I'm going to begin with my complaints, but even my complaints are justified by what these flaws achieve. The prose is, at times, so dense as to be overwritten—but it's overwritten on purpose, and with purpose. It's a heavily atmospheric book. The plot relies hugely on setting. The dense prose establishes that setting at a pace that makes perfect sense to me, and it contributes to a sense of clutter and claustrophobia that serves the midpoint action incredibly well. I'm happy enough to mainly fault the editor for not having a heavier hand with the particularly dense chapter openers, where I encountered most of the feeling of slog. I also found the pacing generally imbalanced, but it had to be in order to achieve the book's goals: the first half is slow, the next 30% is balls-to-the-wall, and then the last 20% is quite a lengthy denouement. No one part feels quite paced correctly on its own, but (trying to phrase this without spoilers) the three parts come together to make a complete story whose jagged pacing makes perfect metatextual sense.

This book is fucking weird. It demands your full attention. This took me the better part of 9 hours to read; that's an average of about 30 pages an hour. Our nameless protagonist is one member of a hive of doctors; each member is referred to in the first person singular. There are paragraphs of description in the first third where the doctor's consciousness moves between various hosts in various locations, each described as "I," before zipping back to our desolate mountain manor. It is deliberately disorienting and very cool. I did find it more disorienting than confusing; I think the author generally did this extremely well and successfully. The hosts are confusing us, themselves, and the people around them by way of their bizarre collective conversations, and that is conveyed. If you can get into this POV concept and its execution, you will likely appreciate the project of the book.

I went into this believing it was speculative gothic horror. It was that, but I have read a lot of speculative gothic horror this year, and this is in a league of its fucking own. It was also, for me totally unexpectedly, a story not only about trauma but about enduring it, and escaping it, by death and other means. Content warnings and spoilers follow:

SpoilerSome content warnings include body horror, birth trauma, depersonalization, forced reproduction, physical abuse, rape, sexual grooming. I don't believe this list is comprehensive. This is what I mean when I say the jagged pacing makes sense when the book is taken together. We begin as outsiders and, by nature of the POV work in the book, slowly become intimately acquainted with certain horrors perpetuated by and upon the characters. Some of the abused die. Some of the abused escape, but that escape takes a long time and leaves a lot of casualties. It is not easy or simple. They have to reckon with their own actions as well as those done to them. Goddamn. This is the point in my review when I upped it from 4.5 to 5 stars. Messy, messy, messy, and very gracefully done.

This book is the new bar for me in speculative gothic horror and taking the "horror house" concept to its truest limits. It hit me in similar ways The Haunting of Hill House did, but more literarily modern and taken to full throttle. Enjoyers of The Locked Tomb will nod knowingly along through parts. It is a trans story in two key and ultimately obvious ways. I already want to read it again. I feel like there's so much about this book I'm talking about only sideways, but I feel like I'm looking at it a bit sideways. This book is great. It's going to take another read to fully appreciate its nooks and crannies.

By the way, it's also far-future post-apocalypse science fiction, and it's got cool as hell linguistics! These were the things I liked about the first half and took notes on before the second half exploded the whole book. Might also recommend this for people who enjoyed the world of Disco Elysium, though I'm not sure that's truly as natural a comparison as it seems to me.