TorDotCom has been publishing some wonderful novellas lately and here's another one, a sapphic monster fantasy that reads like little else that I've read. Like 'Crypt of the Moon Spider', another novella oddly published by Tor Nightfire rather than TorDotCom, it hearkens back to the pulp era, when weird fantasy was a thriving genre and stories this off-the-wall were commonplace. All that said, while that book was unashamed to embrace its pulp heritage, this one aims for more literary recognition and has a more Victorian outlook, so feels more like a proto-pulp story; something the pulpsters would have cited as an influence from a few decades earlier.

It does a lot in a breath over a hundred pages.

It's an upstairs-downstairs story of class, where the masters of houses effectively own the people working for them and are responsible for their lives and deaths. They also restrict themselves to the upper levels so that the human components in the efficient mechanism that constitutes their home are kept as invisible to them as the outside world. We spend almost the entire novella in a single house, the Casa Caprichosa or Capricious House, whose mistress is named Anatema.

It's a mystery, because Matilde, the old keeper of the keys, is dead, unexpectedly murdered by her mistress, who sends a note sent down to the staff in an empty elevator to appoint a replacement by dawn. That replacement was always going to be Dália, Matilde's protegée, who steps up to the position she's been preparing to assume for most of her life. Dália is the protagonist of this story because Anatema explains to her that she killed Matilde because she stole a miniature doll from the miniature house within the locked cabinet that she calls her treasury.

Only Matilde had a key, therefore only Matilde was a suspect and Anatema took care of business. However, she's now doubting herself, wondering if the culprit merely knew where the keys were kept. So Dália not only has to succeed Matilde as keeper of the keys, she has to find out who stole the doll that prompted her death. Of course, Dália has not been trained as a detective. She's only been trained to be the keeper of the keys, but the mistress's word is law.

If you're wondering why a miniature doll is worth a life, well, that's a firm reminder of how much (or how little) life is worth in the Capricious House when it belongs to someone from a lower floor. However, these dolls are personal treasures for Anatema. She wove them herself as memories of every bride and every maid she's had. The sheer volume of these miniature dolls ably highlights a serious amount of brides and maids. And there's a good reason for that too.

You see, Anatema is not human. She's an Archaic One, one of a pantheon of ageless monsters who roamed the world in ages past, each of which takes a different monstrous form. You wouldn't be a long way off if you imagine them as kaiju, the monsters that occupy the Godzilla franchise. Except they're a lot closer to human, able to reason and converse and, well - be the mistress of a Victorian household. Anatema happens to be a gigantic spider with a mostly human torso and head. She can fill the room at the top of the house with her bulk or reach into the floor below with her long legs. Alternatively, she can crunch up into a much smaller form and move around the building.

So we follow Dália in her quest to find the real thief of the doll, which she reasons could be due to it being artwork woven by an Archaic One, thus rare and worth ridiculous amounts of money, or for a much more personal reason, given that it's a representation of Anatema's most recent bride. As we do so, we learn more about both Dália and Anatema, even though conditions are such that this isn't particularly easy. Dália isn't supposed to really exist as a human being, only as a servant. She has no life beyond her work and the house, so we might think that there's nothing to learn about her. Anatema, as an ageless monster who's lived for an unfathomable time already, must have an abundance of secrets but she doesn't like to be seen and she doesn't exactly invite conversation.

One crucial detail we learn about them is that Dália is a beautiful young lady and that Anatema is particularly fond of beautiful young ladies. And that puts something of a literal deadline onto the investigation because it would seem likely that Dália might be elevated from keeper of the keys to bride and brides tend to be eaten. Of course, so was her predecessor as keeper of the keys, so job security isn't particularly strong anyway but Matilde did have a long service. And this opens up an entirely new angle to the story, which I won't explore beyond noting that this is being advertised as a "sapphic monster romance novella wrapped in gothic fantasy trappings."

I liked this a lot, because it's unashamed to take certain established genres and subvert them in a fascinating way. It's not a long read, lasting just over a hundred pages but with each chapter given a right page for its number and a blank left page to follow it. Ten chapters therefore translates to twenty pages without text and a story that's now only about eighty pages long. I devoured this, if you'll pardon that word in this context, in a single sitting and it left a pleasant taste in the mouth, if you'll pardon that too. It's an easy read but it carries depths that often show up later when the book is done and we've moved onto something else and suddenly think, "Hang on, what about..."

For instance, there are points that are meant to be icky and creepy and awkward, because that's what the story calls for. However, the more I think about it, the more I wonder which they were. It really isn't fair to only focus on paragraphs like this one that checks every box I just listed:

"Anatema widened her mouth. The skin unglued from her face like the petals of a flower, revealing complex sequences of fangs, teeth, pincers, and a turquoise tongue so long that she wrapped it around Dália's next to bring her closer."

Is that any more icky than the fact that the mistress of the Casa Caprichosa has a habit of finding beautiful young women, wedding them and then eating them? Is it creepier than the fact that an abundance of staff are recruited from orphanages to never set foot outside the house again, yet never see who they're actually working for? Is it more awkward than the notion that Anatema can murder a long serving employee on a whim, then send an impersonal note to the staff to have her replaced, and nobody calls the authorities?

I haven't read anything by Hache Pueyo before, mostly because she's mostly written short stories, as H. Pueyo, in fantasy and science fiction magazines. She proves to be perfectly adept at a longer form here but it's still a novella. I look forward to seeing what she can write at full novel length. ~~ Hal C F Astell

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