Daughter Of Hounds
(2007) is a captivating horror novel by Caitlin Kiernan set in the darkly fantastic world of the Benefit Street ghouls, a familiar setting to readers of Kiernan’s Low Red Moon
(2003). Kiernan has followed the same cast of characters, more or less through several books, including Threshold
(2001). Daughter Of Hounds focuses on Emma Silvey, the child of Deacon Silvey and Chance Matthews who were major characters in previous books. Emma is precocious and dauntless and believably child-like as she wends her way through the twisting shocks of the story, through dreams within dreams that turn out to be no dreams at all. Her narrative double is Soldier, a tough and brutally practical young woman who is a “child of the Cuckoo,” one of those children stolen by the ghouls and raised in their dank underground warrens. The stories of Emma and Soldier strangely intertwine crossing again and again to the very end of the book. Another character familiar to readers of Kiernan’s fiction is The Bailiff and personally, I was glad to see this character shown from a few more perspectives. It’s too much to hope for, I suppose to expect a lengthy work entirely about him.
Daughter Of Hounds is a delicious mixture of supernatural horror with splashes of everyday gore. It is intelligent and literary while remaining eminently readable. Kiernan has been called the literary grand-daughter of H.P. Lovecraft, though I find her work actually more compelling than that master of eldritch horror. Her descriptions of magick seem more believable; her depictions of that ineffable, nameless wonder/horror are more effective. Kiernan is an established Mistress of short fiction, whose stories frequently are selected as the best horror of the year, and with Daughter Of Hounds a particularly well-conceived and well-executed work, she is clearly hitting her stride with the book-length format. Read them all if you can, but treat yourself to Daughter Of Hounds in the least.
— the grim gnome
DailyNightmare