LET'S FRIGHTEN CHILDREN! The Mainstream

When I saw Coraline in the theater, I thought, “Nope nope nope. This is way too scary for kids.” I loved it, but the movie was legitimately unnerving. Buttons for eyes, sewn-up mouths, dead kids, a spider-lady. But then I heard an interview with Neil Gaiman where he was asked basically the same question — why did you write such a scary thing for kids? His response was wonderful (I mean...Neil Gaiman), and it was that things that are scary to adults are not the same things that are scary to children.

I think about this a lot, and try to take it into account when thinking about what to show my own kids. At the bottom of it all, the way I understand Gaiman’s meaning is that what’s *truly* frightening is the notion that the world ultimately doesn’t make any sense and isn’t governed by any rules that can be understood. As a kid, you’re always finding yourself in trouble or with aggrieved parents for reasons you don’t understand. The great hope is that one day the world will make more sense, and the feeling of careening between invisible, unfair obstacles will lessen.

It's a lovely fantasy. We don’t want to burst their bubble too soon. There is a pervasive mindset that runs throughout much of horror, which is that evil is omnipresent, its application is essentially random, and it is unstoppable. This is a universal feeling and one that older audiences are generally forced to reckon with beyond the confines of movies. One of the great gifts of horror stories to audience members is these tales allow the listener/watcher to confront their very real fears of an impersonal, uncaring, and brutal world in a safe environment. But for kids, the concerns are not yet of that nature. They are personal, dealing largely with one's place in the world. And these fears, too, are more-or-less universal.

The good news is that there are a ton of films that address these fears in a family-friendly way. And by and large, they’re the films you’re probably already familiar with.

Stranger Things

This is probably more of a no-brainer today than I give it credit for. I had some mixed feelings about showing my kid the breakout pop-horror title of our moment, but then I got the, "EVERYBODY at school has seen all three seasons and I'm getting SERIOUS spoilers" treatment, so now we're plowing through.

After Stranger Things, Season 1, I weighed in on this site about what I thought was a bizarre co-opting of...well, pretty much all the other titles I'm going to mention in this series. But here we are, two seasons later, and if kids today don't have time to read/watch every single thing me and the Duffer Brothers read and watched a million years ago, well, who can blame them? If Stranger Things is what steps into the breech, I can think of far worse things.

Tim Burton and LAIKA

At some point, everyone feels alone. Everyone feels like an outsider, or an imposter. Everyone feels un-understandable. This makes sense -- we each experience the world discretely from within our own literal shell. We are unique, separate beings, and each of us experiences the world in a singular way. It's scary. When you get right down to it, it's terrifying. It's only through shared experience and through story that we begin to recognize our own experiences in the experiences of others. Many of us are lucky in that we overlap in many ways with those around us, and begin to recognize these shared impressions almost before we are conscious of them. I guess this is what's called "fitting in." But some of us take a long, long time to encounter another or others who make us feel like we're not the first ones to fight these particular battles.

Artists are generally outsiders. Otherwise, we'd all be businesspeople. Growing up, we're often bullied or shunned. The weird kid. The oddball. The quiet one. Like Tim Burton, who famously idolized Vincent Price as a child and struggled to fit in, yet grew up to put a stamp of weirdness across the whole of popular culture that continues to invite other oddballs to feel ok about standing out. As a creator under the ubiquitous Disney umbrella, it's probably easy these days to shrug off Tim Burton. But I don't. This is, after all, the man who directed Ed Wood. He's more than earned his place on my Mount Rushmore.

The first two horror-adjacent films that my kids loved and re-watched again and again at a very young age were The Nightmare Before Christmas and Edward Scissorhands. But there's a funny thing about the movie that is billed as Tim Burton's The Nightmare Before Christmas — Burton neither wrote nor directed it. Henry Selick directed and Caroline Thompson wrote the script. Now, Caroline Thompson's a helluva writer. She also wrote Edward Scissorhands, and The Addams Family, and The Corpse Bride, among many other titles in her 30-year-and-still-going career.

Henry Selick later moved to LAIKA and directed their first feature film, Coraline. You're sensing a pattern, I know. ParaNorman was the studio's second feature film, and is, to me, an indispensable family horror film. There is a lot of very dark thematic material in it, particularly when we learn about Agatha's backstory, but that character, like the rest of the film, is handled so empathetically and with so much care that I never hesitate to recommend the movie. Plus, the zombies are no scarier than Scooby-Doo villains, and are often played for laughs.

I mentioned how the film treats Agatha with empathy. This is a common thread in so many of these films. Norman himself is an outsider, someone who is misunderstood both at home and at school. Like Edward Scissorhands. Coraline is ignored, and feels invisible. And Jack Skellington is someone who seems cool and the guy everybody else wants to be like...but he feels out-of-place and like something's missing. For kids (and, let's be honest, most adults), these films model a way of existing in the world that resists being governed by the fear of not fitting in, encourages being open and welcoming to others who may be different, and highlights the fundamental human connections that bind us.

These are powerful messages, and they run counter to so, so many of the messages that kids receive on a daily basis.

If we can encourage our own little weirdos to be themselves and support each other, and we can do it with ghosts and spider-ladies, isn't it kind of incumbent on us to do so?

Recommendations

For kids, I recommend:
The Nightmare Before Christmas
Edward Scissorhands
Coraline
ParaNorman
Stranger Things

And though I haven't seen them, I have had good friends with kids recommend the more recent:
Goosebumps
The House with a Clock in its Walls

Posted by Vance K — cult film reviewer and co-editor of  Nerds of a Feather since 2012. Emmy-winning producer and director, and lifelong horror geek.

Microreview [video game]: Control by Remedy Entertainment (developer)

Bigger on the Inside

Control had some work to do right out of the gate. Quantum Break wasn’t exactly an unqualified success and Remedy’s relationship with Microsoft seemed to disintegrate from it. Now back out on their own and paired with 505 Games, Control is a bit of a return to form for Remedy. Smaller in scope than Quantum Break, but doing more with less.

Control is a third person shooter with mind powers. You play as Jesse Haden, a woman who walked into the Federal Bureau of Control, and assumed leadership by bonding with the weapon of the former director. If that sounds weird, we haven’t even scratched the surface. The FBC is charged with protecting the nation from supernatural threats, and it’s been invaded by a threat called The Hiss.

Control is a pitch-perfect blend of creepypasta, Lost, and The X-Files. There’s lot of talk in memos and audio logs about containment and neutralization of Altered Items and Objects of Power. Jesse can bind with some of these OOPs to get new powers, starting with the ability to throw stuff with her mind. Littered all over this game are collectibles describing the supernatural effects of these items and how the FBC are working to contain them. There’s also a series of videos that look like someone took the Dharma Initiative videos from Lost and made their own. These all star the same guy who played Alan Wake. Speaking of Alan Wake, there’s also a series of videos starring the guy who voiced Max Payne. This whole game is stuffed with creepy fiction and Remedy all-stars and I loved it.

The gameplay is also well suited to the atmosphere. This is no cover shooter. Jesse has the archetypal shooter weapons: pistol, shotgun, sniper, etc. Augmenting these are the mind powers, with the first and most useful being Launch, which throws stuff. Essentially every piece of set decoration can be picked up and tossed at the enemy. It does a healthy amount of damage right out of the gate and it’s extremely satisfying. More abilities trickle out later, but Launch is a mainstay through out of the game. Both weapon ammo and mind powers are on a delayed recharge, so combat is usually a matter of emptying one of those meters, and then emptying the other while the first recharges. Enemies also explode with health pickups when they die, so it makes no sense to sit in one place and shoot things in the distance. Eventually you need to get up close to heal. There’s a good variety of enemies, so the mix of weapons and mind powers have plenty of uses and combat essentially never gets boring.

There are two things that take away from Control, and that’s the environments and difficulty spikes. The whole game takes place in the same extradimensional building (think House of Leaves or the Tardis from Doctor Who), and eventually I noticed that it’s an awful lot of poured concrete. It’s good looking and well designed but there’s just so much grey I can look at. Jesse is also fairly fragile, and I found numerous points in the game where difficulty spiked really hard, to the point that I sometimes just walked away from a mission and did something else, or quit out of the game entirely from frustration. There’s a brutal section near the end of the game that took me at least a dozen attempts to get past, and required that I play the game differently from how I spent the rest of the game playing it. It wasn’t fun. Even now, there are a couple side missions I may not finish because I’m past the ending and they’re annoyingly difficult.

Despite these fairly minor quibbles, I absolutely loved Control. It’s creepy, it plays well, and it looks great. Control is an excellent storytelling game.

The Math

Baseline Assessment: 9/10

Bonuses: +1 collectibles worth collecting, +1 gameplay that punishes inaction

Penalties: -1 same-y environments after a while, -1 brutal difficulty spikes

Nerd Coefficient: 9/10 (very high quality/standout in its category)

***
 
Reference: Remedy Entertainment. Control (505 Games, 2019)

POSTED BY: brian, sci-fi/fantasy/video game dork and contributor since 2014 

Microreview [book]: This is How You Lose the Time War, by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone

This is how you lose the Time War is a moving story of a professional rivalry a love story, and a meeting of perspectives told through world-changing time travelers’ letters

The idea was inevitable, and originated relatively early in the history of time travel narratives. If one person can invent a time machine, and if history can be changed, then more than one person is going to invent a time machine, and the goals of those forces are going to not be congruent. From Jack Williamson and Fritz Leiber to The Terminator, to recent novellas like Alasdair Reynolds’ Permafrost  and Kate Heartfield’s Alice Payne Arrives, there is a lot of mileage to the idea of a Changewar, where different time traveling factions seek to change history

Max Gladstone and Amal El-Mohtar’s This is How You Lose the Time War takes this subgenre of a subgenre in a new direction by telling the story of two agents from opposite sides, who find something in each other, greater than the causes they separately serve..That in itself would be an interesting enough concept to pin down a novella, but the authors have an additional, dellightful wrinkle: The agents do not meet, but rather communicate in letters to each other.

In a world of twitter, and direct messages, and texts, and instant social media, long form letters are a delightful retro technology and form. Epistolary novels and stories, never the most common of forms even when letters were dominant as a means of communication, are exceedingly distinctive just by their format in this day and age. It’s a bold choice by the authors to have the two agents, Red (from a technological end state utopia) and Blue (from a biological super consciousness utopia) to start their correspondence and to have their letters (which take increasingly unusual forms as described in the narrative) be the backbone of the action. Every chapter has one of the principals in action, and a letter from the other principals, giving a harmonic balance for the reader as far as perspective. But it is within the letters themselves that the novella truly sings and shows its power.

Those letters, those perspectives, the shift from adversarial relationship to something more, as the two best time agents in all of history find in each other something more in common than in their own sides, Agency and Garden, that this novels runs on. I was half expecting, going in, a narrative more like Leiber or Anderson, or the like, where jonbar points are displayed and fought over, and changed back and forth as the two sides change history. And there is some of that but it is in the most general of senses, with lots of references to alternate strands and timelines. The worlds that were and what might be,and could be are really just smoke and reflections, pale ghosts compared to how Red and Blue bare their souls and hearts to each other. So this is not a story for deep explorations of how saving Archduke Ferdinand or giving Genghis Khan a longer life might change the timelines. Sure, there are handwaves in the direction of changing things here and there, but those are not the point. The novella is not really oriented toward pulse pounding action, either, although there is a culminating sequence toward the end of the novella where the style does change a bit to allow for it.

What this novella provides, and the target readers, are an extremely literary focus. There are clever bits with wordplay, allusions, references, and even a book recommendation mixed in with that. The letters, starting as boasting and admonitions that each side is going to win, slowly change and evolve, as the adversarial relationship finally turns to respect, and then love. The power and the strength of the letters become richer and richer as the novella continues, as Red and Blue really start to really understand each other, and themselves, that the novella truly shines with the full power of the writers. The seamlessness of the two writers writing is also noteworthy--I can make a guess as to which writer might have written which side more predominantly but I cannot possibly be sure of that. Like Red and Blue themselves, the two sides blend into each other, and while I may slightly prefer the letters of Blue to Red, the beauty and poetry of both sides’ letters, especially in the latter portion, is magical.I was moved deeply by the slow burn love story that unfolds in the words in their letters.

My only real quibble is something that I have tried to make clear in this review, this novella being difficult to capture in words, like a letter being consumed in flame even as you write it. My quibble and it is not really for myself but for others is that it is an extremely narrow and specific kind of story that is going to appeal to a particularly stratum of readers, and probably be of absolute no interest to many more. Even if you are a big fan of time travel and Changewar stories, if you are expecting something like a cold or hot war of temporal changes and conflict (again, something I wondered if we would see in the novella, and we do not), you are going to come away disappointed. This is a character focused story, a love story between two women who are opposing agents in a time war. It's heartbreakingly, movingly good at what it does, but that thing is a narrow interest.

There is a line in one of the letters, “All good stories travel from the outside in”, and This is How You Lose the Time War fulfills that promise for me as a reader.
---

The Math

Baseline Assessment: 8/10.

Bonuses: +1 for heartbreakingly excellent prose

Penalties: -1 for a style and format that may not be appreciated by every reader.

Nerd Coefficient: 8/10 well worth your time and attention



Reference: El-Mohtar, Amal and Gladstone, Max, This is How You Lose the Time War [Saga Press, 2019]

POSTED BY: Paul Weimer. Ubiquitous in Shadow, but I’m just this guy, you know? @princejvstin.

Thursday Morning Superhero

The first book for the return to the world of Locke and Key has a name and has a release date. On October 16, Joe Hill and Gabriel Rodriguez are bringing us back to the Locke family in a book entitled Dog Days.  Rodriguez teased some art on his instagram and I couldn't be happier!  Just over one month to go!

Pick of the Week:
Trees: Three Fates #1 - Fresh of getting a television adaptation of the original series, Warren Ellis and Jason Howard have returned to the world of trees. This books takes place in Russia, where the trees fell 11 years ago and the residents of this small town are still adjusting. Things take a dark turn when Klara Voranova, a police officer, is alerted to a dead body.  The mangled body was found near one of the trees and it appears that there is a lot going on behind the scenes in this small town that Klara doesn't know about.

The Rest:
Babyteeth #16 - Five years have passed since Sadie's father sacrificed himself in order to save everyone.  We cut to five years later when Sadie is still trying to make everything right and is currently separated from her daughter and recording videos.  If I remember correctly, this is where we started in issue #1.  She is telling the video of how they escaped from the devil and made it out of Hell.  It is nice that this book has come full circle, but Joshua Williamson is keeping the reader on its feet as the bomb that is dropped on Sadie when she decides that she should head home was quite shocking.



Daredevil #11 - Matt Murdock better get his stuff together quickly or a lot of people in Hell's Kitchen are going to get hurt.  Not only is he not offering them his protection, despite Electra wanting to help, imposter Daredevils are taking the law into their own hands and don't have his restraint. It also looks like Mayor Fisk's power might be nearing its end thanks to Owlsley.  An attempt to get Owlsley out of Hell's Kitchen for a period of time, Fisk is betrayed and severely underestimated Owlsley and the reach of his people.  There was a nice cameo from a certain web slinger to boot!  What I love about Daredevil is how real Murdock has always been and how he isn't shy of admitting the struggles he faces day in and day out.  Murdock is a character a lot of people can relate to and look up to, even when he is feeling down.

Star Wars Adventures #25 - I took a short break from this series and based on seeing Princess Leia on the cover decided it was probably a good time to come back. The story follows Leia with one of her oldest friends Amilyn Holdo on a short adventure on Coruscant.  Holdo is learning how to drive and taking Leia on a tour of the shady underbelly of Coruscant where Leia makes a surprising discovery. Tales of friendship like this are something that the Star Wars Universe needs more of. It is nice to see stories that are more run of the mill, while still set in this fantastic environment.  As I note almost every time I write about this series, it is a fun all-ages series that I highly recommend.




POSTED BY MIKE N. aka Victor Domashev -- comic guy, proudly raising nerdy kids, and Nerds of a Feather contributor since 2012.

Nanoreviews: The Stiehl Assassin, City of Brass, Jade War

Brooks, Terry. The Stiehl Assassin [Del Rey, 2019]

There will undoubtedly be many more Shannara novels as Terry Brooks continues to flesh out the history of The Four Lands, but The Stiehl Assassin is also the penultimate volume in Brooks' push to close out the main line story arc of the Shannara Saga. The Four Lands are facing the invasion of the Skaar, though that invasion does not feel to be the same world breaking danger as the demons from the Forbidding in previous novels, mostly because though there is an invasion it has been a tightly targeted one.

The relative quality of Shannara novels has been inconsistent at best over the decades, and any time readers thought that Brooks might have turned a corner would result in several workmanlike volumes before a "return to form", though Brooks has never since been the careful writer he was in the 1980's and early 90's. With that in mind, The Black Elfstone (the first Fall of Shannara novel) felt as much like a return to form as we've seen in recent years with only a small step down withThe Skaar Invasion. The Stiehl Assassin mostly takes another step back for much of the novel, with loose storytelling and a sense that Brooks is dancing around something larger that needs to be told, that he could do better with fewer larger volumes than the racing pace of these relatively short fantasy novels. Where The Stiehl Assassin largely succeeds is when it does get to those larger issues - the reasons behind the invasion, the impact of technology and battle, as well as begin to answer lingering questions deeper in the series since at least 2013's Witch Wraith (which is only 6 years ago but there have been 5 books between that and this novel).

In the end, The Stiehl Assassin doesn't have enough to recommend it beyond being a continuation of a series many have been reading since the beginning or at least for as long as they've been reading genre.
Score: 6/10

Chakraborty, S.A. The City of Brass [Harper Voyager, 2017]

When I wrote about the Campbell (now Astounding) Award finalists back in July I lamented that I missed out on reading The City of Brass when it was first published in 2017 and had I read it then, it would have immediately made my Hugo Award ballot for Best Novel. The City of Brass is a spectacular debut novel.

Chakraborty blends 18th century Cairo with fantasy, the magic of the djinn are very real and there is a culture at war with itself and sometimes with the human world. I don't have the words to describe City of Brass in a way that the beauty of the novel comes across as deeply as it hit me from the start. Chakraborty's writing is smooth as silk and it draws the reader in to one hell of a story.
Score: 8/10 

Lee, Fonda. Jade War [Orbit, 2019]

The ongoing conflict between the No Peak and Mountain clans is the core of the story Fonda Lee is telling first with Jade City and now with Jade War, but the heart of the novel is the interplay within the Kaul family of the No Peak clan. The dynamic between Hilo and Shae as siblings and also Pillar with his Weather Man is painfully and perfectly drawn out. It is nearly impossible to not reference The Godfather (either Puzo's novel or Coppola's film) when discussing Jade War because Lee's novel has that feel of family and crime tinged with legitimacy and vengeance and hints of what it looks like from the wider world. It's not a one to one match and comparisons between characters are facile at best.

Jade War fulfills the promise of Jade City and then raises the bar once again. The novel expands beyond the island of Kekon and Fonda Lee's rich description makes brings each new location alive with the smell and feel of the city and Kekonese in exile. The world and the novel is so much bigger, and once again Fonda Lee has delivered a spectacular novel.
Score: 8/10 


POSTED BY:
Joe Sherry - Co-editor of Nerds of a Feather, 3x Hugo Award Finalist for Best Fanzine. Minnesotan.

LET'S FRIGHTEN CHILDREN! Vincent Price & Scooby-Doo

You’re a parent. You love horror. But horror is scary. So how to share this love of horror with your young, innocent, in-love-with-the-world child?

Sure, you can Google “best horror movies for kids,” and get the usual results, which you kinda already knew anyway. But for myself, as a parent who has tackled this question four times over, I’d like to take a deeper dive into this idea. So today I’m introducing our “Let’s Frighten Children!” series, which I hope will at least prompt some discussion about how we grown-up nerds can indoctrinate our tiny replicas into the genre we love, without sending them, screaming, into therapy.

Over the years, I have documented on this site the way I came to love horror, which was through screenings of classic Universal monster movies on over-the-air TV back in the 1980s. But the world has moved on. No 21st-century kid is getting their creepy from UHF channels, so how do we, as loving, responsible parents who know the joys of floating skeletons and disembodied laughter, bring our little kids with us into the warm embrace of darkness?

Friends, I have ideas.

The Language of Horror

For me and my family, the first step to introducing horror was to introduce the language of scares without, really, the fear. It’s hard to be a little kid. You are tiny, and surrounded by giants. Nothing makes sense, and every outcome is uncertain. Mom’s leaving...Will she come back?! How long is an hour?! It’s unknowable. And worse, there might actually be a monster under the bed. Or in the closet — you just don’t know.


This is where Vincent Price and Scooby-Doo came in handy. It’s pretty unlikely any kid is going to be legitimately frightened by an episode of Scooby-Doo. And yet, there are ghosts, goblins, witches, vampires, werewolves, creepers, and more, all running about. I’m actually not a huge Scooby fan, but I found the Cartoon Network Scooby-Doo Mystery Incorporated series to be excellent. I watched a big chunk of it with my kids, who were five and seven at the time. They loved it, and still do. We re-watch episodes regularly. In a world where asking a kid who has grown up with an iPhone to watch Bela Lugosi’s Dracula seems like a bridge too far, this is a show that is fast-paced, conversant in horror tropes, dabbles in grotesque/frightening imagery, and is funny, smart, and good. It’s also a show that prominently features Vincent Van Ghoul, who is a not-at-all-disguised representation of Vincent Price.

I think the world of Vincent Price. And while you might shy away from some of his 1970s work when it comes to screenings for young kids (things got pretty bloody), he spent the majority of his career as a boogeyman in a system that shied away from realistic violence. The result is a trove of movies that are neck-deep in Gothic imagery, but that aren’t actually frightening. I showed my daughter the Roger Corman/Vincent Price The Pit and the Pendulum when she was five, and she was all in. Several years later now, I’m taking her to theatre performances about the life of Edgar Allan Poe, and she’s reading her first Stephen King novel.

Introducing horror tropes in a way that wasn’t actually threatening helped to get my kids familiar with mythologies, characteristics, and images that would come to have more meaning later on as they got a little older and began seeing more things. Bride of Frankenstein is, believe me, easier for a kid to understand after they’ve seen Edward Scissorhands (featuring, of course, Vincent Price).

Recommendations

If you have little kids and want to introduce them to horror iconography in a relatively subdued presentation, you’d do well to consider the various iterations of Scooby-Doo and the Roger Corman/Vincent Price Poe films of the 1960s.

Every kid is different, and what excites and engages my kid might not be perfect for yours. But one of the lovely things about starting with the sillier end of the horror spectrum is that a kid can experience the fun of a Halloween vibe without actually getting scared out of their wits. After all, not everybody is going to graduate to enjoying The Texas Chainsaw Massacre or The Exorcist or The Babadook, but everybody can enjoy a creepy, spooky aesthetic on their own terms.

For young kids, I recommend:
Scooby-Doo Mystery Incorporated
Scooby-Doo on Zombie Island
The Haunted Palace
Fall of the House of Usher
House of Wax
The House on Haunted Hill
Ghostbusters

Posted by Vance K — Emmy-winning director and producer, cult-film reviewer and co-editor of Nerds of a Feather since 2012.

Microreview [Book]: Gideon the Ninth by Tamsyn Muir

The Queer NecRomantic Murder Mystery You've Been Missing All your Life

Cover art by Tommy Arnold

To say that Gideon the Ninth, the debut novel from Tamsyn Muir, has been the subject of some hype is like saying the Pacific Ocean is a bit wet. The hype about this skeleton-based queer adventure has been slowly taking over my Twitter feed since the end of last year, and its regularly felt like the universe was divided into those "lucky" few who had already read it (and were therefore falling over themselves to talk to the rest of us about skeletons) and everyone else waiting for the release to roll around. At last, dear readers, I have graduated into the ranks of the skeleton analysts.

Was it worth it? Oh, very yes.

Gideon is an orphan raised in indenture to the Ninth House, a crumbling ruined cult living on a nigh-uninhabitable planet, now facing total extinction. Ignored by most and openly tormented by the only other girl her age, Reverend Daughter Harrowhark, Gideon has been plotting her escape for years and on her eighteenth birthday, now finally has her chance to make her way off planet and into a marginally better life. On the verge of making good on her escape, Harrow outwits her at the last minute, only to instead offer to take her as a "cavalier", a sworn bodyguard to the House's necromancer, on a very different sort of quest. The First House - that of the Emperor - has offered a challenge, enabling a representative from one of the houses to ascend to the Emperor's services if they can successfully complete a task on the deserted First House planet. Left without a choice (and clearly intrigued and also maybe a bit into Harrow) Gideon takes on the challenge, taking a crash course in what it takes to be a cavalier before setting off to a crumbling house for an uncertain contest with the other seven houses. And then, of course, the murders begin.

In its worldbuilding, Gideon the Ninth takes a particular kind of claustrophobic gothic sensibility - one that's embodied in speculative work like Gormenghast and Under the Pendulum Sun - and applies it on an interplanetary scale whose mechanics are vague but also irrelevant. There's an empire, which we don't get a whole lot of information on, but whose leadership appears to be at the least chronically absent from the house structure its created. These houses specialise in upholding different aspects of the empire, ranging from practical services like "being soldiers" or "managing the library" to more nebulous professions like "being likeable", "thinking you're good at diplomacy but you're not, actually", "dying of attractive forms of consumption" and, of course, "skeletons". There's definitely an evolution to be drawn here from the districts of the Hunger Games or factions of the Divergent trilogy (and before those, the Hogwarts Houses) to this distinctly non-YA portrayal of a dysfunctional and yet internally meaningful classification system; in practical terms, the houses allow Muir to introduce a lot of characters and give them motivations in a relatively short space of time, and to allow the representatives of the Ninth House their own pre-existing prejudices and conflicts with those houses, while still maintaining them as outsiders to civilised company. Almost all of the supporting characters grow beyond the stereotypes of their house depiction (the main exception is the soldiers of the Second House, but they play their role and further nuance is not really missed), creating a highly satisfying political-necromantic soap opera which gets more desperate as the body count starts to build.

At the centre of it all are Gideon and Harrow, and their deeply dysfunctional relationship, all told through Gideon's lens. Muir may have written Gideon the Ninth in third person but it's most definitely Gideon's voice, and the portrayal of someone who has spent so long putting up with overblown spooky bullshit that she has no more fucks or reverence to give is utterly hilarious. Though Gideon makes no explicit cultural references to anything but her dirty magazines (and those play less of a role in the narrative than you'd think), her voice is imbued with what in other mediums would be referred to as "easter eggs": occasional memetic pop culture references to things like Mean Girls, which don't detract from the text if you don't read them as such but add to the idiosyncratic irreverence if you do. Because the atmosphere is so well defined beyond Gideon's perception, it makes for some highly amusing moments where Gideon's internal descriptions contrast with what's objectively going on: for example, her enforced vow of silence in early chapters allows her to come across as a creepy, mysterious hooded-and-painted skull figure to the rest of the group, even as she's walking around being internally rude, judgemental, and bored. The fact that the atmosphere isn't really dented by Gideon's irreverence is testament to Muir's skill in balancing the tone of what could have been a very uneven book. Instead, it all meshes together to create something that feels unique and fresh with a wonderful character voice, and a strain of heartbreak that really creeps up on you under all the hardened sword-wielding snark.

Another point of skill is the way that Gideon and Harrow's enemies to "it's complicated" relationship unfolds (complete with multiple complications including the aforementioned attractive consumptive necromancer), completely against the intention of either character, against a backdrop of general queerness despite their being very little in the way of explicit romance. Although I found it mildly frustrating that the few more "established" couples seem to be heterosexual, the way queerness is incorporated normalises it in a way which then enables Gideon and Harrow to be utterly obtuse about each other without it coming across as "baiting" or textually ambiguous that they could jump each other's bones (I promise that's the only skeleton pun that's going to make it in here) (but only because I'm kind of tired and don't expect any more low-hanging fruit). It's an important balance to strike particularly in a book like this where the trajectory is not towards an uncomplicated happy ending for the disastrous duo, because if lesbians are going to end the story unhappy and/or out-of-action, I need an author to have earned my trust along the way. However, this is a point where individual mileages may vary, and if you're a reader steer clear of "bury your gays" in the broadest sense then it may be worth seeking out a more spoiler-heavy review to work out if Gideon the Ninth is a book you want to invest in.

For me, therefore, this book has certainly earned its pre-release buzz, and I expect the community excitement is only going to increase as more people get to experience the world and characters Muir has created here (there was already a Gideon cosplay wandering around Worldcon one day, which I was pretty excited to see even before getting to read the book). In a strong year, Gideon the Ninth has effortlessly risen to near the top of my 2019 reads, and while its combination of gothic-grimdark worldbuilding sensibilities and post-Potter Millennial teen snark isn't going to work for everyone, it certainly does capture a genre zeitgeist which I was thoroughly delighted by. Best of all, there's just so much more of this bizarre world to see, and it sounds like we won't be waiting long before the next adventures of our skeleton faves in Harrow the Ninth.

The Math

Baseline Score: 8/10

Bonus: +1 Double Bones with Doctor Skelebone; +1 I could probably write a second review on all the other necromancers and cavaliers and my feelings about them (except the Second House)

Penalties: -1 Worldbuilding is a bit light on everything that doesn't play into the "Double Bones with Doctor Skelebone" aesthetic

Nerd Coefficient: 9/10

POSTED BY: Adri is a semi-aquatic migratory mammal most often found in the UK. She has many opinions about SFF books, and is also partial to gaming, baking, interacting with dogs, and Asian-style karaoke. Find her on Twitter at @adrijjy.

Reference: Muir, Tamsyn Gideon the Ninth (Tor.com Publishing, 2019)