Recent Reading Roundup 64
The Original by Nell Stevens - "The lost heir returns! But is it really them?" has long been a staple of Gothic and neo-Gothic fiction, and for good reason. It's a premise that combines mystery, family drama, and a recognition that there is something fundamentally absurd about imbuing one particular bloodline with the right to tremendous wealth and power. In her second novel, Stevens offers a unique twist on this story by telling it through the eyes of a woman who has her own complicated ideas about authenticity and truthfulness. Grace Inderwick has been, since childhood, the unloved dependent of her wealthy aunt and uncle, and has quietly observed her family's dissolution over that period, as one after another of its members has succumbed to disease and mental illness. Now a man claiming to be Grace's cousin Charles—who ran off to sea as a teenager and was never heard from again—has made contact. Grace's cruel, domineering aunt immediately announces that the newcomer is her son, while more distant relatives and family retainers denounce him as a charlatan, leaving Grace in the middle to draw her own conclusions.
As a girl, Grace was close with Charles, who taught her to paint, but also helped her discover the core limitation of her art—afflicted with severe face-blindness, Grace can copy any painting with absolute fidelity, but can't create anything original. When the putative Charles announces himself, Grace is on the verge of embarking on a career as an art forger, in the hopes of establishing her independence from her family. Charles's appearance shuffles the cards. Even more than her family, Grace can't be sure that he is the man she once knew. But more than any of them, she is embedded in the demimonde that this stranger appears to move in, and able to investigate him in places they can't even imagine—to discover, for example, that like her, he is queer. At the same time, Grace's forays into the world of art forgery offer an opportunity to think more expansively about what "real" actually means. In the novel's turn-of-the-twentieth-century setting, it is still possible to convince eager collectors that a work as famous as, for example, Van Eyck's Arnolfini portrait is available for purchase from a shady dealer. But are these people being gulled, or do they just want to believe? And is that any different from how Grace's aunt has embraced Charles, despite all the evidence that he isn't who he says he is? When Grace's only friend on the estate, the stable boy Bobby, is fleeced by a con artist, Grace recoils from the idea that she is engaged in the same sort of dishonesty. What she's selling, she tells us, is real, even if it isn't true. But does it follow that the same can be said of Charles?
Reading other reviews of The Original, it seems I'm not alone in drawing a comparison between it and the Victorian novels of Sarah Waters. Like Waters, Stevens writes about the period from the perspective of a gay woman, but also like her, she describes her historical setting with a sense of alienation that we tend to think of as quintessentially modern. Despite the stifling mores and omnipresent rituals of her world, Grace often finds herself alone and directionless—wandering a dilapidated house whose rightful owners keep dying off, struggling to make conversation at a dinner party whose guests are equally compelled and repelled by the scandal of Charles's questionable identity, listening to the other lodgers in her boarding house as they make friends with an ease she can't imitate. Unlike Waters, however, Stevens suggests that what lies at the root of Grace's alienation is not, or at least not only, the indifference of her class-based, money-obsessed society, but her own unusual way of looking at the world. Grace is direct and plain-spoken, scandalizing her relatives by failing to parse nuances of class and social standing. Her narrative voice is passionate about art, but often just as interested in the mechanics of convincingly imitating a centuries-old painting. When sparks fly between her and a woman visiting the Inderwick estate, Grace delves into the practicalities of pursuing the attraction under her oblivious family's noses, but struggles to understand her new partner's emotional needs.
It is, in other words, a portrait of a neurodivergent woman, and Stevens slyly suggests that Grace's ability to see through the hypocrisies of her world—both her aunt's determination to pass off a (probably) fake Charles as the real one while still clinging to her ideas about class and heredity, and the system that arrogates the bulk of wealth and property to the few while the many struggle—is intimately connected to her mind's unusual working. But that still leaves the question of Charles. Do his similarities to Grace, his ability to see the flaws in their world as she does, mean that she can trust him? Stevens belabors the answer to this question a little longer than she needs to, but in a way that is so much fun—including switching several times to Charles's perspective to tease the solution to the mystery of his identity—that one simply does not want her story to be over.
The Iron Below Remembers by Sharang Biswas - Laxman Yadav, a professor of archeology and art history and an expert on the world-spanning Karthik empire, is summoned by the department of supermundane affairs—the people who organize and oversee those who possess superhuman powers—to examine an artifact discovered during a superpowered fight. Laxman quickly concludes that what's been discovered might be the first intact example of a lochal, the Karthiks' famed, quasi-mythical mechanical warriors. He is quickly seconded to the department to oversee the lochal's excavation and study, a job he secures in part due to the influence of his hunky, adoring boyfriend Ezra, AKA the superhero Savior.
Right off the bat, Biswas sets his story—yet another entry in Neon Hemlock's extremely impressive novella line—apart from the veritable flood of superhero fiction of the last decade-plus by placing his emphasis on his world's varied, complex, at times overwhelming history. Laxman's footnote-riddled narrative is full of references to Karthik art and poetry—and more importantly, to absent or damaged artifacts, debates between translators, and questions raised by gaps in the historical record. Did the Karthiks really practice magic? Did they encounter aliens? Did their famed sage Supratik the Enlightened really live for centuries? Fittingly for an academic deeply embedded in a vibrant, raucous scholarly tradition, Laxman's focus is granular, going deep into questions of a particular poem's interpretation, or a particular textile technique's origins, while revealing only patches of the greater history that he assumes his readers are aware of—things like Athens allying with the Karthiks against Rome, the Catholic church being inspired by them to recognize same-sex marriage, and the Karthik colonization of Europe. The result is to give readers a sense of the bewildering breadth of an actual history, which is not a straight line but an ever-proliferating, fractal network, whose every corner is as fascinating, and as full of potential for debate and disagreement, as its whole. As Laxman eventually reveals, the Karthik empire was neither an exact duplicate of European colonization in reverse, nor perfectly progressive. Nevertheless, the world he lives in is a more benevolent, more inclusive one than our own. Traditional English games like "legball" may have been reduced to historical curiosities, but the London that Laxman lives in is still economically vibrant, a global center of culture and learning.
That benevolence suits the other thread that runs through Laxman's narrative, his cheerfully raunchy obsession with his and Ezra's sex lives. Many of Laxman's footnotes begin with scholarly interest, and somehow segue into a reminiscence of his and Ezra's forays into bondage and light BDSM. Ezra's superhero colleagues are often described by Laxman as a buffet of potential (or past) sexual partners, and the duo enthusiastically practice ethical non-monogamy. Since much of pop culture, and superhero fiction in particular, treats kink and lasciviousness as hallmarks of depravity, if not outright evil (The Boys is a particular offender in this respect), it's refreshing to encounter a story that is so positive about characters with active, varied sex lives. That positivity, however, can initially obscure the fact that all is not well between our heroes. Ezra is self-conscious about not being as smart as his boyfriend, and afraid to set boundaries because of this. And Laxman, consumed with his work and with his own feelings of inferiority, is prone to self-absorbed, hurtful behavior.
The crisis that this behavior precipitates in our heroes' relationship ends up being the focus of the story, far more than the lochal or the discoveries Laxman makes about the Karthik empire. As Laxman and Ezra move from party to anniversary celebration, from minor supervillain encounter to scientific breakthrough, the cracks in their relationship begin to show, and the question of whether Laxman can stop being distracted by his work for long enough to get his head out of his ass becomes more pressing. The result ends up, despite its fascinating setting and eye-popping premise, feeling more like a slice of life story than a classic superhero tale or romantasy, and is all the stronger for it.
All of Us Murderers by KJ Charles - Best known for a variety of historical romances, Charles seems to be branching into writing books in other genres that also have a strong romance component. A notable recent example is the compelling 2024 mystery Death in the Spires, but though the title of All of Us Murderers might lead one to expect another detective story, it is better described as Gothic psychological suspense. Zebedee Wyckham is the youngest and least-regarded great-grandson of Walter Wyckham, a renowned author of lurid Gothic novels who built a phantasmagorical estate, Lackaday House, in mist-strewn Dartmoor. Now, in the early years of the twentieth century, Zeb and the rest of Walter's scions have been invited to a house party by the Wyckham family's current head, their cousin Wynn. Believing himself to be dying, Wynn announces that instead of passing the estate to the next person in line, he will bequeath it to whoever marries his young ward Jessamine, an illegitimate descendant of Walter Wyckham through a late-in-life marriage to a housemaid.
If this situation were not uncomfortable enough, the party gathered at Lackaday House seems designed to play on all of Zeb's anxieties and regrets. It includes his brother Bram, who regards Zeb as a wastrel, and who used Zeb's inability to hold down a job as an excuse to cheat him out of his inheritance. His cousin Hawley, a dissipated bon vivant who is the only member of the family who knows Zeb's tastes run to men, and who is not above a bit of blackmail on this score. And Gideon Grey, Wynn's secretary and Zeb's former lover, who blames him for losing him his previous position and nearly plunging him into poverty. To begin with, interactions between the guests are merely caustic. Hawley, an avant garde artist, clashes with Bram, a critic whose tastes run to the traditional (an enmity that is only intensified by the fact that Hawley once had an affair with Bram's wife). Bram keeps snapping at Zeb. And nobody believes that Zeb has no interest in either Jessamine or the fortune. Events, however, soon grow more fraught. A faceless figure appears to the guests, pointing a skeletal hand; accusatory messages appear and disappear from the walls; a pool of what appears to be blood stains the faux druid temple on the grounds. As the increasingly hysterical Jessamine insists that the house is haunted, and as the weather prevents anyone from leaving, tensions between the guests rise and threaten to erupt into violence.
Charles's most impressive achievement with All of Us Murderers is the balance she strikes between an entirely self-serious presentation of this soup of Gothic tropes, and a main character who regards them all with skepticism and refuses to be drawn into the various family dramas and the supposed supernatural melodramas erupting around him. Zeb seems to have a talent for zeroing in on actual horrors—the disappearance of one of the guests, a maid who has been assaulted—rather than the ones that are getting the most attention, an ability that stands in stark contrast to the way the other guests see him. It's almost unfortunate that Charles felt the need to reveal, in the book's content warning, that Zeb has ADHD, because it might have been interesting to experience him without that label. To begin with, Zeb's habits—his tendency to ramble, his propensity to self-soothe with beads or other small objects, his inability to focus (or alternatively, his capacity for all-consuming hyperfocus in very specific situations)—can easily come off as annoying, especially when one learns that they have prevented him from acquiring a profession or holding down a job. It's obvious that his family has written him off, and even Gideon (whose feelings for Zeb are, naturally enough, by no means extinguished) finds it difficult not to become impatient or dismissive. But as we get to know Zeb, we realize that although these criticisms have struck deep, he has developed techniques that allow him to function and even thrive, which nobody gives him credit for. Perhaps more importantly, we realize that beneath his tics, Zeb is a deeply principled person, who is able to pierce the increasingly heated atmosphere in Lackaday House and understand that what is happening there is thoroughly mundane, and no less horrifying for it.
Zeb's iron-hard principles, however, are also where All of Us Murderers seems to lose its nerve a little. For a Gothic novel, it seems determined to be as wholesome as possible, with Zeb often pausing to express precisely the right opinion (or to excoriate the wrong one) on everything from literature to sexual mores to slavery. It eventually becomes clear that his ability to survive Lackaday House hinges on always making the right, moral choice—refusing to court Jessamine; trying to make peace with Gideon; even, at one point, declining a cigarette. That's a valid storytelling choice, but it feels a bit safe in the face of what Gothic fiction is capable of. There is in All of Us Murderers none of the queasily seductive quality of the best Gothic fiction; the feeling that the mysterious house, the villainous man, the misbehaving woman, are alluring even if you know they're going to lead you to a sticky end. What we get instead is a brisk, entertaining romp with a character whose triumph feels both earned and satisfying. But compared to some of the novels Charles is clearly in conversation with, what she has produced feels overly neat.
These restrictions become a painful reality for Larkin when she learns that her much-wanted unborn child suffers from a fatal developmental abnormality, but that she must nevertheless carry it to term. This is a harrowing, enraging situation, and Dillon does a good job of capturing its cruel absurdities, such as the well-meaning strangers who cheerfully congratulate Larkin on her developing pregnancy, or the hefty hospital bill she and her husband accrue for a delivery they never wanted to experience. But unlike Mills, Dillon struggles to balance reportage with genuinely emotive storytelling. She spells out the biological processes that govern pregnancy and fetal development, and just as flatly spells out Larkin and her family's feelings. The result lacks the force that truly good fiction has, its ability to bring us into the headspace of characters who feel fully human and real. As horrific as Larkin's situation is, the anger we bring to it feels no different from what we feel when we read about stories like hers on the news.
Ava takes a decided turn in its second half, in which, a decade on from this tragedy, Larkin volunteers to become a test subject—or rather, to make her next child a test subject—for a gene therapy that causes women to lay eggs instead of developing fetuses inside their own bodies. The scientist who develops this therapy conceives of it as a solution to both the dangers of pregnancy and the political wrangling over female bodily autonomy, but the issues raised by the technology are given short shrift by the novel. By the time Larkin's daughter Ava, the first egg-laying human woman, comes of age, and the technology is revealed to the public, we are on page 200 of a 250-page novel. Having spent much of the first half of the book delving into minute scientific detail—revealing, for example, that Larkin takes off-label Viagra to thicken her uterine lining because drugs aimed at women that have the same effect are too tightly controlled—Dillon now handwaves most of the questions raised by her SFnal McGuffin. The potential health risks of swapping out the uterus for an oviduct, the dangers of incubating a human fetus when such an attempt has never been made before, the impossibility of keeping Ava's identity a secret after her case is reported on in scientific and general publications, these issues are all ignored in Dillon's rush to assure us that egg-laying is a solution that many women will opt for.
Early in the novel, Larkin's teenage best friend is denied access to the HPV vaccine by her fundamentalist parents. True to the logic of this novel, this inevitably leads to her developing cervical cancer and requiring a hysterectomy in her mid-twenties. It does not seem to have occurred to Larkin—or, indeed, to her author—that by accepting the gene therapy on Ava's behalf, she has played the same sort of russian roulette with her daughter's health and fertility. When a teenage Ava rages at her mother for making this decision for her, she is immediately mollified by learning about her mother's horrific first pregnancy, accepting Larkin's logic that preventing such an eventuality justifies the changes made to her biology. There's a more interesting, more thought-provoking version of Ava in which this assumption—that a technocratic solution is what's needed to address a political and social problem; that it is, in fact, the only possible solution, with political action and protest having proven a failure—is explored and challenged, but Dillon seems determined to avoid that version of her story. The interesting ideas raised by Ava are flattened and ignored, in favor of a happy ending that rings hollow.
The early chapters of the novel—which still bears some hallmarks of having originally been a series of linked stories, but overall manages to weave them together quite impressively—introduce us to several, more or less benign, varieties of this type of being. A minor parasite infects Quinn and requires regular feeding of useless memories, such as small talk or reality TV. A new recruit to the division is greeted by a colleague whom he gradually realizes is an escaped anti-meme. As his memories are eaten away, he learns that he is merely the latest in a long string of division employees who have been attacked and consumed by the creature, but that each of them has left behind a record of their attempts to fight it off, which he can build on. Little by little these separate stories reveal that there exists an apex anti-meme, so dangerous and so uncontainable that anyone who learns of its existence is immediately erased and forgotten. As Quinn realizes this danger (and then immediately, for her own protection, erases all knowledge of this realization), she tries to build an apparatus capable of fighting this entity off, while remaining ignorant of her own actions.
The chief pleasure of There Is No Antimemetics Division lies in observing this constant push-pull between knowledge and ignorance. A running gag (albeit a rather dark one) sees Quinn lament that her department is understaffed, but each time she muses on this point, she cites a different, lower number, unaware of how many of her agents have fallen to the entity. A sequence in which she senses the presence of an intruder in her home and expertly fights him off ends with the revelation that he is her husband, and that her parasite—for reasons that will not become clear until later in the novel—has consumed all of her memories of him. A containment room in the antimemetics division—originally built to contain the effects of an imprisoned anti-meme—is converted to hold off the effects of the apex entity, creating a vault where remembering the entity is possible and safe. Quinn repeatedly "discovers" it and learns about her own plans. Even then, however, there are gaps, memories she has abandoned, or plans she set in motion and doesn't feel the need to let her later versions know about.
One might expect a reading experience in which the reader constantly knows more than the main characters to be a frustrating one, but qntm (the pen name of author Sam Hughes) keeps pulling back the curtain to reveal the mechanisms that Quinn and her superiors have constructed to fight off the entity—mechanisms that sometimes fail, and sometimes turn out to be more labyrinthine than anyone, including the people who put them in place, are aware of. More importantly, what each of these revelations serves to reinforce is the idea that there is a profound difference between memory and selfhood. Quinn may not remember her own actions and choices, but she knows that she made them. And since she knows herself, she—and we, and other characters in the book—can trust that they know the kind of decisions she's make, and trust her to have made the right decision. This trust in the self eventually builds up to the novel's conclusion, in which Quinn's plan comes to a cosmic fruition, satisfyingly tying together a clever, chewy puzzle box of a novel.
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