Finished a new story today.

"Psong"

3,232 / 3,232 (100.0%)

This one is about a political assassin who also happens to be psychic. In a scary coincidence, a man apparently acting alone (police are still looking for suspects) shot sixteen people at a college in Montreal today. Even more disturbing is the fact that Canada’s worst school shooting, which took place back in 1989, happened not even a mile away from today’s attack. Fortunately, despite the number of injuries, the gunman didn’t actually kill anyone. That doesn’t make it any better, but it’s still something to be thankful for.

On a lighter note, I recently finished reading Silk, the first novel by Caitlin R. Kiernan. I’ve had it for a while, but never got around to reading it until now. I was a bit weary at first, thinking it was going to be a "goth novel" about a bunch of whiny GenX-ers wallowing in self-pity. I had read a few of Kiernan’s short stories and been quite impressed, but the pictures of her I had seen as the unsmiling goth princess turned me off to reading one of her novels. (Let this be a lesson that one should never judge a book by its cover, and never, ever, ever judge it by a picture of the author.) I was worried that it would be artsy and annoyingly abstract and full of the sort of angsty yearning that speaks to me not at all. Simply put: I thought Silk would read like an Anne Rice novel for young adults.

Thankfully, I couldn’t have been more wrong. Silk is a truly great piece of work — even more impressive for the fact that it’s a first novel — with strong characters and an enticing plot that kept me turning the pages long into the night. And scary! I can’t remember the last time a horror novel actually got under my skin. It probably has something to do with my own deep fear of spiders, because Silk has plenty of creepy crawlers skittering through dark alleys and spinning razor-wire webs. I found myself staying awake long after I turned out the light, listening for scratching sounds on the floor, or tapping at the windows. Once or twice I even found myself thinking I had woken up in Spyder Baxter’s house, voices floating up from a trapdoor in the living room, my hands slapping spasmodically at imagined spiders with red hourglasses on their backs. Kiernan lays on just the right amount of mystery; nothing is left too ambiguous, and the ending, I felt, was satisfying.

I picked up a couple of Kiernan’s short story collections, and, coincidentally, my copy of Alabaster (a series of interconnected tales concerning a female monster-hunter who receives her orders from an angel) arrived today. I’ve been told this character was introduced in Kiernan’s sophomore novel, Threshold, so that will be the one I read next.

Until then, I recommend you check out Silk. And if you’re as afraid of spiders as I am, read it with a can of Raid close at hand.

• Currently reading: "Passline," S.J. Rozan