Review of Black Helicopters by Caitlin R. Kiernan

I bounce off H.P. Lovecraft, hard. His prose is purple to the point of putridness and I condescend toward the paranoia and anxiety underlying the handful of stories I've read. Get a grip, dude. Reality is what it is, even if we can't explain everything. Secret evil is not waiting to pop out from behind every yard gnome you encounter (only a few). Caitlin R. Kiernan, however, I'm a sucker for. She often works in a similar medium (~existential horror), yet possesses some of the tip-top best prose out there, not to mention takes her reader's intelligence for granted. Black Helicopters (2013) is the perfect example of how deep (far?) cosmic “horror” can go.

Black Helicopters is a difficult story to encapsulate in just a couple of sentences. I will provide only the shell. Two rival agencies, operating invisibly yet in plain sight, have their sights set on one another. Butterfly effect in full effect, they tweak a social knob here, twist an event there, all in the hopes of manipulating the global dance in their subtle favor. At the beginning of the tale, one agent recruits two agents from the other side—knowing they are from the other side. And so too do the two other agents. Cat, mouse, and back again, they tango and samba around one another, getting at their secrets, bits of black magic and Weird just some of their tools of the job. Black helicopters—the proverbial variety—hover menacingly on the horizon.

Black Helicopters is more a sophisticated vignette than a story-proper. If one gets out a ruler tape, indeed they could measure an A-B-C sequence of events. But this sequence is subtly tucked into a rotation of scenes that wink-wink with dialogue and crackle with brilliant exposition, the story tucked neatly between the lines. The book's end state is different than its beginning, but the quality of scenes is where its tires meet the road (“where its rotors whip the air” would be a Lovecraftian simile too far).

Speaking of which, one of my other complaints about Lovecraft is that his cosmic evil is not as subtle as the quotidian reality his stories begin in. A massive tentacle-faced alien with dark mind powers is not the definition of delicacy. The overtness leads to cartoonishness, in turn taking any wind out of any sails of existential commentary. I prefer my philosophical cosmic musings delivered by a fusty old white dude who understands the true power of leaving some things unspoken.

Black Helicopters, while not a philosophical treatise, does take its subject matter seriously. It offers the degree of subtly that Lovecraft lacks. From prose to presentation, Kiernan imbues an idea upon a reader without ever showing them—connect--the-dots-style--what precisely that thing is. The reader walks away with a mood, a feeling, a certain uncertain dread, and questions dancing uncomfortably at the back of the mind. In my book, that is proper “horror”.

In the end, Black Helicopters is brilliant. From title to technique, diction to delivery, substance to theme, Kiernan nails all of it. This is high brow fiction that, as a result, will appeal only to a niche of readers—readers who 'get it', readers who won't get left behind. I'm aware some will take that as elitist. So be it. Best to call a spade a spade, which is better than dumbing something down for a reader, only for them to be disappointed a tentacled alien didn't pop out from behind a yard gnome.