“Harrowhark Nonagesimus – I really think you should consider the idea that you might also be haunted.”
The sequel to Tamsyn Muir’s Hugo-nominated debut novel is out, and if anything Harrow the Ninth is even more Gothic, decadent, weird, violent, gruesome, and gorgeous than the first book.
Gideon the Ninth ended with Harrowhark becoming a Lyctor, a Hand to the Undying Emperor. Her crumbling House is going to be restored, and she’ll have three of the Emperor’s current Lyctors to teach her – and her fellow new Lyctor – how develop their powers. So it sounds like she got everything she wanted, right?
Wrong. Harrow can never risk going home again, her powers as a Lyctor seem to be somehow…stuck, her fellow new Lyctor is a beautiful bitch, her three impossibly-old teachers are unimpressed with her talents (and one of them is actively trying to kill her), there’s something called a Resurrection Beast about to attack the Emperor and wipe out everything, and Harrow can’t trust anything she sees because there’s a very good chance that she’s completely insane.
“The Lyctors have died…fighting these things?” “Fighting them?” said God. “Harrow, I’ve lost half my Lyctors distracting them.”
The prologue starts with Harrow, the Emperor, and the rest of the Lyctors under attack by the Resurrection Beast’s hordes and Harrow is literally about to die.
And then suddenly we’re in chapter one with a scene from Harrow’s past and a crucial piece of information made me think “…ay?” Something’s off here. There isn’t much time to analyze this before we switch to the days immediately after Harrow became one of the Emperor’s Hands and finds out just how far she is from being a real Lyctor and…wait, why does this section sound like it’s being narrated to Harrow? And why are the chapter headings counting down the time to the Emperor’s murder?
I want to discourage anyone right now from the idea that you can jump into this series with Book Two. Seriously, don’t do it. In fact, there’s a Dramatis Personae in both Book One and Book Two, plus Book One ends with a glossary, a series of notes about the different houses, and a scholarly sermon on Cavaliers and Necromancers, and I highly recommend that you read all of it. Tamsyn Muir’s worldbuilding is epic and overwhelming, and she respects the reader’s intelligence enough to trust that they’ll remember everyone’s names and house affiliations and which saintly departed cavalier belonged to which now-immortal necromancer. I kept getting lost and having to plow through hoping things would make sense later.
Which didn’t always happen. Or at least not right away. I don’t think I’ve ever read a book where the author was this dedicated to the concept of the Unreliable Narrator. We keep seeing Harrow’s memories of her time in Caanan House, and what she’s remembering is just wrong. Then we’ll be back aboard the Emperor’s ship and Harrow is being stalked by shambling corpse that for some reason no one else can see. And she receives a series of letters that seem to have been written by herself with instructions like “to open if your eyes change” or “to open in the case of your imminent death”. Or she finds scraps of paper with non-sequiturs practically screaming at her in all-caps, but to everyone else the pages say something completely different, or they’re blank.
THE EGGS YOU GAVE ME ALL DIED AND YOU LIED TO ME
In many ways the tone of this book is completely different from Book One. Instead of the spitfire Gideon, we see everything through the eyes of Harrowhark, someone who’s parents killed two hundred children in order to create enough thanargic (death) energy for her mother to carry a baby to term. She also caused her parents to commit suicide when she opened the Tomb That Should Not Be Opened and fell in love with what she found there. (The regular appearance of The Body that only she can see just adds to the confusion about what exactly is real in this story.) She still has her necromantic powers to control bone, but it’s nothing compared to what she could do if she hadn’t somehow failed to make the full transition to Lyctorhood, which means she’s almost certainly going to die when they face the Resurrection Beast. And she has zero friends, because she’s Harrowhark Nonagesimus and she doesn’t need them. Or feel like she deserves them.
So what we have is a desperately lonely, miserable, cold-hearted necromancer who’s slowly losing what’s left of her mind. And all of that’s without the fact that, as mentioned before, one of her teachers is trying to murder her.
In the following months the Saint of Duty attempted to kill you, by your count, fourteen times, and you never came close to understand the motivation.
None of it makes sense. The Emperor seems to be a very kindly soul who likes Harrow and yet isn’t inclined to stop the relentless attempts to kill her. One attempt in particular almost feels like it needs a trigger warning for appalling violence. There are so many details to keep track of, so much I didn’t understand. The first couple hundred pages of this book are exhausting.
And then Harrow does something that surprised me more than pretty much anything I’ve read in ages. It literally made me say “HOLY CRAP” when it happened. It didn’t exactly solve all of Harrow’s problems, or even most of them, but good God it was satisfying, and after that everything was different. The rest of the book flew by.
Muir still has this amazing skill with creating cinematic images; Harrow flicking bone chips out of her earrings and creating a pack of skeletons behind her, or morphing weapons that spring out of her own bones, or being carried by a huge, lumbering skeleton creature as it marches across a jungle planet that she’s about to mercy-kill. We see swordfights where the fighter is having to regrow limbs and fingers as quickly as they’re being bitten off. Harrow’s memories of Canaan House get progressively stranger and stranger, with Lovecraftian tubes of flesh crawling down the ceiling, and a group of people who absolutely should not still be alive huddling close to Harrow as the walls crumble and the lights crash to the floor. I still don’t completely understand the entire concept of The River, but I can appreciate the absolutely horrifying images the author paints of the way it manifests: a rising tide of bloody water filled with floating dismembered corpses.
And what keeps all of this from being over-the-top is the moments of brilliant, completely unexpected humor. Smart-alack dialog like something from a Tumblr conversation: Yikes as an entire sentence. Millennia-old beings bickering constantly, the Emperor King of the Nine Renewals responding to someone’s attempt to sacrifice themselves with a muttered “…for fuck’s sake.” One character has written eighteen volumes of a poetic history of a Ninth House hero, and Harrow’s reactions whenever he starts reciting parts of it just keep getting funnier.
And then the author will catch you by surprise again by slipping in a beautiful image, or a heart-to-heart moment that you didn’t know you’d been waiting for.
There is still so much of the world the author has created that I don’t quite get, but I can’t even care about that because the last fifty or so pages are one revelation after another. It’s stunning, it’s mesmerizing; you spend the entire book knowing you can’t trust anything anyone says, and by God by the end you understand why. And if you don’t mind I think I’m going to go reread this now, because all of those cryptic comments and times where people are shouting the end of a conversation that started a few millennia ago are all going to be seen in a completely different light the second time around.
Cover art by Tommy Arnold.
