This post was originally published on Tor.com, on August 9th.
Recently I was skimming through Tumblr—ever an excellent way of wasting time—when I scrolled to a post reacting to the book Nona the Ninth, the latest entry in Tamsyn Muir’s The Locked Tomb series, published last September. One particular part of this poster’s reaction stood out to me, a reaction that I will roughly paraphrase to, “Wait, are the necromancers in the series…actually the bad guys?”
For the uninitiated, there are many, many necromancers in The Locked Tomb series (and as Charles Stross’ cover blurb for the original entry also assures us, they are mostly lesbians and in space!). To those unfamiliar with the books, the answer to this question might feel obvious: Yes, the necromancers are probably the bad guys, right? That does tend to be the usual depiction when it comes to people who mess with the dead, or even just folks who wear a lot of skull paraphernalia. The guys that stick their fingers in dead bodies and puppet them around? It’s probable that they are up to no good and are, in fact, scheming to steal your liver as we speak!
[Spoilers for The Locked Tomb series below.]
But of course, I’m don’t bring this up to call the OP out for being confused about the obvious. Like me, they have read the books, and it sounds as though we had a similar experience with them. The first two entries in the series take place within John Gaius’ necromantic empire, and the second book is told from the perspective of a full-blown necromancer. Protagonist bias being what it is, readers learn to roll with necromancers’ weird activities and styles of dress. What seems normal to them becomes normal to us. Indeed, one of the central joys of the first book, Gideon the Ninth, is being taken along on the journey of slowly falling in love with the necromancer Harrowhark Nonagesimus, the “hideous witch from hell.” You just have to get to know her a bit.
Only in the third and most recent book does Muir take us out of the dominion of John’s empire and the upper echelons of its society, and onto a world bursting with refugees fleeing the conquest of his legions, a campaign only hazily alluded to heretofore. Now we see its consequences.
And so Nona lived with Camilla, Palamedes, and Pyrrha, on the thirtieth floor of a building where nearly everyone was unhappy, in a city where nearly everyone was unhappy, on a world where everyone said that you could outrun the zombies, but not forever.
Nona the Ninth, pg. 39
So, yes, it is understandable that this would be the book where readers really start to grapple more seriously with the idea that the Nine Houses may be a less-than-righteous society. And yeah, maybe all the skulls and talk of “arterial blood” should have been a hint…
As a reader, there’s a funny sense of dissonance as you find yourself considering the idea that maybe the most stereotypically “evil” genre of magic could be the instrument of wickedness here too…but that is itself often the fun of books, both in fiction and nonfiction: discovering the gulf between how you expect to feel about something and what actually bubbles up when you face it on the page. Muir has created a universe in which we root for necromancers—and their cavaliers!—as naturally as we’d root for any other protagonist. Now in book three, she’s complicated that dynamic, pushing the world of necromancy away to the distance where it starts to look less familiar. At that point, we’re forced to reevaluate and ask, “Why necromancers? Why the kind of magic that bleeds and oozes?” It’s an invitation to think more deeply about the overall themes of the Locked Tomb books—about bodies, death, grief, and the boundaries we draw and then sometimes erase between ourselves and others.
And while we’re on the subject of necromancy, it always helps to dig a little deeper, because when we read about magic of any genre, we are always implicitly confronting what we do and don’t expect, what we consider to be normal. So, let’s talk a little about what is magic, what is magical about necromancy, and how Muir’s Locked Tomb series incorporates the inherent strangeness of magic as a concept into its themes.
Cognito Mode 