“You will need all your wits, Desdemona Mannering, all your scimitar wiles, to bargain with Kalos Kantzaros in Breakers Beyond.”
C.S.E. Cooney (author of The Bone Swans: Stories) returns with a brand new stand-alone novella, Desdemona and the Deep, set in the same world from her Dark Breakers series.
The author drops you in the middle of this alternate-universe Gilded age with just enough explanation that readers who haven’t already experienced the previous stories (like me) won’t be lost.
On top of the goblin world of the Bone Kingdom, and the faerie gentry world of Valwode, sits the mortal world of Athe. Inside Athe is the luxurious (if you’re wealthy) city of Seafall, and in the center of Seafall’s wealthiest’s family is Desdemona, heir to the Mannerling fortune.
And Desdemona? Is awful.
Or she is at first anyway. Desdemona is bored to tears with her mother’s endless charity balls, like the benefit she’s currently suffering through for the Phossy Girls (that’s a real thing; look it up sometime if you can stand the photographs. It’s proof that civilization learned nothing by the time the Radium Girls trials took place.) She’s humiliated by the sight of the dying factory workers being paraded around in her loaned ballgowns, she couldn’t give a damn about things like coal miners striking for better working conditions, and she’d rather spend her time having scandalous affairs, or better yet competing with her best friend Chaz on who can spend the bigger fortune on a new ballgown, followed by drinking a priceless bottle of rum and getting into drunken arguments about art.
“…Now you, you can’t just get me drunk and make pronouncements about the nomenclature of aesthetic symbolism like some iconographic expert on the Voluptuist movement. Cite your references!”
Desdemona’s spoiled, devil-may-care shallow life is a hell of a lot of fun to read, and I thought for sure that the story would be about her gradual transformation into someone who actually gives a damn about her fellow human beings. Nope. All it takes is eavesdropping on one of her father’s phone calls to find out what kind of bargain is behind her family’s fortune and that’s it. She’s going to march down into the worlds beneath – never mind how – and she’s going to recover the awful price her father paid for his latest business venture and she is going. To. Fix. This.
I love how single minded Desdemona is. Almost as soon as she finds out about her family’s tithe, she’s seeking out the abdicated queen of the gentry and finding out that her family mansion of The Breaker House is actually connected to a shadow version of the house in the Valwode: Breakers Beyond. The doors between the two open at midnight, when artists and poets can cross between worlds. The fact that Desdemona is neither doesn’t make her pause for an instant. If The Breaker House needs a poet, then she’ll just put on her finest gown along with thirteen different kinds of expensive feathers and furs and then get drunk on champagne with Chaz. That’s poetry enough, damn it.
Not even terrifying journeys and faerie throne rooms and unexpectedly turning into something covered in feathers and furs is enough to stop her. She’ll go toe-to-toe with the Kobold King himself and demand the return of her father’s tithe, her missing best friend, and by the way what kind of pervert has a magic river that takes all of her clothes.
“What did you do with my gown? It was an Ernanda! You think I’ll find another down here?”
“You forget yourself.”
“And you,” she snapped, “forgot to give me a towel when your river ate my dress.”
An earlier chapter has Chaz obsessing over an encaustic painting by his favorite artist of the Voluptuist movement, and I think that’s wildly appropriate because the luminous, melted-wax color of encaustic artwork is exactly what Cooney’s writing is like. The descriptions aren’t so much written as sculpted, the prose practically drips off the page. Through Cooney’s eyes we see a faerie mob where every single member is uniquely bizarre: horns for eyes, feathers for clothes, a nest of eels for legs, green skinned silver-haired triplet women dressed in leather and armed to the teeth. Desdemona’s companion in her quest is a small, fat, very 
randy satyr named Farklewhit who wears pink apron that doesn’t do much in the way of covering his crotch, and the author’s descriptions are just shy of being indecent as Desdemona’s transformed senses keep distracting her with how Farklewhit smells just delicious, in every sense of the word.
If I have one complaint about the story – and I’ve heard this from other reviewers as well – it’s that a novella just isn’t long enough for this complex tale of transformation, love, and the politics of Lower Word royalty. I wanted a lot more than just a few hundred pages. Fortunately C.S.E. Cooney is working on updated versions of the previous novellas in the series (The Breaker Queen and The Two Paupers) so with any luck those of us coming to this late will get another taste of this very strange world soon.