Where 'Gideon' was the story of a deadly, dashing cavalier gallivanting around a spooky space mansion fighting monsters, 'Harrow' is about the survivor's guilt and homicidal coping mechanisms of a moody, paranoid, hallucinating and immensely powerful teenaged necromancer. absorption?) meant to turn her into a Lyctor didn't quite take, so she is weak, damaged and. The process (begun by Gideon's death and. Gideon was fun, but Harrow is a walking trauma. At one point, she carefully (and explosively) poisons someone with a soup made from her own bone marrow and it's passed off like, Oh, that's just Harry, exploding one of God's own hit men at the dinner table, the kooky kid! She vacillates wildly between breathless (though exceptionally prudish) teenage passion for a corpse (that would take pages to explain), fervent prayer and drear musings on death - her own and everyone else's.

A bone witch (and don't think Muir doesn't have some fun with that), she can construct a skeleton from a chip of tibia and have it tear your arms and legs clean off. She's that one goth girl from high school gone full dark supernova with her sacramental face paint and unfathomable necromantic powers. Harrow, though? Harrow is all black crepe and rosaries.

Seriously awesome, because the coolest thing about it was that we got to see it all and experience it all through the aviator-shaded eyes of Gideon Nav, unwilling cavalier of the Ninth House, who kicked ass, took names, always had a dirty joke handy and so loved her icy, genius Ninth House necromancer, Harrowhark Nonagesimus, that (spoiler alert) she ultimately gave her life to turn Harrow into a Lyctor - a kind of superhero bodyguard and magical ghost assassin working at the right hand of the undying God-emperor of Muir's expansive, creaking world. She created a crumbly, dusty, deeply haunted and wonderfully goopy horror-universe with Gideon the Ninth, peopled it with creepy, sepulchral wizards, dipped it all in the reverential tones of quasi-Catholic religious fanaticism, wrote it like a science-fantasy parlor romance full of murder and then gave it to us, still warm and dripping, like a cat bringing home a particularly juicy mouse.Īnd it was awesome. Last year, Tamsyn Muir absolutely owned the lesbian-necromancers-in-space genre.

You know how sometimes people say, It's like everything you loved about the first book, only MORE. You don't have to read the first book in this series to dive right into the second.

You know how sometimes people say, Oh, it's okay.

Gideon the ninth series