It’s been a few years since I reviewed C.S.E Cooney’s standalone novella Desdemona and the Deep, swimming in all that lovely sculpted prose and wishing there was more of this world of magic and goblins and worlds stacked one on top of each other and people making very inadvisable deals for money and power.
Lo and behold, we now have a collection of five stories set in the world of Breaker House, three of them brand new and two of them re-written novellas that were formerly only available as ebooks. I was able to win a signed advance reader copy from the author herself (“Books are the best possible thing to win! Other than money. Which you can then use to buy books.” – Elizabeth), and I’ve been taking my time reading it, trying to make it last as long as possible because this book is as tasty as ice cream and as dizzying as an entire bottle of wine.
For anyone not familiar with C.S.E. Cooney’s work, the world she’s created for Dark Breakers is actually three worlds set on top of each other(or sideways)(or nested inside each other)(it’s complicated). There’s Bana the Bone Kingdom (the lower world of the goblins), the upper world of Athe (otherwise known as “reality”), and in between them is a thin slice of a world populated by the faerie-like gentry and shaped by dreams: The Valwode. At some point in the past the three worlds were separated by walls, but they’re not entirely cut off from each other. Some residents of the Bone Kingdom and the Valwode can move from world to world; in some places in Athe the wall to the Valwode becomes thinner at midnight. And one house exists in all three worlds simultaneously: the palace of the King of Kobolds, the Dark Breakers in the Valwode, and Breaker House in Athe, home of one of the richest families in the town of Seafall.
And while most of the residents of Athe think the Three Worlds stories are fairy tales or allegories, the gentry of the Valwode are very much real, and they have a bad habit of sneaking into Athe and taking what they want.
The problem with Breaker House was, at midnight, everything became a door.
How to describe Cooney’s prose? The example I keep coming back to is the masquerade that Desdemona throws at one point in Breaker House. Cooney absolutely revels in her descriptions of a roomful of dancers in full costume, of gentry life, of high society, of the darkness in the cellar of a workhouse, of a quiet forest glade beside a cabin in the mountains. The gentry become drunk on human writing, human art, human mortality. Humans are dragged into the complicated politics of the gentry where rivals fight for the throne using sculptures and captive poets and venom. Cooney describes the paintings and mythology of this world in a way that you can almost touch and smell as well as see.
(Speaking of paintings, Elliot Howell – one of the main characters – is a Voluptuist painter. He exclusively creates pictures inspired by gentry stories and the surreal feeling of a world where people have a badly-hidden tail or horn or butterfly wings or weep diamond tears. My favorite painting description was the one of a chain-smoking dragon at a hospital bedside, but I’ve decided I want to see all of his paintings. And his friend Gideon’s sculptures. And read his friend Ana’s book. And cosplay as Nyx Nightwalker in full war paint. And also I’d like a pony.)
The stories in this book are in chronological order, but they also peer back in time to give a little more information about The Changeling Wars when the walls dropped between the worlds. Cooney also slips in allusions to several of her previous stories. Desdemona Mannering makes a couple of appearances that are prior to the events of Desdemona and the Deep, so she’s still a spoiled princess and force of nature but hasn’t learned yet how to, you know, care about things. But there are also a few hints at the fallout from Desdemona’s adventures, and even little things like the dress Desdemona is wearing to her masquerade is a shout-out to the title story of Cooney’s short-story collection Bone Swans.
The first two novellas in the collection feel more like two chapters of a novel than standalone stories. In “The Breaker Queen”, aspiring artist Elliot is invited by Desdemona Mannering to spend a few days painting her portrait in the sprawling mansion of Breaker House. Coincidentally, Nyx the Nightwalker, Queen of Valwode has chosen this as the time to slip between the worlds and enjoy a few precious hours of adventure and escape in Athe. And maybe, just maybe, she could kidnap a mortal artist and use him to hold off a coup attempt back in Dark Breakers. It’s the sort of thing that a human with any knowledge of gentry tales would know to stay absolutely the hell away from, unless they wanted to be held prisoner beyond the Veil and come back centuries out of their own time, if they came back at all.
So it completely disarms Nyx when the first human artist she happens upon sees right through her disguise, sees everything that Nyx is capable of, and falls head over heels in love with her. The story kept going places I simply didn’t expect, Cooney lingers over all the ways that Nyx and Elliot discover how much they adore each other, and how different they are from each other, and every description was sheer poetry.
She did not have a heartbeat, exactly. Not the way he understood a heartbeat. If her enemies opened up her chest, they might find a ruby-throated hummingbird at the center, or a whirlpool inhabited by leviathans, or the moon in all of its phases, or all of this, all at once.
“Two Paupers” picks up almost right where “Breaker Queen” leaves off, except this story follows Gideon Alderwood and his next-door neighbor Analise Field. (Cooney mentions in her afterward that she had to keep these two from taking over the first story by promising them one of their own.) We’d previously seen Gideon be just awful to Analise, literally driving her away from the gathering at Breaker House. For a moment I thought this was one of those tiresome stories were the manly hero drives away the woman because he hasn’t learned to make himself vulnerable to love…until it becomes clear that Gideon is almost blank with terror and in an absolute panic to get Ana out of Breaker House. And just to be safe, away from him as well.
“Two Paupers” is where we learn what happened to Gideon that drives him to smash his sculptures as soon as they’re done, and to justify the sometimes breathtaking cruelty he’s shown to Ana, practically from the moment they met. And then we get to see how his friends get him out of all the prisons he’s been locked inside from the day the Breaker House walls opened to him at eight years old.
I’ve recently realized that I have a real weakness for stories about inanimate objects that fall in love with a human and would do anything to protect them, so that element was a particular draw for me. But I also enjoyed watching sweet and mostly shy Ana march straight into danger, damn the consequences. If Ana can face down someone as fearsome as an iron-cold high-society bitch like Gideon’s mother, she’s definitely not going to be intimidated by an immortal gentry upstart with an army of indestructible stone soldiers.
…not just for Gideon, but for the statue he’d meant to destroy. And for the gentry whom General Lorelia meant to subjugate. And for the good of the whole Valwode.
But.
Also for Gideon. Who needed rescuing. Whether he deserved it or not.
We have a bit of a departure with the story “Salissay’s Laundries”, where we follow intrepid reporter Salissay Dimaguiba as she goes undercover in the Seafall City Laundries, a place for the “purification” of the magically inflicted. Many unfortunates have been sent there, none have ever been seen again, and Salissay is going to blow this scandal wide open like one of the famous female reporters of the late 19th century.
I loved all the breathless chapter titles that went on for several lines (“Seven Days in Hell, i.e., the Seafall City Laundries. Falling to the Depths. Walking with the Wretched. Finding Wonders on the Way.”), but even more I loved how Cooney combines Salissay’s passion and empathy and fearlessness with a situation that is both supernatural and heartbreakingly mundane. Salissay thinks that the Three Worlds stories are complete bunkum, and the reports of women having to be committed for magical infection, spell-sickness, or bearing changeling children are all stories told to justify the imprisonment of “inconvenient” people. But what’s going on in the Seafall Laundries is a lot more complicated. It’s impressive how many elements Salissay gets right when she has so much of it completely wrong.
I’ll jump now to “Susurra to the Moon”, because it’s a cute, irresistible, fun story featuring two familiar faces. Well, familiar, except that they’re both almost unrecognizable from what they were when they last appeared, and yet somehow they’ve become even more themselves, if that makes any sense. It’s a brief little interlude that promises many more madcap adventures, and it’s the perfect story to wrap up the collection…
…but the story I want to wrap up this review with is “Longergreen”. Written by Cooney in the mountains she used as the setting, it’s a lovely, quiet story of navigating grief in a changing world. The images that Cooney paints are astounding (one of my favorites is an antler crown hung with ribbons tied to mortal mementos). In a collection that’s had magical battles and masquerades and itemized declarations of love and grilled-cheese sandwiches, it felt right to finish two character arcs in a simple and sweet way. And I know a lot of times I want to shout “You’re going to end it there?!”, but of all the stories that end with a “yes or no” question, this is one of my favorites.