A short collection of stories in a grim and engaging world mired in perpetual war.
His story, and several others in his world, make up the collection One Message Remains by Premee Mohamed.
The bulk of this collection is its striking titular novella that leads off the book, so we might as well begin there. We get a deep dive and interior look at Major Tzajos, even more than he himself can comprehend, as he goes about his duty in the aftermath of the war. There is a definite creepiness as other lives, other voices, start leaking into Tzajos’ pages of his journal, and then into his actions. One could take this as a metaphor of the madness of war, and what it does to a person, even without them quite realizing it until it is too late. There is a real tragedy to Tzajos who in his lucid, normal moments, really does think that he is doing well by the army, by the people around him, and himself, even as that world inevitably crumbles around him.
Using those intrusions really allows Mohamed to show us the horrors of war, far away from an active battlefield. Tzajos doesn’t realize and even denies what is clear to us, he is channeling the experiences of people fallen in this terrible conflict, to horror and ghastly effect. What starts off as unintended entries in his journal does not remain confined to the page.
And there is a real set of questions of duty, privilege, honor and right action that is being explored in this novella. Tzajos thinks he is a good man, that he is doing a good thing by the exhumation and repatriation of remains and capturing the teleplasm that would otherwise go to waste. He’s a cog in a machine in eternal war, and he thinks, ultimately, that he is one of the “good ones”. Tzajos is totally a villain but not the moustache twirling kind, instead one that helps keep systems of oppression and harm running, even if they can’t see that those systems are doing that. There are far more Tzajos than moustache twirling villains in this world, and in this story, Mohamed gives us one who ultimately comes face to face with what he's doing.
Next up is The Weight of What’s Hollow. Taya comes from a family who build gallows for executions. It’s a fascinating if ghastly business mainly because her family builds these gallows, on spec to the government, out of bones. Taya is asked to build a set for the latest victim, but the commanding Colonel wants the victim to explicitly suffer, something that goes against all of her family’s principles. But to defy the Colonel could lead to disaster. The story also has a story skeleton of the family writing down at last the details in a manual on how to build such gallows, giving the whole story a very macabre feel to an ultimately quotidian problem: To resist, or not resist, an order that will lead to cruelty?
The third story is Forsaking all Others. There is a neat thematic link here even beyond it being set in the same world. The prisoner that the Colonel wanted killed with cruelty was a deserter from the Treotan army. This story features a different deserter. Rostyn has left the army and is on the run, trying to dodge wanted posters, curious people, and much more. He gets help from Nana, who is not the innocent grandmother that she appears, as we get from her point of view her own perspective on the war and what she has done to oppose the enemy. And when the military authorities come knocking, Nana is ready. And then there is Kalek, the third person in this little drama... but to talk about Kalek, that would be telling.
The volume ends with the even more phantasmagoric The General’s Turn. We started off with strange doings with One Message Remains, the dark quotidian horror of The Weight of What's Hollow, the thematically linked and unusual Forsaking All Others. The General’s Turn brings us the story of a captive, Private Stremwynn. His choice of being caught as a war criminal and brought to this play of gears and machine is arbitrary. What is not arbitrary is that if he does not survive the night that his captors have planned (lead by the titular General), he will either hang (there’s the gallows again) or be ground by the gears. It’s a story about deaths and its aftermaths and trying to avoid a seemingly inescapable, rigged game. It’s the most surreal of the set, even more so than One Message Remains.
Overall, the stories evoke for me a feel for a world that feels not terribly far away from the world of the Palleseen in Adrian Tchaikovsky’s Tyrant Philosophers novels. And I want to explore for a bit what that means, because both that series and this collection are examining the same themes. What those works (particularly the second book, House of Open Wounds) and these stories really convey is the horrors of industrialized, wholesale war, but on the personal level.
War does terrible things to people in any day and age, but the mechanization of war is a new and vicious brutality. Mohamed goes for a different approach than Tchaikovsky here, though adding in the aforementioned generous elements of horror and dark fantasy that is not Tchaikovsky’s usual métier. And Mohamed’s stories don’t take place in the war itself, but the war looms over her stories like a death shroud. The war is not physically present, but it is not past, either. It's an eternal war, even if the bombs aren't being dropped on your head.
And Mohamed likes to, from all of my experience, and shown here, write at shorter lengths, to distill down her story, worldbuilding and elements into a concentrated form. While I really have a good sense of the world on a larger scale in Tchaikovsky's books, what One Message Remains offers is a darker, narrower, focused experience. We feel for the unraveling of Major Tzajos, all the way to his dark end (even if he is the villain!). We feel for Taya, asked to make a gallows that goes against all of her principles of capital punishment. We feel for Rostyn, deserting from an army, only to find out that while he can run from the war, the war will run toward him all the same. We feel for Private Stremwynn, caught in the General's ghastly auto-da-fé-like trial and display.
Even more so than making us feel for the characters, the evocative writing of the author, the dark fantasy sliding into moments of horror, really is put on display here. From the horror of past lives intruding on the present, or the details of how to build a gallows, word choice and line by line dialogue and description shows Mohamed’s strength and skill as a writer. Her work engages even as it unnerves.
So if one wants to go for a food metaphor, while Tchaikovsky’s Palleseen novels tackle these subjects like a large rich delicious chocolate cake... Mohamed instead goes for several high cacao percentage squares of that same chocolate. So, her work may not necessarily be for everyone, and it is intense and difficult for me to read loads of at one go. But such intensity of writing, of feeling, of evocation truly makes her work special and lasting.
In a time and world where we are dealing with grinding war and brutality in several places in the real world, One Message Remains shas us confront the costs, without ever stepping onto the pages of a literary battlefield. Thus, in the end, the stories of One Message Remains together provide an engaging and immersive set of experiences of a world where the war is always in the background, and always at your front door.
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Highlights:
- Interesting set of stories led by the titular novella
- Engages with the reader on a visceral level
- Classic and patented Premee Mohamed touches of horror
ReferenceL Mohamed, Premee, One Message Remains, [Psychopomp, 2025]
POSTED BY: Paul Weimer. Ubiquitous in Shadow, but I'm just this guy, you know? @princejvstin
