SFINCS Review: From These Dark Abodes by Lyndsie Manusos

“The Speculative Fiction Indie Novella Championship (SFINCS, pronounced “sphinx”)a is a yearly competition to recognize, honor, and celebrate the talent and creativity present in the indie community. We are a sister competition to both SPFBO and SPSFC, and we highlight greatness in the novella format in all areas of speculative fiction (fantasy, science fiction, horror, etc.).” – From the official SFINCS website.

Note: The following review contains only my personal thoughts as a judge and does not reflect the views of the team as a whole.

 

REVIEW

From These Dark Abodes by Lyndsie Manusos is an ambitious Gothic novella that, in the tradition of Sofia Ajram’s Coup de Grâce and Susanna Clarke’s Piranesi uses the construct of an endless labyrinthine prison to approach the subject of depression. Lush prose and a more surreal atmosphere in the first half combine with a more literalized and plot-driven story in the second, potentially opening up the book to a wider variety of readers. Despite the above comparisons, I’d most recommend this one to fans of Premee Mohamed’s And What Can We Offer You Tonight and Catherynne M. Valente’s Comfort Me With Apples, which likewise deal with real-world feminist concerns through allegory and the fantastic.

It’s hard to write meaningfully about the plot of From These Dark Abodes without spoilers. When the novella opens, we’re in the POV of a woman named Lethe. Lethe, along with her companion Petunia, are servants in a vast hall called St. Edah’s (hah!) that’s occupied and governed by several underworld figures. Each night, these figures unzip their skin and cavort together at a raucous party as skeletons. As Lethe’s name suggests, our POV lacks concrete memories of any life prior to her appearance in the house, though Petunia clings to scraps of an earlier existence that seems to involve a baby. The first half of the novella feels largely symbolic, and tends to emphasize lyrical prose over concrete detail. However, when one of the skeletal party guests turns up truly dead, the mystery of Petunia’s identity–as well as the reason for the house’s existence–becomes the focus of the story, as Manusos lays out the meaning and backstory that led to Petunia and Lethe’s present circumstances.

It’s undeniable that Manusos is an incredible talent and the creative scope of Dark Abodes is impressive. As a horror fan who loves surrealist approaches to the genre, I was easily hooked by the nightmarescape atmosphere that Manusos constructs for Lethe and Petunia. While on the surface, St. Edah’s lacks the obvious horror of some genre settings, it’s Lethe and Petunia’s unsteady senses of self that produces a destabilizing effect and which acts as the generative force behind the novella’s creepy atmosphere. There’s also some exquisitely described gore here and there that I’d be remiss not to mention, with the “unzipping” delightfully horrific without veering into comedy–a delicate balance that Manusos handles with real skill.

As a character, Lethe is somewhat hard to get a true sense of, but given her name and the context of the story, that’s not a surprise (and isn’t necessarily a drawback). While the novella is fundamentally about personal experiences of depression, and while the symbolic world of the novella lies at the heart of Petunia and Lethe’s circumstances, Dark Abodes is much more of an atmosphere and idea-driven book than it is invested in character voice. Readers interested in the ways in which the fantastical can be used to address real-world issues and themes are thus most likely to appreciate what Manusos is exploring. That’s not to say that the themes and backstory motivating Petunia and Lethe aren’t rich (they are both rich and important), but that the novella is most invested in exploring character as concept.The cast is rounded out by the skeletal overlords who order Lethe and Petunia about. These characters act largely as archetypes, and readers who enjoy contemporary reimaginings of mythological characters in fantasy settings may well find something new in Dark Abodes. Of particular note is the somewhat sadistic and taunting leader of the immortals–Erinyes (used in the plural to refer to a single person), who seems to delight in Lethe and Petunia’s confusion and suffering.

 

“Oblivion does not bow to rules”

Despite the clear talent on display from Manusos, Dark Abodes was somewhat of an uneven read for me. I was most compelled by one of the novella’s later passages, in which we learn Petunia’s backstory (along with a somewhat Peter Beagle-esque section involving a talking rat named Bloody-Bones). In Petunia’s backstory section there’s a deeper sense of the truly human stakes at play, as well as a greater sense of rootedness in something meaningful. Throughout the rest of the novella, unfortunately, I found that there was a prevailing sense of disconnection between the words on page and the themes and symbolism Manusos was playing with. The prose in the first section is, as mentioned, often beautiful and remarkable, yet it sometimes lacks a greater meaning behind the gorgeous language, something disguised by the prettiness of the word choice or a certain grammatical and contextual vagueness. I did also experience a lot of tonal whiplash from Dark Abodes. While its opening section is mood and atmosphere-driven (vibesy as the kids say), the second half of the book felt much more like a standard fantasy, invested in the various powers of the skeletons and a very literal storyline that didn’t quite fit inside the book’s small pagecount. The narrative here is propelled largely by a series of reveals (reveals to do with the origins of each of the skeleton overlords, the purported symbolism of shedding one’s skin, the reason for the construction of St. Edah’s, Lethe and Petunia’s true natures, and the culprit behind the murder). Much of this section felt a little too much like an infodump–a justification for the novella’s premise rather than an exploration of its weightier themes. While one of the skeletons provides an on-page explanation of the novella’s symbolism (one they later trouble), it never quite felt that the trappings of the house and its backstory married well with the more impactful and gutting experiences Manusos expertly addresses in the Petunia/backstory section. I was left with a sense of Manusos as a very ambitious, gifted, and compelling writer, but who had perhaps made some unsound structural and tonal choices in this one work. As someone who’s attempted to marry the symbolic, mythological, and the pop-fantastical in a short story (much less successfully than Manusos does here, I should note), I’m sympathetic to the challenges involved when combining such different tones and concepts, which has added another layer of diffulty for me in terms of writing this review.

I genuinely can’t wait to read more from Manusos, who is already a highly accomplished short story writer with a number of prestigious accolades to her name, and with whom I share an investment in the ways in which the mythological and fantastical can be used to explore real-world mental health struggles. While I have issues with how Dark Abodes shakes out, it’s very apparent that Manusos can write and that she has meaningful things to say.

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