HARROW THE NINTH (stupidly good) is a new book by Tamsyn Muir and a sequel to GIDEON THE NINTH (also stupidly good).
Apparently this "Muir" is a living mortal human despite her John-like ability to do with letters of the alphabet what the arc of the covenant does with nazi faces. Tamsyn Muir routinely writes sentences that are so utterly perfect in their construction that the reader has no choice but to close the book, stand up, walk outside and just laugh into the street. She selects words so unexpected and ideal that one experiences an overwhelming urge to found a new religion just so they can dedicate the rest of their life to praying before the altar of that one word. Her writing is so exquisite that I would not be surprised to find transcendental joy in reading her shopping lists or her exhaustive comparative study of laundry detergents.
As it happens, HARROW is neither of these, but rather a cosmic emo fantasy novel-cum-space opera about necromancers and denial. And skeletons. This is a book that goes through originality and out the other side. It treats hugely fresh and mindblowing ideas with - simultaneously - both flippant ease and staggering richness. The text is absurdly, gorgeously technical and dense. It is the pinnacle of an author's commitment to her premises. It's indulgent as all hell, but you only wish it were more so. Every goddamn line drips with sensual meaning and import - yet in the same breath delights in the most lighthearted of jokes and self-depreciations. There's a whole sex-scene metaphor that simply consists of someone cutting off someone else's arm and rebuilding their arm bones. Genius from start to finish.
Muir builds her story like a dominatrix; grappling with her narrative feels like nothing so much as badass sadism (on her part) and puppy-eyed masochism (on the reader's). The scope of the hidden truths and multifaceted plotlines is spooled out like a delicious smell that causes the audience to float involuntarily along its vapour trail, transporting us to a higher state of pure, cataclysmic yearning for answers that are constantly teased, intimated and whispered just beyond our hearing. And whenever a juicy morsel is finally tossed to the reader in the form of actual exposition, it is always accompanied by an entire dumpster truck of ambiguity and new questions that just make you punch yourself in the eyeballs for having been so stupid to have started this torture-book without first waiting for ALECTO. I love every part of this process so completely.
The cover art for HARROW THE NINTH is like the best art that anyone's ever made in any context in all of human history. Just as a side note.
