Siren Party

Last night I read "Build Your Houses With Their Backs to the Sea", the Caitlin R. Kiernan story in the new Sirenia Digest. It's a particularly nice one.

An art journalist takes an assignment to attend an exhibition of some kind. The story is told in first person and the journalist is established with a credible, down-to-earth, tone that makes the weird stuff effective for the contrast. It's another especially Lovecraftian story and yet also not. There are suggestions of a blurring between human and sealife but there's something more ethereal about it than typical for Lovecraft. It's a Sirenia Digest story that possibly references an actual siren. Caitlin even mentions This Mortal Coil's famous cover of "Song to the Siren", which happens to have been much on my mind lately. It's a nice, haunting little story.

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