Gideon the Ninth, by Tamsyn Muir

[sophia_sol]

NOBODY WARNED ME THIS BOOK IS HORROR. THIS BOOK IS HORROR. FYI.

Okay. Okay! I'm fine! This book was just..........a little more than I was expecting, you know? I was promised lesbians and snark and and swordfighting and bone magic. And yes, there was all that, but there was also a very generous serving of horror. I'm not a horror person. I am a wuss. But by the time it dawned on me what the book was doing it was too late and I was invested and I am absolutely going to read the sequels too once they're out.

It possibly should have dawned on me earlier that the book was horror given that it is entirely about necromancers, but like, you can do a lot of different things with necromancers? Because horror is really more about the tone and the narrative approach than it is about the Actual Things That Happen in a given story. And I don't read enough horror to be able to recognize it creeping up on me.

ANYWAY.

The book started out actually pretty boring to me for the entire first act (which is like, 80 pages!) and I nearly gave up on it because that is so long to have a boring intro go on for. The thing is that I personally find Gideon and Harrow far more interesting once there are other non-Ninth people around for them to a) interact with and b) be compared to. I was pretty uninterested in either of them or their fraught relationship with each other, for the whole first act. But I was very into all that for the rest of the book! And I do recognize the import of the stuff we're shown in the first act for setting the stage for everything else, but it would have been nice if it could have been a bit more efficient about it.

The rest of the book is really good though. There were a lot of things I kept on noticing to be impressed with, though of course now that I'm done reading I can't remember a single one. Idk. Skillfully written book, very engaging, very interesting and unusual. It's worth reading! (At least, if you're a person who can handle a certain amount of horror.)

Comments

[skygiants]

I also found the whole thing significantly more interesting once the other kids turned up - alas that most of my favorites of the other kids ended up dead, but so it goes! 😬

[michelel72]

Oh, man, surprise!horror is not my bag, either.

I really like Ursula Vernon/T. Kingfisher, even though much of her work can be said to have horror elements. When she announced her most recent work, she was very up-front that it's a horror piece, and I super appreciate that because if she's drawing that distinction, I can be sure it's not for me!

[pauraque]

I didn't know that book was horror either! Based on the bits I'd heard about it, I was imagining something very different.

[chestnut_pod]

May I ask what kind of horror it is? Is it a sort of gory horror, eldritch horror, or suspense horror, or *gulp* all at once?

[cahn]

The thing is that I personally find Gideon and Harrow far more interesting once there are other non-Ninth people around for them to a) interact with and b) be compared to. I was pretty uninterested in either of them or their fraught relationship with each other, for the whole first act. But I was very into all that for the rest of the book!

yesssss! All this!

Heh, I was not expecting you to be one of the people who had read this, because the whole time I was reading I was like "wow, this is basically a horror book!"