The Hero’s Journey consists of leaving a stable and welcoming home, facing trials which grant power and skill, gaining a psychomp who will – one way or another, through some great trauma – force the Hero into a predictable series of sacrifices, culminating in, but not ending with, the sacrifice of the hero themselves. They may return from this journey but they can never go back home again. Not as the person they were.
There is a second path available, however. Let us call it the Anti-Hero’s Journey. The Anti-Hero might begin with an apparently stable beginning, but as their journey commences, we come to understand that there was nothing stable about it. Limned with trauma, betrayal, loss of hope and self, the Anti-Hero begins their journey with nothing left to sacrifice, clawing their way back to a purpose and forming a personality from the wreckage of their torment. They may may come back, but they can never return.
In Tamsyn Muir’s Harrow the Ninth, there is a third way – a course that never leaves the liminal, rebounding from one interstitial to another with no “there” there. The choice is never normative versus non-normative – what we might think of as sanity or insanity. The choice is between this form of insanity or this other one, with options for a third or fourth form waiting in the wings.
Harrowhark, née Nonagesimus, is a prodigy among necromancers at the very pinnacle of achievement for her House. She should be spending her days in study, in refinement of her skills as the hand of God. Instead she is drowning, insane (by her own admission) and overwhelmed, surrounded by the most amazingly shitty people you can possibly imagine…or, more accurately, that Muir could imagine for you. Harrowhark learns that Immortals are capable of being both appallingly human and incredibly shitty immortals as the world is ending and it does not make her happy.
What made Gideon the Ninth a most delightful mix of filth still exists here. People continue to be peopley, cursing and fucking and eating, (although rarely enjoying anything but the cursing.) Gideon was a brilliant book. Harrow, too, is a brilliant book. It is a completely different brilliance, darker and colder, with at least as many sex jokes, possibly more. Harrow (and Harrow,) also is queer as fuck, in case you were worried at the end of the first book that the lesbian had left the building.
The fact that a stable foundation is both unattainable and, frankly, unimaginable, means that we spend most of this book doing high-wire tricks with our comprehension skills. Going with the flow is an absolute imperative, even as the flow is full of dead bodies and hungry ghosts.
Ratings:
Overall – 10
Harrow the Ninth will be available on August 4th in digital, paperback and hardcover. Alecto the Ninth is tentatively slated (based upon an unconfirmed rumor) for August 2021, but I hope to all the gods and the Necrolord Prime that humanity can hold it together long enough for me to read it. Then we can explode into the sun or be ripped apart by revenants or however we’re going down.
My very sincerest thanks to Tor for the review copy, to Meryl for facilitating, and to Tamsyn Muir for writing these most extraordinarily creative and intelligent books about necromancy. Absolutely stunning.
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