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The Red Tree (2009)

163 statements
30 feature instances
8 referencing feature instances

The Red Tree (2009)	type	TVTItem
The Red Tree (2009)	label	The Red Tree (2009)
The Red Tree (2009)	page	TheRedTree2009
The Red Tree (2009)	comment	The Red Tree is a Psychological/Surreal Horror novel (with some elements of Cosmic Horror and Folk Horror) written by Caitlín R. Kiernan presented in the form of an Apocalyptic Log. It has been nominated for the 2010 Shirley Jackson Award for Best Novel, as well as the 2010 Locus Award for Best Fantasy Novel.In the fall of 2008, writer Sara Crowe commits suicide shortly after renting out an old farmhouse in rural Rhode Island. One month later, her editor receives a strange, anonymous package: a stack of Sara's journal entries, from the time she moved into the old house to the point of her death, wrapped in butcher paper and sent with no explanation, return address, or cover letter.As it turns out, while wandering into the house's cellar looking for a cool place to read, Sara had discovered an incomplete manuscript written by the house's former tenant, the deceased parapsychologist and anthropologist, Charles L. Harvey, who was documenting a number of urban legends, accidents, and murders surrounding a red massive oak tree less than a hundred yards from the house (and the same tree he was found hanging from after apparently committing suicide). Curious, Sara started reading the unfinished text.And that's when things start getting weird.Compare House of Leaves (which is also about a protagonist slowly driven mad after discovering a dead man's unfinished manuscript) as well as The Haunting of Hill House. Not to be confused with Shaun Tan's picture book of the same name.
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The Red Tree (2009) / int_1869b4b1	type	Unreliable Narrator
The Red Tree (2009) / int_1869b4b1	comment	Unreliable Narrator: Lampshaded. Sarah notes in her entries that she's basically paraphrasing all of the dialogue she writes down from memory, which she admits isn't all that great (not to mention the fact that she might be going insane) and almost every time she writes down her dreams, she freely admits that she doesn't really remember them that well and is reflexively embellishing to the point she annoys herself. She's also shown to be very familiar with the works of Lovecraft and related authors, and not to mention some of the dark folklore surrounding New England. She even drops the name of the trope:
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The Red Tree (2009) / int_1e1afc1b	type	Framing Device
The Red Tree (2009) / int_1e1afc1b	comment	Framing Device: The book opens with a preface by Sarah's former editor, Sharon, who was mailed everything Sarah typed in the cottage, and chose to publish it. This is one of the only ways to know for sure what things really happened (the cottage is real, the tree is real, Constance is real but won't provide comment).
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The Red Tree (2009) / int_2969dda7	type	Nightmare Fetishist
The Red Tree (2009) / int_2969dda7	comment	Nightmare Fetishist: Amanda made custom artwork on commission from such people. Her specialty can best be described as "photographing what cannot be photographed."
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The Red Tree (2009) / int_3081bed	type	Unseen Evil
The Red Tree (2009) / int_3081bed	comment	Unseen Evil: Sarah becomes convinced the tree is merely a mask for some primordial, malignant entity capable of searing her mind.
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The Red Tree (2009) / int_3bc88a7f	type	Foregone Conclusion
The Red Tree (2009) / int_3bc88a7f	comment	Foregone Conclusion: The editor's note in the beginning tells you that Sarah committed suicide and this is her journal.
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The Red Tree (2009) / int_4e3e577a	type	Psychological Horror
The Red Tree (2009) / int_4e3e577a	comment	Psychological Horror: Sarah's increasingly unstable mental state plays a huge role in the novel.
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The Red Tree (2009) / int_4e7c4536	type	Wham Line
The Red Tree (2009) / int_4e7c4536	comment	Wham Line: The very last journal entry by Sarah, being the last three or so pages, in their entirety. Hell, the entire ninth, final chapter is a Wham Episode, but especially those last pages.
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The Red Tree (2009) / int_5009999d	type	Painting the Medium
The Red Tree (2009) / int_5009999d	comment	Painting the Medium: When she's trying to describe what happened in the cellar, Sarah starts making typo after typo (using "you're" when she means "your", etc) and then the entry ends with "coulll", the lead-up to her having a seizure in the middle of typing
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The Red Tree (2009) / int_5d5cc3fd	type	Through the Eyes of Madness
The Red Tree (2009) / int_5d5cc3fd	comment	Through the Eyes of Madness: As Sarah's journal entries progress, it becomes less and less clear if all the weird goings on are actually happening, or just in her and Constance's head. In the final entries, Sarah says that she's read the previous entries and doesn't recall even half of the events actually ever happening. She also notes that she checked the attic after Constance disappeared, only to find the place just as dusty and unused as it was before she moved in.
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The Red Tree (2009) / int_62434fe2	type	Sanity Slippage
The Red Tree (2009) / int_62434fe2	comment	Sanity Slippage: Sarah and Constance, if Constance was ever there in the first place.
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The Red Tree (2009) / int_66479d0	type	Our Ghosts Are Different
The Red Tree (2009) / int_66479d0	comment	Our Ghosts Are Different: Discussed Trope, neither Sarah or Constance believe in an afterlife or the supernatural. Still they speculate on the existence and nature of ghosts, settling on glitches in space-time.
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The Red Tree (2009) / int_67fedd35	type	Bizarrchitecture
The Red Tree (2009) / int_67fedd35	comment	Bizarrchitecture: The cellar below the farmhouse turns out to have some very unusual spacial properties. First, it's a natural cavern that's much too big to plausibly support itself, then it's a much smaller granite tunnel that was clearly dug.
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The Red Tree (2009) / int_698d7dad	type	Lovecraft Country
The Red Tree (2009) / int_698d7dad	comment	Lovecraft Country: The story is set in Rhode Island and references many New England legends.
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The Red Tree (2009) / int_6d332aea	type	Driven to Suicide
The Red Tree (2009) / int_6d332aea	comment	Driven to Suicide: Sarah, Amanda, and Harvey
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The Red Tree (2009) / int_8774fb47	type	Eldritch Abomination
The Red Tree (2009) / int_8774fb47	comment	Magic ("subtle" variety): Constance never was there to begin with, and thus, about two thirds of the plot, and the overt supernatural events, occurred in Sarah's mind - hallucinations caused by madness, due to exposure to the tree, which is still an Eldritch Abomination and just as malign as Sarah makes it out to be. The nature of the tree would be the same, but instead of that last scene being hallucinatory, everything else but that scene was. Sarah's insanity is clearly much more severe in this case, whereas the tree "only" affects her mind, not physical reality. Again, this explanation would be equally consistent with the mentioned events, and with the effect the tree seems to have on people judging by Harvey's manuscript.
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The Red Tree (2009) / int_8a3c406e	type	Hair-Raising Hare
The Red Tree (2009) / int_8a3c406e	comment	Hair-Raising Hare: One morning, Sarah finds a neon green fishing line tied from the back porch of the house to the red tree. When she reaches the end of it, she finds a rabbit killed and systematically mutilated at the tree's "altar."
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The Red Tree (2009) / int_8b568cb7	type	Posthumous Character
The Red Tree (2009) / int_8b568cb7	comment	Posthumous Character: Amanda Tyrell, Sarah's artist girlfriend who died by suicide.
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The Red Tree (2009) / int_95be648c	type	Creepy Basement
The Red Tree (2009) / int_95be648c	comment	Creepy Basement: It's got a wall full of occult symbols and no one ever determines quite how big it really is. Constance tries and ends up traumatized by something she can't remember.
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The Red Tree (2009) / int_ac5b526d	type	Hellgate
The Red Tree (2009) / int_ac5b526d	comment	Hellgate: The red tree is implied to be one.
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The Red Tree (2009) / int_ad22fa80	type	Apocalyptic Log
The Red Tree (2009) / int_ad22fa80	comment	Apocalyptic Log: Both Sarah's journal and the unfinished book she discovers.
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The Red Tree (2009) / int_adf84dea	type	What Beautiful Eyes!
The Red Tree (2009) / int_adf84dea	comment	What Beautiful Eyes!: Sarah is rather fond of Constance's drowsy, red-brown eyes.
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The Red Tree (2009) / int_af157b58	type	First-Person Smartass
The Red Tree (2009) / int_af157b58	comment	First-Person Smartass: Sarah
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The Red Tree (2009) / int_bef696dd	type	Mind Screw
The Red Tree (2009) / int_bef696dd	comment	Mind Screw: It's really impossible to tell what's real and what isn't. Only things mentioned in the prologue, which is a foreword written by Sarah's editor, can be nailed down as true, and there aren't very many of those.
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The Red Tree (2009) / int_cb70651c	type	Maybe Magic, Maybe Mundane
The Red Tree (2009) / int_cb70651c	comment	Maybe Magic, Maybe Mundane: Played to full, terrifying effect. Since the book is so replete with Mind Screw (see below), there are more or less three possible explanations for the events of the book. None of them can be said to clearly be the actual explanation, and based on the facts we learn (and keep in mind that Sarah is an Unreliable Narrator, by her own admission), all of them are more or less equally plausible. Magic ("overt" variety): The literal intepretation. The tree is indeed an Eldritch Abomination and the events of the novel occured in-universe just as described - Constance was there, the "lost picnic", basement exploration, sacrifice episode and all the interactions between the two women happened. Constance either left or was taken by the tree, and the tree is responsible for Sarah's hallucination of an empty, disused attic at the very end. Up to that point, Sarah perceives the actual, objective reality, albeit one that is influenced by supernatural events. More or less consistent with events as they are mentioned by Sarah. Magic ("subtle" variety): Constance never was there to begin with, and thus, about two thirds of the plot, and the overt supernatural events, occurred in Sarah's mind - hallucinations caused by madness, due to exposure to the tree, which is still an Eldritch Abomination and just as malign as Sarah makes it out to be. The nature of the tree would be the same, but instead of that last scene being hallucinatory, everything else but that scene was. Sarah's insanity is clearly much more severe in this case, whereas the tree "only" affects her mind, not physical reality. Again, this explanation would be equally consistent with the mentioned events, and with the effect the tree seems to have on people judging by Harvey's manuscript. Mundane: Probably the most terrifying one: the tree might just be that: only a tree, just the way Sarah perceived it while visiting it alone for the very first time before Constance's arrival. It's precisely the manuscript, written by a clearly insane Harvey, that lodges itself in Sarah's just as clearly unstable mind, while she's still coping with Amanda's death, and triggers a severe bout of hallucinations and paranoia. No supernatural causes whatsoever, just a result of reading the wrong kind of book at the wrong time while being in an unstable state of mind, coupled with an overactive imagination. That last explanation may seem less probable at first, however there are several (easily overlooked) hints at various points of the novel that the actual, physical events connected to the tree, such as the deaths of several people, have not been reported widely, outside the sources that Harvey describes - which Sarah is in no position to check thoroughly. It is quite possible that all of the folktales about the tree and the grisly events connected to it were invented by Harvey and occur only in his book.
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The Red Tree (2009) / int_ccc73c34	type	Spooky Painting
The Red Tree (2009) / int_ccc73c34	comment	Spooky Painting: Amanda made really screwed up photoshop montages for a living. When Sarah goes up to the attic shortly after Constance leaves, she discovers seven blank canvases with tiny notes attached to each of them. After she reads them all, she looks back at the canvases to find they've been replaced with Francis Bacon-inspired paintings of contorted, mutilated women.
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The Red Tree (2009) / int_d32cd9f5	type	Cast Full of Gay
The Red Tree (2009) / int_d32cd9f5	comment	Cast Full of Gay: To be fair, it's a rather small cast.
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The Red Tree (2009) / int_f0c4ce7d	type	The Lost Lenore
The Red Tree (2009) / int_f0c4ce7d	comment	The Lost Lenore: Sarah's late girlfriend, Amanda Tyrell, who committed suicide shortly after a really nasty fight between the two.
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The Red Tree (2009) / int_f9439c84	type	Haunted House
The Red Tree (2009) / int_f9439c84	comment	Haunted House: Technically speaking, it's the tree that's haunted. The house is just in its area of effect.
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The Red Tree (2009) / int_ffb1df90	type	Perpetual Poverty
The Red Tree (2009) / int_ffb1df90	comment	Perpetual Poverty: Sarah is living off of a dwindling, irregular paycheck, which is why she doesn't move out immediately when weird shit starts happening — she literally can't afford to.
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