The Drowning Girl
India Morgan Phelps, called Imp, sits down to write her own ghost story and warns the reader on the first page that she has paranoid schizophrenia, has stopped her medication, and cannot tell which of two encounters with a drowning girl named Eva Canning actually happened. The book gathers Imp's journal entries, the short stories she writes inside the journal, and the history of a 19th-century painting called The Drowning Girl that may have ruined every owner who hung it. Kiernan writes the haunting as a biological event spreading through Imp's brain, with the same ambiguous logic VanderMeer gives Area X.
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What you might want to know about The Drowning Girl
The questions readers send us most often, answered without spoilers.
A young Rhode Island woman with schizophrenia tries to write her own ghost story about a drowning girl, in Caitlin R. Kiernan's award-winning weird-fiction novel.
The Drowning Girl was written by Caitlin R. Kiernan and published in 2012. Kiernan is also the author of The Red Tree, Threshold, and many other works of literary horror.
Yes. The Drowning Girl won the Bram Stoker Award and the James Tiptree Jr. Award (now the Otherwise Award) in 2012. It is widely cited as one of the great literary horror novels of the 21st century.
The Drowning Girl is 350 pages in standard print editions, though page counts vary slightly between hardcover, paperback, and large-print formats.
At an average reading pace of about 250 words per minute, The Drowning Girl takes most readers 5 to 8 hours to finish.
The Drowning Girl is a standalone novel by Caitlin R. Kiernan, not part of a series.
The Drowning Girl is available in hardcover, paperback, ebook, and audiobook formats from Amazon, Bookshop.org, ThriftBooks, and most major bookstores.
