Kiernan, an excellent descriptive writer, is so much so that it is often difficult to follow what is being described. The book starts out kinda slow, but picks up pretty well in the last half. The ending could have been better, felt a little anticlimactic. It's worth a look to anyone who's into this type of ritualistic occult/witchcraft/fantasy (the author is also a wiccan).
—Josh Hawkins
Reread, though I can't remember when I read it.And damn, I'd forgotten how *good* this book is. So much beautiful language and so much amazing imagery. If I ever have 10% of the talent Kiernan has I'll be content.You can really see the development of Kiernan as a writer reading this and "Silk" back to back. "Silk" was good, but there are real glimmers of the genius of Kiernan (which I feel has developed into its full capacity in her last two novels, but especially "The Drowning Girl") in this book.
—Stephanie
