Dick, Clive Barker, Peter Straub, Dunsany, and gods, these lists are so inclusive they’re truly meaningless. Later, in college, I discovered a wealth of other authors who’ve had a very great influence: Angela Carter, Machen, Blackwood, Baudelaire, Wilde, William Burroughs, Philip K. I didn’t really have access to bookshops, as we either lived in places without them, or I simply didn’t have the money to spend on books. I fell in love with weird fiction, as I use the term, at a very early age – certainly by First Grade – and voraciously sought out everything I could find at public and school libraries. Kiernan: If we go back to the truly formative influences, let’s say when I was a child, a preteen, a teenager, I’ll say Bram Stoker, Lovecraft, Poe, Shirley Jackson, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Tolkien, Harlan Ellison, Lewis Carroll, Le Fanu, and really this list is too long to be meaningful.

: What writers were your introduction to the “weird”, whether the Weird Tales kind of weird or something even stranger? I was happy to interview Kiernan recently about “the weird.” As Peter Straub has written, “With The Drowning Girl, moves firmly into the new vanguard, still being formed, of our best and most artful authors of the gothic and fantastic.” You can read part of chapter one elsewhere on, as well as a story we posted a few months ago. Her latest novel, The Drowning Girl, is yet another masterpiece from this iconic author. Perhaps more than any other writer of the past thirty years, Kiernan places the reader somewhere alien and inhabits points of view that seem both luminous and edgy. In addition to her many award-winning novels and stories, Kiernan has written scientific papers that reflect her love of herpetology and paleontology, also reflected in her fiction. Kiernan (1964 – ) is one of the most original and audacious weird writers of her generation.

The Red Tree by Caitlín R. Kiernan