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448 pages, Hardcover
First published September 10, 2019
“The more you struggle against the Ninth, Nav, the deeper it takes you; the louder you curse it, the louder they’ll have you scream.”
“You are the honoured heirs and guardians of the eight Houses. Great duties await you. If you do not find yourself a galaxy, it is not so bad to find yourself a star, nor to have the Emperor know that the both of you attempted this great ordeal.”
“Maybe it’s that I find the idea comforting . . . that thousands of years after you’re gone . . . is when you really live. That your echo is louder than your voice.”
“You are my only friend. I am undone without you.”
The more you struggle against the Ninth, Nav, the deeper it takes you; the louder you curse it, the louder they’ll have you scream.
“Maybe it’s that I find the idea comforting . . . that thousands of years after you’re gone . . . is when you really live. That your echo is louder than your voice.”
“One flesh, one end, bitch.”
“I need to be inside you,” Harrowhark bellowed over the din.
“Okay, you’re not even trying,” said Gideon.
“Did you know that if you put the first three letters of your last name with the first three letters of your first name, you get ‘Sex Pal’?”
“Anyone can learn to fight. Hardly anyone learns to think.”
The Written Review
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Gideon the Ninth comes from an universe seeped in necromancy.![]()
While we were developing common sense, she studied the blade.
But Gideon was experiencing one powerful emotion: being sick of everyone’s shit.Gideon and Harrow have hated each other ever since they could remember.
“just had a near-death experience,” she said, “let me have my little moment.”Oh. My. Gosh.
”You want to fight it.”
“Yep.”
“Because it looked…a little like swords.”
”Yop.”
“Does anyone else want to take this opportunity to admit that they’re already dead, or a flesh construct, or other relevant object? Anyone?”It took me about three weeks and a hundred pages to really warm up to this book, but then I inhaled it, flew through it like a necromancer to a bone, happy and giddy even if at times exasperated.
“Gideon rolled her eyes so hard that she felt in danger of twisting the optic nerve.”This is a story about space necromancers (!!!) in an alien (or not?) planetary system, where nine necromantic Houses occupy nine planets. Our (anti)heroine Gideon Nav (“absolutely goddamn starved of any contact with people who didn’t have dark missals and advanced osteoporosis”) is from the Ninth, which is a creepy cultist place even by necromancer standards.
So did I, repeatedly. But with happy and giddy love.![]()
“You couldn’t spend any time in the Ninth House without coming away with an unwholesome knowledge of skeletons. She could’ve easily filled in for Doctor Skelebone without practising a single theorem.“Gideon is doing her best to escape her indentured servitude (until death and then thereafter — because of, you know, necromancy and all it entails) while being tormented by her arch-nemesis Harrowhark, who has puppeteered her dead parents for years now (ahem, necromancy) and is now de-facto the planetary ruler.
“Are you telling me that when you were ten years old—ten years old—you busted the lock on the tomb, broke into an ancient grave, and made your way past hideous old magic to look at a dead thing even though your parents told you it’d start the apocalypse?”The Ninth house is in serious decline. But there’s a way out - if Harrow wins the position of a Lyctor, a “necrosaint” to the Emperor of the Nine Houses, Necrolord Prime, God who became man and man who became God — or basically some dude that resurrected the dying world 10,000 years ago and his supposedly immortal knights turned out to be just a bit mortal, after all. The heirs to the eight necromantic Houses have been called to the First planet for a competition that would allow at least some of them to become Lyctors. Each necromancer needs a devoted Cavalier at their side, and Gideon with her mad sword fighting skills gets roped into playing this part for her nemesis Harrowhark —by the promise of release from her indentured servitude.
“Gideon comforted herself by recoiling at her reflection in the cracked mirror: a grinning death’s-head with a crop of incongruously red hair and a couple of zits. She pulled her sunglasses out of the pocket of her robe and eased them on, which completed the effect, if the effect you wanted was “horrible.”With all the necromancers and their (more or less) devoted cavaliers all trapped on an empty planet in the very necromantic ruins (complete with animated skeletons as your waiters at mealtimes), the competition begins. Although it’s not really a competition as there are no tasks, no clear objectives, no rules except for the vague suggestion “that you never open a locked door unless you have permission.” It’s not too long before suspicious deaths start. And it almost has a vibe of Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None (if Madame Christie had taken some serious mind-altering substances while writing that book):
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“But natural law—the laws against murder and theft. What prevents us from stealing one another’s keys through intimidation, blackmail, or deception? What would stop someone from waiting for another necromancer and their cavalier to gather a sufficient number of keys, then taking them by force?”Although Gideon is our eyes and ears (and a sarcastic snarky mouthpiece) to this odd creepy and yet somehow immensely fun world, it’s really almost an ensemble cast, with a few minor characters that really stand out. At least to me ��� since I’m a shameless fangirl now of one Palamedes Sextus, Warden of the Sixth and his cavalier Camilla. Oh come on, they are Necromancer scientists and born in the Library. And Palamedes is a walking store of snark, second only to Gideon herself. And Camilla is beyond badass and into a whole new dimension of badassery which she shares only with Gideon.
Teacher said, “Nothing.”
“Reverend Daughter, you know as well as I do that the Eighth House wouldn’t let a little thing like fair play get in the way of its sacred duty to do whatever it wants.”This crazy weird skeleton-ridden, sinister, death-obsessed world is so much fun. It really shouldn’t work - this incongruent mix of overwrought language and teen snark and flowery metaphors and cheap jokes and gothic pathos and trashy cheap shots. It shouldn’t work — but somehow it does.
——————
“Hm,” said Camilla neutrally, and Gideon knew immediately that she organised Palamedes’s and her socks by colour and genre.
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“Suck it down,” said Gideon. “You’re already two hundred dead daughters and sons of our House. What’s one more?”
“There is no isolated genetic code associated with necromantic potential, nor the presence of any extra biological feature apart from heightened activity from organs we would otherwise mark as vestigial.”I mean — does necromancy involve the appendix??? I must have some clarification on this!
“Ask me how I am and I’ll scream,” she said.
“How are you,” said Camilla, who was a pill.
“I see you calling my bluff and I resent it,” said Gideon.
”Strike me down. You’ve won. I’ve lived my whole wretched life at your mercy, yours alone, and God knows I deserve to die at your hand. You are my only friend. I am undone without you.”