The Dinosaur Tourist
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The Dinosaur Tourist
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About this listen
Almost nothing is only what it seems to be at first glance. Appearances can be deceiving, and first impressions often lead us disastrously astray. If we’re not careful, assumption and expectation can betray us all the way to madness and death and damnation.
In The Dinosaur Tourist, Caitlín R. Kiernan’s 15th collection of short fiction, 19 tales of the unexpected and the uncanny explore that treacherous gulf between what we suppose the world to be and what might actually be waiting out beyond the edges of our day-to-day experience. A mirror may be a window into another time. A cat may be our salvation. Your lover may be a fabulous being. And a hitchhiker may turn out to be anyone at all.
©2018 Caitlín R. Kiernan (P)2021 Blackstone PublishingWhat listeners say about The Dinosaur Tourist
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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Overall4 out of 5 stars
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Performance5 out of 5 stars
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Story4 out of 5 stars
- Miss B
- 18-06-21
Interesting and inventive but...
Too much swearing and explicit content for a relaxing listen, not evident from sample!Some of the stories are fantastic if a little difficult to follow so it is a shame.
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Overall5 out of 5 stars
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Performance5 out of 5 stars
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Story5 out of 5 stars
- Mir
- 23-05-23
Another collection from one of the greatest writers of our era
There are writers whose words, whose weave of emotions and moods is so strong, make such an impression that it is difficult to find the words to describe them. Either you have to write a dissertation three times longer than the book or you are condemned to silence.
Ever since I found Caitlin R. Kiernan's writing by chance (or was it the writing that found me?), I've known this is one of them. Reading this short prose is like getting lost in a world that has long since fallen apart. Which has probably never been anything but a constant ruin. To meet the people who have made this world their home, lost, often with murder in their eyes. A darkness that is so much more powerful than the unmentionable horror just out of sight.
They are not stories in the classic sense, but impressionistic portraits, of times and places that have been and will be. We meet abandoned ladies at the turn of the century, and gangsters who will not be born until we are all dead. The common denominator is the loneliness to which they are all exposed. Sometimes there is love, or even friendship, never strong enough to dull the sense that the characters are at the mercy of a world that cannot be understood and where monsters lurk in the shadows of broken lives.
Kiernan is at her best when indulging in her own voice, her own stories, Elegy for a Suicide or Untitled Psychiatrist No. 2 , are stories where the darkness does not have a name, where it is unclear what or if anything has happened. And the reader as well as the characters are left with questions rather than answers. Or the magnetic reinterpretation of Little Red Riding Hood in The Road of Needles. Not all stories last. When Kiernan borrows mythologies from others, as in his play with HP Lovecraft, I am left with the feeling that the author should inhabit his own stories instead of someone else's. Are they bad? These three stories, no. If I had read them anywhere else, I would have loved them. But they are something else.
Kiernan is something as unusual as a writer for adults. It is a language, a prose that is more influenced by the romantics and high modernists than classic genre writers. The same goes for the themes. There is sex, sudden death and monsters. But always to explore everything that language, literature can and cannot tell us about ourselves.
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