Caitlin Kiernan's The Red Tree falls into the long tradition of the horror novel as journal, often with a preface telling us how the journal came to be found, although its writer is no longer with us.
These novels depend on mood even more than most horror novels, because the final confrontation has to take place off-stage, after the journal has ended. Not only that, but everything has to happen in retrospect, so to speak, because the journal entries must be after-the-fact. So these stories rely on the journal entries to slowly build a sense of dread, even as not much may be happening in the outside world.
The Red Tree is an excellent exemplar of the form, with the eponymous red tree a spooky presence through the whole book without itself doing anything overt. Kiernan has given us a bit of a modernist twist by making the journal unreliable -- Sarah, its author, has mental issues, and admits to making things up. Even so, I think we're supposed to "believe" in most of the journal, even if only as an insight into Sarah's slide into madness.
I also think this book will repay another read-through; a lot of it has a sort of dream logic that feels like it will make more sense later.
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