Caitlín R. Kiernan

Black Helicopters

Caitlín R. Kiernan — 2013

A dark jewel of a novella, this definitive edition of Caitlín R. Kiernan's Black Helicopters is the expanded and completed version of the World Fantasy Award-nominated original. Just as the Signalman stood and faced the void in Agents of Dreamland, so it falls to Ptolema, a chess piece in her agency's world-spanning game, to unravel what has become tangled and unknowable. Something strange is happening on the shores of New England. Something stranger still is happening to the world itself, chaos unleashed, rational explanation slipped loose from the moorings of the known. Two rival agencies stare across the Void at one another. Two sisters, the deadly, sickened products of experiments going back decades, desperately evade their hunters. An invisible war rages at the fringes of our world, with unimaginable consequences and Lovecraftian horrors that ripple centuries into the future.

Reviews

N.C@quince

Dec 28, 2023

I barely followed this, though I have to say it had some interesting ideas. Just wish I knew what the hell was going on. I'd have given this 2 stars but I know I'm dumb, and that's not the books fault!

Maggie Gordon@maggieg

Aug 13, 2022

I wanted to love Black Helicopters a lot more than I did. I thought it would be much more connected to Agents of Dreamland, but the relation is much less robust than I imagined. Beware being disappointed if you are looking for a sequel. Black Helicopters exists in the same universe, but it deals with its own set of characters and weird magical/paranormal happenings. The tale is told in a non-linear manner, so at times it is hard to parce what is going on. By the end, I get what Kiernan was trying to do, I just don't think the book really worked. Some chapters felt superfluous, while others felt like they needed much more content. There is a core of a really neat idea, but I was not wowed in how it was presented or resolved.