The Drowning Girl
by Caitlin R. Kiernan
Summary
India Morgan Phelps, Imp to everyone, is a painter in Providence with a job, a girlfriend, a diagnosis, schizophrenia, the family inheritance, her mother and grandmother both died of it, and a story she needs to write down before it finishes with her. This book is that manuscript, and Kiernan makes the form carry everything: Imp types, corrects herself, contradicts herself, interpolates fairy tales and invented case histories, and warns the reader on the first page that she is an unreliable narrator, in a memoir whose whole subject is what truth is worth when your mind manufactures its own.
The haunting has two versions, and Imp has memories of both. In one, she picks up Eva Canning naked by the roadside in July, and Eva is a siren, the drowned ghost of a river, connected to a painting called The Drowning Girl and to a cult that walked into the sea. In November's version, Eva is a wolf. Both happened; both cannot have; the novel's work is Imp's, sorting which ghost is real, which is her illness, and whether the distinction survives examination. Around her, patient and imperfect, stands Abalyn, her transgender girlfriend, whose leaving and returning mark the story's true stakes: not what Eva was, but what the telling costs the teller.
It is genuinely difficult and genuinely beautiful, closer to Shirley Jackson by way of experimental memoir than to anything on the horror rack.
Around three hundred and forty pages.
Best for readers who want the ghost story and the account of psychosis fused with total honesty, the decade's high water mark for literary horror.
Historical Context & Significance
The Drowning Girl won the Bram Stoker Award for 2012 and the James Tiptree Jr. Award together, with Nebula and World Fantasy nominations besides, a spread across horror, feminist SF and fantasy honors that mapped exactly where Caitlín R. Kiernan works: between categories, claimed by all of them.
Kiernan, Irish born, Alabama raised, a published vertebrate paleontologist who has coauthored descriptions of several extinct species, had spent nearly two decades as the field's writers' writer, praised in blurbs as the successor to Lovecraft done right; this book, with its predecessor The Red Tree, converted the reputation into awards, and the two novels are now standard citations for the unreliable memoir form in weird fiction.
The Tiptree jury honored its gender work, with Abalyn a fully realized transgender character at the story's center; the possession of the book by later writers is visible everywhere in the ambiguity school. Kiernan's subsequent career folded back toward novellas like Agents of Dreamland; this remains the summit.