title: Murder of Angels
author:  Caitlin R. Kiernan 
description: In this stylish sequel to Kiernan's debut novel, <i>Silk</i> (1998), it's been 10 years since a drug-fueled experiment opened a window on an alternate world of horrors that pushed angst-scarred Spyder Baxter to suicide, and its survivors are still reeling from the aftershocks. Daria Parker has parlayed some of her experience into a successful musical career, but her lover, Niki Ky, is wracked by full-blown schizophrenic episodes in which Spyder beckons her from a dimension beyond death. When Niki follows Spyder's instruction to make a fatal plunge from San Francisco's Bay Bridge, she awakens in a gothic realm of death and darkness where she plays a key role in an intrigue Spyder has engineered to draw out a demonic entity known as "the Dragon." Meanwhile, Daria struggles in the world of the living to retrieve and protect an artifact Niki needs to keep horrors in the Dragon's world from erupting into our own. Though the plot often mystifies, the novel's unusual blend of otherworldly and supernatural horror gives it a uniquely weird cast. Kiernan's true achievement, however, is the careful crafting of her mellifluous prose to sustain an intense atmosphere of dread. Dream and nightmare, hallucination and reality, private fantasy and objective experience all merge seamlessly, making this one of the more relentless horror reads of the year. <br />Copyright  Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
zlib_text: ## “Caitlín R. Kiernan writes like a Gothic cathedral on fire.”—Poppy Z. Brite
  
  ## Praise for the novels of Caitlín R. Kiernan
  
  Low Red Moon
  
  “Kiernan only grows in versatility, and readers should continue to expect
  great things from her.”
  
  —Locus
  
  “The familiar caveat ‘not for the faint of heart’ is appropriate here—the
  novel is one of sustained dread punctuated by explosions of unmitigated
  terror.”
  
  —Irish Literary Review
  
  “Effective evocations of the supernatural…a memorable expansion of the
  author’s unique fictional universe.”
  
  —Publishers Weekly
  
  Murder of Angels
  
  “I love a book like this that happily blends genres, highlighting the best
  from each, but delivering them in new configurations…. In Murder of Angels,
  the darkness is poetic, the fantasy is gritty, and the real-world sections are
  rooted in deep and true emotions. Lyrical and earthy, Murder of Angels is that
  rare book that gets everything right.”
  
  —Charles de Lint
  
  “[Kiernan’s] punk-rock prose, and the brutally realistic 