A review by flying_monkey
Gideon the Ninth by Tamsyn Muir

challenging dark funny mysterious medium-paced
  • Strong character development? It's complicated
  • Loveable characters? No
  • Diverse cast of characters? No
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

3.0

I'm still catching up on the best SFF lists of last year (2019), this was one that I didn't think I would enjoy, and it's pretty much lived up to that first impression. It is certainly an original premise. The setting is a decrepit solar system populated by dead and dying necromancers seved by reanimated skeletons, each planet (or House) having a slightly different specialism in the service of the deathless (and unseen) Emperor. In the creepiest, least populous House, the Ninth, whose occupants guard a locked tomb that contains some hideous secret, an orphaned girl has grown up to be the protector of the grim young necromancer, Harrowhark, the only other girl on the planet. She is foul-mouthed and well-muscled, and wields a big sword, and her only reading is girlie magazines (yes, that type) in complete contrast to the aescetic, stick-thin, black-cloaked nuns with skull-painted faces who populate the deep dark chasm that holds the tomb. The pair, along with a similar couple from each of the other planets is called to a competition on the first House to see who will become a new 'lyctor' (a sort of praetorian for the Emperor). We meet a cast of characters from the prissy to the intellectual to the outright sexy (this, if you haven't guessed is a very LGBTQ+ book, although it's not at all explicit, in fact it's all sighing and longing like some mid-century novel about girl-school crushes...). From here on in the book becomes essentially a haunted house mystery, and gets increasingly and disgustingly grand guignol, with a lot of murder, bones, more murder and bodily fluids. So what's not to like? Well, the writing is horribly, and I mean horribly off-puttingly uneven, as if this was written as the private project of a precocious teenager. It veers between fluid description, overly portentous exposition, and stupidly camp / Buffy or Mean Girls-style 'repartée', often in the space of a page. It's jarring and sometimes the intrusion of some ridiculous contemporary cultural reference from our own world completely undermines the job of world- and atmosphere-building that the author has done up to that point. For some people this is no doubt hilarious, but it made me want to hurl the book at the wall (which I couldn't do since I was reading this on an e-reader) and give up. I'm sure this is all entirely deliberate (at least I hope so or Muir is just a bad writer), but for me at least, it's grating and does not work. In conclusion, if you like reading a dark, atmospheric and very violent science fantasy populated by bitchy goth teenagers (or adult characters who still behave and sound like bitchy goth teenagers) whose idea of a witty comeback is 'that's what she said!' or 'Eat a dick!' then you'll like this book. Clearly, from the reviews, a lot of people do like this, it has won awards, and it clearly has a target audience. That target audience is not me.
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