So I finally managed to finish a book. I guess either my part time job is sucking up my reading energy, or I haven't been choosing very good books lately.

But choosing the wrong book was not the case this time. I am always confusing the authors Caitlin R. Kiernan and Caitlin Kittredge for some odd reason. It isn't like they write the same thing.

Kiernan writes dark fantasy. And she's got quite her own style going on. I enjoyed Threshold on many levels, the urgent, tangled feeling of the present tense, the characters who seem really really real, the gritty smells and tastes of the modern world intertwined with freaky voices and appearances.

But I think she's a bit like Sweet Maui Onion potato chips. (My friend Heather (from Beaverton) teases me that I'm always making food comparisons to explain things like books or movies, what can I say, its whats on my mind) in that you either like them or not. And you can't eat more than a snack sized bag or you feel ill.

Kiernan has this long, loopy sentence structure style that involves a lot of "...and so and so does something, and then does something else, and then sensory description" that could get on my nerves, but doesn't.

And how oddly fluid and undifferentiated her real/unreal world split could also annoy me, but for some reason doesn't.

And I LOVED all the paleontologist arcana, vocabulary, and explanations in this story, right up to and including the glossary of terms at the end.

As much as I enjoyed this, I'm not sure I would wholly recommend it to someone without knowing their tastes, first. Just like I wouldn't recommend Sweet Maui Onion potato chips to someone who doesn't like a lot of salt, for example.

So, my final opinion is: guardedly recommended.