If you live in a sci-fi/fantasy/space opera world like I do and haven’t read Tamsyn Muir’s 2019 runaway “disaster lesbian necromancers in space” hit Gideon The Ninth (The Locked Tomb Trilogy, Book I), then you’ve at least heard about it… and if you haven’t heard about it, then that’s a very large rock you’ve been living under. I heard about it, read it, absolutely loved it, and have been waiting since approximately four days after it came out for the trilogy’s second entry, Harrow the Ninth.

Quick recap of Gideon: the Scions of the Nine Houses, along with their Cavaliers, are invited by their Emperor/God to Canaan House (pretty much a locked murder box) to prove their worth and, should they manage to survive, become His Lyctors (mostly immortal right hands). At the end of the debacle, only Harrowhark Nonagesimus and one other Scion are left standing – their Cavaliers, including Gideon, having given their lives to ensure the women’s survival.

And so, Harrow finds herself exactly where she wanted to be: aboard the emperor’s ship, en route to his Mithraeum, being instructed in the ways of Lyctorhood.

And everything is fucking terrible.

Ianthe, the other surviving Scion, hates her and yet holds the key to her survival and also keeps trying to maybe get in her pants. Harrow’s teachers would rather kill her than look at her. The emperor is fine with people calling him “John” and keeps trying to give her tea and feed her cookies. Harrow throws up every time she touches her sword, she’s in love with a ghost, a planet-eating monster is chasing them, and where the everloving fuck are her veil and face paint?

I’m not going to lie to you, peeps, this is a weird-ass book. It definitely has a plot, but you’re going to have to figure out what it is yourself… and you won’t find out if you’re right until about two-thirds of the way through. Chapters, nay, sequential sentences contradict one another. Tenses and voice shift between chapters. Part of it is in second person present, often referred to by writers as the “sweet baby Jesus, what the fuck are you doing” POV. There are time slips. There are time landslides. There are chapters were Harrow is being gaslit, and there are chapters were it’s entirely possible Harrow is deliberately gaslighting herself. There are runs of narrative and then bam! something that won’t make sense until 100 pages later if you remember it at all.

I loved it.

Not everyone did or will, and that’s fine. This particular style is very different than the mostly traditional A to Z narrative form upon which Muir stretched the first part of the Locked Tomb Trilogy. I’ve seen a lot of Twitter chatter to the effect of “If I can’t figure out what’s going on by page 50, then the problem is the book.” And sure, that’s one way to look at it – a totally acceptable way to look at it.

I happen to feel differently. I think Muir takes a huge risk with Harrow, and it’s a risk I appreciate both as a reader and a writer.

Muir asks her readers to trust her completely, and she puts her faith in them; she makes the act of reading the second Locked Tomb book a necessary partnership rather than a solitary activity.

Reading is something most people do alone. Some folx read to their kids or to their partner, but the act doesn’t require company. You sit, you open the thing, you turn the pages (or swipe the screen), the words go in your eye holes and get translated by your brain, end of story (literally and figuratively).

Not with Harrow, though. With Harrow, you’re wondering what Muir means every step of the way. Why she changes a tense, why this cause has that effect, and what it means going forward. Why does Harrow suddenly make soup? Why does this person and that person have the same name? Muir leaves you clues and trusts you to follow them… and her. She’s testing you, your curiosity, and your faith, and she trusts you have enough of both to follow to the reward.

And if you trust her as much as she trusts you, you get that reward. If you are willing to enter into that partnership, to give part of your experience back to Muir, you get to see the solution to the puzzle – and holy shit! Even though I saw a chunk of it coming? It blew me away.

Do I want every book I read to require a give and take? Absolutely not. Sometimes I want to lose myself in a story. And not every story is suited for that sort of chaotic energy (and it is definitely chaotic). This one, though? This book is very special, and I have absolutely no doubt that Gideon would wholeheartedly approve while she yelled at the book and, every so often, threw it at the wall.

Harrow would, no doubt, leave herself a very long letter tucked between the last two pages. I shudder to think what she has planned next…

Harrow the Ninth (The Locked Tomb #2) by Tamsyn Muir (Tor Dot Com) is available now.