🎃 What I Am Reading for Halloween: "The Monster of Elendhaven" by Jennifer Giesbrecht

I always try to put a horror-fantasy novel on my list, and this year it was The Monster of Elendhaven. This short book was a very gothic story about a pair of antiheroes: a monstrous, invulnerable murderer, and a plotting, frail magician from a fallen noble house. Unlike other antihero stories, however, this is not the tale of their gritty, insidious triumph. 150 pages is only long enough to hold a more traditional story arc.

The two characters live in Elendhaven, an arctic city in a German-flavored Victorianish (Wilhelmine? Not quite) fantasy land. The time period is a little hazy and anachronistic: it has a character referencing the filaments in light bulbs while coexisting with gaslights, tricorns with feathers, and musket balls. The Victorians tend to bleed out a bit on either side of their actual timeline, as also seen in Blades in the Dark, the RPG I've been playing. The pole was the site of a magical apocalypse five hundred years ago, and the city feels the fallout in the form of a dark, polluted ocean that causes "aberrations" in the biology of the area. Elendhaven seems star-crossed for other reasons, namely the 10+ months of cold weather (the author is from the Canadian Atlantic), the departure of much of its industry other than whaling, and a plague within recent memory.

The plague is the source of motivation for Florian Leickenbloom, the frail, vain mage whose full plan remains mysterious. From what we are told, he seems to be driven by revenge against the city for abandoning his family to the plague (since the old money clan had a reputation for magic use) and against the world for abandoning the city to its fate. We are introduced first, however, to the character Johann, who appears at first glance to be a twisted waterfront urchin, facilitated in his sub rosa crimes by the discovery that he is invulnerable. As the story develops, however, we are given only one detail of the city's religious/magical undergirding; but that story, how the sea goddess Hallandrette sends her children to assist the wronged and wretched with their vengeance, proves critical to understanding the troubling connection between Johann and Florian.

The connection itself develops interestingly, as Johann, after joining with Florian, handles him in a predatory sexual manner. I wondered for a while if he was going to kill Florian; he sought him out in order to learn magic from him, and had killed people who had taught him life skills in the past. Johann is a grimdark serial killer, though he does not always have full control of his situation, and so doesn’t just relentlessly command the course of the story the way a Hannibal Lecter might. In any event, it is an interesting gay relationship between Johann and Florian, as Florian continues to display arrogance and command of the situation.

The book is short, and must fit in establishing the main characters and their relationship, the slow revelation of Florian's plans, and the developing threat to those plans in the form of a Mage Hunter, hiding in plain sight for most of the pagecount. It was quick and dirty, and made for an atmospheric read.

Did It Scare Me?

I was scared on behalf of the characters, especially once I realized that Florian needed more than the last twenty or thirty pages to unspool his plot. Horror-fantasy books are more about immersion, and often (including this case) revulsion and grotesquerie, than they are about realistic fright.