"Hi, Not Fucking Dead. I'm Dad."

I often find myself discussing Tamsyn Muir's Locked Tomb series at moments of twilight awareness – just after waking, just before sleeping, or while letting my mind wander as I watch an especially gross episode of Monster Factory. It's preoccupied with the subconscious and with half-light. I came late to these books (Gideon the Ninth, Harrow the Ninth, Nona the Ninth, and an upcoming finale), because I am a contrarian who slams the door closed when someone visits to tell me about a hot new thing. I probably would never have read them if I weren't one (1) Bacon number, through my partner, from the essential and inimitable Muir. By the time I got here, we'd gone through a full cycle of excitement, backlash, and rediscovery, and were already on the railway to the canon, which is going to make things extremely interesting in thirty years when none of Muir's references make sense and they have to release annotated editions that tell you what sass was in 2019. To be honest, I have to assume Muir knows this, and that her disinterest in the problem is Apollonian.

The Ninth books are built on a dense but airy web of influences in which the King James Bible and an evergreen meme are accorded identical weight. It's the first thing you notice – the Gormenghast and the Utena, the Shakespeare and the Sailor Moon, the Eminem, the Gothics (inclusive), certain key Pratchetts, all Internet culture between 1995 and 2020, etc., etc., etc. When worn on the sleeve, a small brooch of influence is neutral, and a big noisy charm bracelet is unbearable. But when we get to rows and rows of layered bangles, over a loudly patterned fabric, over a full-sleeve tattoo – that's an aesthetic movement. I am personally averse to quotes and nods and referential gags in quantity, but I reserve my awe for the blood-weeping masters of collage (Melville, Gene Wolfe, Muir) who know what to do with them. Wolfe may be another of Muir's influences, or may just be her dead twin. Either way, they are both incredibly good at telling you what you need to know and not what you want to know, and making you like it. I particularly recommend her to his fans, only 99% of whom are boyfriends.

I suppose I should take a moment to tell you what these books are about, but it's kind of best to go into them without any knowledge of their worldbuilding, which is sui generis, demonically inspired, and makes absolutely no sense when summarized in any briefer form than three massive doorstoppers. All you need to know is that they're about two young women who grew up together on an isolated planet where everyone is some kind of death nun. Gideon is every early-career Arnold Schwarzenegger character, Harrow is a goth. Most people we meet in this setting are necromancers – it's a whole massive society (many planets' worth) based on death magic – but Harrow's planet is looked at askance by the others for being way too into it. Gideon and Harrow have always been mortal enemies, but it's obvious that the genuine violence and mistrust between them is also their way of surviving childhoods which were intensely traumatic. Their hatred is close enough to love as makes no difference. Over the course of the series, their relationship survives massive changes, revolutions, deaths, accessions to godhood, deaccessions from godhood, all without ceasing to be extraordinarily complicated.

Most of all, the powerful but emotionally lost Gideon, and the brilliant but self-destructive Harrow, have no idea that they are mutually loved. They're surrounded by people who try to show them the way, but they've been through too much to be able to feel others' love instinctively. Muir's commitment to their mutual self-deception is complete and painful. She also manages to make all this painful to consider, but not painful to read. Muir is an author who understands that people are always changing, even if they're not always changing forward. Unsurprisingly, these are books in which everyone is mentally ill (value-neutral), and constantly trying to figure out how to live in the face of death, and this is enhanced rather than detracted from by the fact that it's a setting where people often die more than once. Sometimes people in Muir's universe come back to life, but they always come back having lost something vital that can never be recaptured. Honestly, at the end of every day in Muir's universe (and again, from many angles the series is a comedy), everyone loses something vital that can never be recaptured.

Within this large framework, Gideon is about childhood trauma and swordplay, and is also a murder mystery; Harrow is about suicidality and Gnostic space knights; Nona is almost a straight-up literary novel about identity and the brevity of things. By Nona, most of Muir's large cast are living in other bodies, or dead bodies, or memory-wiped bodies, or combined bodies, and dealing with the Ship of Theseus question of whether they're now the same people or not. I have no idea what the fourth book will be about, partly because Muir understands something important about theme, which is that if you're obsessed with each of the themes, people will perceive them as cohesive even if you'd expect them not to be. Above all, these are tales of obsession – every character has their particular obsessive nature – and they come from a place of authorial obsession as well.

I know this description sounds exhausting, and these books are kind of exhausting. They couldn't be anything other than exhausting while still being true to their subject matter. The detailed exposition, the elaborate plots, the double-crosses, the duels, the grueling lives of the characters, even the jokes – it's pure maximalism. I often feel annoyed, impatient, or frustrated when reading them. What keeps me going is their emotional honesty, the intentionality of Muir's decisions, and the remarkable variety of tone, in which an emotional speech will be the setup for an elaborate pun, or an elaborate pun will be the setup for an emotional speech. We never know whether something funny, or the saddest goddamn thing you've ever heard of, will happen. And there's always room for the characters to breathe, to think, to process.

This is why it's best to go into them unspoiled in any particular, and I'm speaking as a person who loves spoilers. Do not, under any circumstances, read a summary of one of these books. You've got to just let it wash over you, from the first scene of Gideon quietly packing up her porn collection to run away from the Ninth House, to – well, I made the Utena comparison; if you've seen it, you can imagine how things go. Sometime I'll write an essay about Revolutionary Girl Utena, a bold formal experiment in setting up a pattern and then telling it over and over in ever-glitchier ways until everyone self-actualizes. Utena and the Locked Tomb series are essentially sagas of death and reincarnation. My tastes don't run to epics. That's the only kind of epic I have patience for.