Silk, Caitlín R. Kiernan's 1998 debut novel, starts out like a coming-of-age story - with consistently poetic prose Ms. Kiernan delves into the lives of disaffected teens and twenty-somethings living in Birmingham, Alabama, in the mid-nineties. The central figure is Spyder Baxter, a woman who holds secrets inside as dark as anything Lovecraft implied was buried in Alhazred's Necronomicon.

The sense of something dreadful just around the corner grows on the reader slowly. As I read I realized this author had written a richly layered book, literally spinning out the story as a spider spins it's web. Those who love traditional chillers and want their horror explicit might lose patience with a novel like Silk, but my opinion is that this would be laziness on the part of the reader. In the end what is left is a deeply disturbing, and in some ways very sad, story of evil that is at once right around the corner, every day, and as rarified as anything concocted by Lovecraft in his Cthulhu mythos.

And indeed, Caitlín R. Kiernan is in some ways H.P. Lovecraft's spiritual granddaughter. The sense of something lurking, something that when you see it is still not quite in focus, but no less terrifying, permeates both Silk and Murder of Angels, as it did all of Lovecraft's work.

While Silk is a story of this world, and something out of the dark, out of time, intruding on it, Murder of Angels, the just-released sequel, takes up the story 10 years later and quickly establishes itself as a full-on dark fantasy. Death is not death for some characters, but a doorway to an alternate place that is fantastic and absolutely terrifying. Daria Parker, a main character in Silk, has gone from a gifted bassist in a nowhere punk band to a star, and Niki Ky, the runaway teen who enters her life by pure chance in Silk, is her schizophrenic lover. At least everyone treats Niki like a schizophrenic, and to anyone familiar with what sufferers of that disease endure, it certainly rings true at first. But there is a layer of reality beyond this one in Murder that eventually becomes the main setting for the story. Caitlín R. Kiernan constructs a second world, an alternate universe perhaps, that rivals Stephen King's desolate world that has "moved on" in his Dark Tower series for complexity. It is filled with it's own kind of logic and familiar characters are transformed into logical extensions of the people they were on this side of the veil. Logical, but fantastic.

It is not in the interest of either book for me to give any spoilers. It would take too much time, anyway, as the stories don't lend themselves to easy summation. The easiest thing to focus on is the way this author tells a story.

Few horror writers bother with the layered characterizations you encounter in a novel by Caitlín R. Kiernan. Each person you meet is fully fleshed out, good and bad sides both, and some who are nominally the heroes are still revealed as weak and tortured. Daria Parker is a good example - Ms. Kiernan doesn't do anything to make one really sympathize with Daria too deeply - she's not a person you'd probably want to know - perenially angry, confrontational, self-absorbed, prone to talk more with destruction than words at times. Yet Daria is in her heart deeply wounded and the emotion that bears the tide of anger forth is real. You may not like Daria, but you feel her. Her lover Niki comes across for much of Murder of Angels as a kind of classic 'holy fool' - a blithe spirit, befuddled by the danger surrounding her yet persevering. Through both stories Spyder Baxter is the ostinato that beats away under each action taken, the influence, the ghost who haunts and the spinner of the webs that entrap everyone else. She is the most intriguing character, in part because she's become something far different in Murder of Angels than what she was in Silk.