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Harrow the Ninth (The Locked Tomb, #2)

Tamsyn Muir

Start date: August 1, 2020

Finish date: August 31, 2020

Discussion: SciFi

Why we're reading this: Featured buddy read - August 2020
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What Members Thought

Aug 12, 2020 Nataliya rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: 2020-reads, hugo-nebula-nominees-and-winners

To sum up: it’s a lovely migraine of a book.

“I was not following all of this, because necromantic theory is a lot of hot bullshit even when I'm not busy having Complex Emotions.”

If you thought Gideon the Ninth was a bit bonkers, do I have a surprise for you. Enter Harrow the Ninth that makes “Gideon” seem like the easiest and most straightforward story there ever was. “Harrow” is so deliberately confusing, frustrating and over-the-top that I had to reach into my brain and forcibly shut off the part of it that’s responsible for logically trying to figure out what’s going on, instead just going along with a weird slightly insane ride where, like in a haunted ~~funhouse~~ madhouse nothing is what is seems and what it should be. I usually hate books that force me to do that. But with Harrow the Ninth it was ultimately worth it.

“I could protect you, if you’d only ask me to,” said Ianthe the First. A tepid trickle of sweat ran down your ribs.
“I would rather have my tendons peeled from my body, one by one, and flossed to shreds over my broken bones,” you said. “I would rather be flayed alive and wrapped in salt. I would rather have my own digestive acid dripped into my eyes.”
“So what I’m hearing is … maybe,” said Ianthe.

Our weirdo fanatical necromancer Harrowhark Nonagesimus (strange and creepy even by the murky standards of spacefaring necromancer society built on skeleton labor and bone magic and swordplay) has supposedly ascended to the coveted Lyctorhood at the terrible cost of a sacrifice of the only (living) person she ever cared for, becoming the superpowered magical knight to the Necrolord Prime, the Undying Emperor for the last 10,000 years. Or so it should have been. In fact, everything seems terribly and confusingly wrong. The powers are not what they are supposed to be, the memories are not what we know happened, the madness and insane confusion rule, and God seems to go by the name of John. Oh, also there’s a dead body ghost haunting you and a corpse that refuses to stay dead. And half of it is in second-person narration. And it refuses to make sense for two thirds of the story. Oh, and the time jumps, lets not forget that. And what I can only call reality jumps as well, in addition to time jumps.

Everything is just so *wrong*. And Harrowhark Nonagesimus seems to really be losing it.

“But Harrowhark—Harrow, who was two hundred dead children; Harrow, who loved something that had not been alive for ten thousand years—Harrowhark Nonagesimus had always so badly wanted to live. She had cost too much to die.”

Tamsyn Muir could have stuck with the snappy juvenile-ish snark that was both the best and the worst bit of Gideon the Ninth, the one that made me both entertained and a bit tired from all the eye-rolling. It would have been fun and familiar. But instead she throws us into the confused jumble of Harrow’s possibly insane and very much haunted mind without a lifeboat. It’s sink or swim narration, so grab the nearest piece of flotsam and stay adrift.

“In the real world, I have been fatally stabbed. The place that holds my body is about to be overrun by thanergetic monsters created by a galactic revenant. I am, put bluntly, on the verge of death. My soul is under siege, and I overwrote my real memories with a ghost-filled pocket dimension, which has now apparently been co-opted by some kind of poltergeist. From what I can tell I am stuck in here. I cannot get out. And I am about to die—I may even be dead already—which will render this all somewhat moot.”

Under all the craziness this is a book about loss and grief. It may be hidden and masked and avoided, but it’s constantly there, just underneath the surface, sharp and relentless. Harrow is grieving, even if she refuses to understand it. And she feels tremendous guilt. And let’s not forget the haunted bit either. She’s struggling to survive — all while around her the entire world is in danger, and dead planet revenants are threatening the fabric of existence, and the spaceship/boneyard can only protect them for so long, and while the whole Lyctorship has gone terribly wrong, and each chapter counts down to the Emperor’s murder.

And necromancers still have to make soup. That’s not a joke.

The clues to what is going on are scattered everywhere. You know those are all clues but putting them together is hard, and for the two thirds of the story you’d do better if you just collect them in your mind and let them sit there and wait until Muir comes to the part where answers start. It’s frustrating but also fun. Some of them are easy, some seem to come out of the left field, but they are all rewarding. There’s a cringeworthy immortal heretical threesome that made me (and Harrow) flee in terrified embarrassment. There are planetary homicides. There are poignant ruminations on very messed up childhoods full of cruelty and neglect. There are objectively terrible pop-culture jokes — and I am certain that Muir makes them glaringly obviously bad on purpose, as a self-aware mockery in this case. There are loving and horrifying descriptions of bones and viscera that would fascinate anatomists and graverobbers alike. Those who are dead make appearances (since when has death stopped anyone in a society of necromancers???) and some of those make me squeal with happiness, and you really should brush up on Gideon the Ninth plot prior to starting this book because otherwise it won’t be nearly as much fun.

"Do not fucking ask me for information. I could not be more lost right now."

Tamsyn Muir has created characters that are both immensely unlikable ((view spoiler)) and yet in the same breath real and complicated and worth rooting for. Morally grey and multifaceted is apparently easy for Muir to create. Kudos are in order. And there are enough power struggles and complex motivations to last a lifetime or two, necromantically speaking.

“Memory hit Harrowhark Nonagesimus with the inexorable gravity of a satellite sucked from orbit, flinging itself to die on the surface of its bounden planet; the world hit her like a fall.”

I think it took guts for Muir to flip the switch from inhabiting Gideon’s mind — fun, irreverent, sarcastic, snarky, and bristling with energy — to Harrow’s fanatical, obsessive, paranoid, glum, dark, confused, claustrophobic and for all intents and purposes insane mind. Taking the readers out of established comfort zone and plunging them into the new cold uncharted waters is a string and ballsy move, and after the initial shock I embraced it with all my heart. (view spoiler) It’s wickedly powerful, once you let it take your brain over. Or maybe it’s just crazy talking. Who knows?

“Is that the truth, or the truth you tell yourself?” asked Augustine.
“What is the difference?” said God.

It’s cryptic, it’s fascinating, it’s frustrating, and it’s fun. If you hated Gideon the Ninth, you’ll hate this one. If you loved Gideon the Ninth, you still may hate this one. It’s prickly and often annoying and makes you really work for it.

It’s like a migraine in the book form that eventually unfolds into a beautiful creation.

I loved it. And I certainly will be queueing up to see how this bonkers and awesome story wraps up.

“I think the main thing I should have said was, You sawed open your skull rather than be beholden to someone. You turned your brain into soup to escape anything less than 100 percent freedom. You put me in a box and buried me rather than give up your own goddamned agenda. Harrowhark, I gave you my whole life and you didn’t even want it.”

4.5 bone shards. Or stars. Whatever.

————
My review of Gideon the Ninth is here: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...

———————

My Hugo and Nebula Awards Reading Project 2021: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show... ...more

410 likes · Like · see review

Mar 07, 2020 Bradley rated it it was amazing

Shelves: horror, 2020-shelf, sci-fi, fantasy

I'm pleased to say that this sequel to Gideon the Ninth not only answers a few questions, but breaks the mold established by the first and plows through the fields of the dead to create (or destroy) all of creation.

I mean, what else can you expect when you're dealing not only with necromantic gods in a supremely hi-tech post-humanity universe?

Them to make soup?

Oh, wait... yeah.

Honestly, I was slightly bemused and slightly weirded out by the kind of pacing and style in the first part of the nove ...more

93 likes · Like · see review

Sep 02, 2020 Lindsay rated it it was amazing

Shelves: science-fiction

What a book to try and review ...

Ok, so you know how a lot of the time in Gideon the Ninth you really had no idea what was going on?

Go ahead and turn that dial up a bit. Um, no. Twist it up until it pops off. Mark in 1,000,000 with sharpie.

Now you're ready for Harrow the Ninth.

We pick up two story-lines in this book, one set months after the first book with infrequent chapter headings counting down to the Emperor's murder (!) and one set in what looks to be an alternate version of the first book ...more

18 likes · Like · see review

Aug 20, 2020 Di Maitland rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: fantasy, very-old-characters, non-humans, action-girl, humorous, magic, swords, future, lgbtq, sci-fi

It is with total and utter surprise that I tell you that I didn't hate this. Actually I rather liked it. This is despite the fact that, even having finished it, I still have next to no idea what actually happened. 'Mind fuck' doesn't quite cover it.

Harrowhark is on a ship travelling away from Canaan house with God - more commonly known as John, and Lyctors: Ianthe; Mercymorn, the Saint of Joy; Augustine, the Saint of Patience; and Ortus, the Saint of Duty. None of them live up to their titles, a It is with total and utter surprise that I tell you that I didn't hate this. Actually I rather liked it. This is despite the fact that, even having finished it, I still have next to no idea what actually happened. 'Mind fuck' doesn't quite cover it.

Harrowhark is on a ship travelling away from Canaan house with God - more commonly known as John, and Lyctors: Ianthe; Mercymorn, the Saint of Joy; Augustine, the Saint of Patience; and Ortus, the Saint of Duty. None of them live up to their titles, and Ortus is inexplicably trying to kill her - a fact everyone else seems to find funny.

The ship is preparing for a faint fight against the Revenant Beasts, the undead souls of dead planets. Something went wrong in Harrow's transition to Lyctorship, however, and so she is largely left to her own devices. Gideon is gone - totally forgotten as if she never existed - and we don't know why. In fact, we don't know who or where we are most of the time. Madness doesn't quite cover it. I considered everything from alternate realities to time travel. The problem with necromancy is that, when you take death off the table, you can't really rule anything out.

Be warned, unless you're super savvy (and probably not even then), you won't have an inkling as to what's going on until three-quarters of the way through the book. And even now I've finished, I'm still trying to wrap my head around it all. A reread is probably a required. A buddy read is recommended so that you can whine to all your fellow readers that you don't get it and they'll pat you on the shoulder and tell you to keep reading (thank you Lindsay, Amanda and Denise!).

By far the best thing about this book, and the reason you'll keep reading, is its humour. It had me laughing out loud on multiple occasions. Muir takes put-downs to a whole new level, delightfully overstates the mundane and understates the extraordinary, and uses similes in a way that makes me wish I could see the world through her eyes. Moira Quirk's narration only adds to the perfection, the drawls, the squeaks and all. My fervent wish is that I have the occasion to use some of them myself soon.

'"Stop wearing that pillowcase any time you'd like. I've seen your face before and I know it looks like both of your parents were right-angled triangles. We must work with what we've got, as the flesh magician said to the leper."'

'"A Steely is eight feet tall, covered in the dead languages by special Fifth adepts, and continually bathed in oxygenated blood," said Mercymorn from the pilot seat. "The type of thing where, if there is one on board, you say quite soon: Oh, look, a Steely!"'

'"Can we get back to this blasted funeral," said Mercy. "Sitting through six of these is worse than dying myself. I will let you know now, that the plan for my funeral is in my top drawer and I've got it down to a minute by minute framework and it's only twenty-four minutes and it's just lovely."'

'"You've got two short minutes left before I punch you right in the butthole," I said. "Follow me. We haven't got much time, quite apart from your hurtful threats of sexual violence," she said. "Why your fist is so big and my butthole is so small!"

And the ultimate for those who've finished it:(view spoiler)

The characters, I will admit, are infantile and pretty one-dimensional, but I found I could forgive a surprising amount when I was laughing out loud. World-building was simplified by mostly being on a standard starship, and the magic system was just logical enough that I felt Muir must have understood its intricacies, even if I didn't. I did learn a lot about the names for the bones in our body though. #phalangesforfingers

All in all a very enjoyable read but one I'd struggle to recommend to others - mostly because I'm relying on others to tell me what happened. Will I read the next one? Maybe. I'm sure it'll be a good laugh but I might cheat and read a recap first so I have some structure within which to read the book.

If you liked Harrow the Ninth and are looked for you next books, I've listed a few recommendations on my blog. ...more

17 likes · Like · see review

Oct 04, 2020 Lata rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: sf-f-h, auth-f, x2020-read

How is it possible to be confused, and I mean seriously confused, for most of a book, and still LOVE it? Tamsyn Muir took Gideon in book one through A story that had me confused at times, and a mystery with a growing pile of bodies, and between the crazy good prose and characterizations of Gideon and Harrow, had me loving my awesome cavalier and her necromancer.
Well, here, we follow Harrow in two storylines, one with the NecroLord Prime and his Lyctors, and the other back at the Ninth House then ...more

14 likes · Like · see review

Aug 12, 2020 jovena s rated it really liked it

Shelves: fantasy, science-fiction

4.5 stars

that ending…utterly bewildering and incredible. i absolutely loved harrow and every single character in this. the dialogue was snappy and hilarious, and the fight scenes were insane. i also really appreciate the second person pov, which is so delightful as it’s really uncommon. and did i mention how much i love harrow?

but i was confused about 95% of the time. i get that it’s very important to harrow’s character arc and the several huge reveals at the end, but it was a little too baffli ...more

8 likes · Like · see review

Aug 13, 2020 Amanda rated it really liked it

3.5 stars.

6 likes · Like · see review

Oct 11, 2020 Christina Pilkington rated it really liked it

Shelves: genre-fantasy

Actual rating: 4.5 stars I am so glad I read through Liberty Hardy chapter by chapter breakdown of Gideon the Ninth on Tor.com before diving into Harrow the Ninth because I would have been even more lost than I was at the beginning of this novel!

I never had any issues with the large cast of characters or getting lost in the plot details of Gideon the Ninth. But I have to admit to being a little confused during the first third to half of Harrow the Ninth. However, I had faith that Muir had a met ...more

1 like · Like · see review