Alabaster
by Caitlín R. Kiernan, Subterranean Press, 2006

      In Caitlín R. Kiernan’s Dancy Flammarion stories, a reluctant teenage girl is charged with protecting the world from hordes of demons and vampires. She is guided by an all-knowing guardian who compels her to fight the forces of evil despite her misgivings and innocence. Fans of "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" might notice similarities between Dancy and their own favorite adolescent demon killer – and they’d be right to do so – but Kiernan’s slayer lacks Buffy’s humor and pop culture savvy. Dancy makes up for that lack, however, with a humid gothic sensibility. The stories in Alabaster, though full of narrative holes and frustratingly incomplete, are soaked in creepy atmosphere. Even if they present a sketchy picture of Dancy and her world, they’re certainly enjoyable.

      Kiernan’s character was introduced in the 2001 novel Threshold, and the stories collected in Alabaster provide backstory as they flesh out episodes alluded to in the novel. On their own, these stories are a disjointed, strobe-lit recollection of Dancy’s origins as a demon hunter, but the skeletal outlines are there, as well as intriguing hints of huge, fantastic story arcs. The stories will, as the saying goes, pose more questions than they answer. The questions, though, are fun to ponder, delivered as they are in the context of the stories’ frightening set pieces.

      Dancy Flammarion is just what you might expect in a teenage gothic demon slayer. A pink-eyed albino, she was born the daughter of a teenage mother who was visited by a scary, four-winged, four-faced angel. No matter how much Dancy’s mother, the rebellious Julia Flammarion, protests, the angel insists that she is destined for important work and will not let her back away from the task. Dancy grows up – as much as she has grown up when her story begins – in the drippy swamps of northern Florida, where she lives in a backwoods cabin with her mother and grandmother. She wanders childishly about the swamp, talking to frogs and exploring, until a nighttime visit to the cabin of a friend, an old man who knows much more than Dancy about the things that live in the swamp, lets Dancy know that she’s not at all your normal little girl.

      That initial encounter is depicted in “The Well of Stars and Shadow,” and in this story Kiernan establishes her character’s roots in the mundane-yet-ominous environment of the rural southeast. Dancy, as we first glimpse her, seems to be a simple, carefree country girl. In her original conception of the character Kiernan envisioned Dancy as a “creepy little ‘Boo Radley’ albino girl,” in reference to the simple-minded character in Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird. As in Lee’s novel, the almost idyllic simplicity of rural southern life masks a threatening darkness, and in Kiernan’s stories the darkness takes a large, slithering, literal form.

      The collection’s other stories explain key moments in Dancy’s early career. Armed with only with a big carving knife, she walks the back roads of Florida and Georgia, told where to go and who to kill by the hovering, omniscient angel. In “Bainbridge” she confronts a crowd of shadowy, evil beings (along with a particularly cranky demon) in an abandoned church, while somewhere behind the scenes a war involving vampires, demons, dragons, witches and sundry other dark creatures rolls along. How Dancy and her angel fit into the politics of this war is never made quite clear in the story, just one of the reasons that Alabaster alone is not a satisfying way to learn about Dancy’s universe.

      Later, in "Alabaster," Dancy is directed to a rural gas station, where she encounters another demon or two, a run-of-the-mill assignment that sets her on the path to full-fledged slayerdom. In “Waycross,” Dancy is menaced by a Texas Chainsaw Massacre-meets-Silence of the Lambs demon, and she is also threatened by a terribly confusing glimpse of the essence of her demon-killing destiny.

      Finally, in “Les Fleurs Empoisonnées,” Dancy gets mixed up with a horrifying group of cannbalistic, necrophiliac Southern ladies (plus some young vampires and a talking stuffed bear) in a musty Savannah mansion.

      The collection’s stories are arranged in the order in which Kiernan wrote them, which is not the order in which they take place chronologically. The author does, however, provide an alternate table of contents that lays out the stories chronologically. I would recommend reading them in this order, if only because “Les Fleurs Empoisonnées” is the best story in the book. If you read the stories chronologically, you’ll save this one for last, but if you read them in the order they were written, things go downhill from page one.

      Dancy Flammarion’s world (or worlds – the nature of her reality is a bit perplexing) is rich and interesting. Kiernan wraps her stories in intentionally excessive sensual details (smells are especially prevalent), and the cosmic imagery and symbolism (try reading Dancy as a Christ-like figure and see where that gets you) are delightful to contemplate.

      Alabaster will leave you wanting to know more about Dancy, but as an introduction to the character, it’s a great place to start.

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