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510 pages, Hardcover
First published October 14, 2020
“You hating me always meant more than anyone else in this hot and stupid universe loving me. At least I’d had your full attention.”
“I was not following all of this, because necromantic theory is a lot of hot bullshit even when I'm not busy having Complex Emotions.”If you thought Gideon the Ninth was a bit bonkers, do I have a surprise for you. Enter Harrow the Ninth that makes “Gideon” seem like the easiest and most straightforward story there ever was. “Harrow” is so deliberately confusing, frustrating and over-the-top that I had to reach into my brain and forcibly shut off the part of it that’s responsible for logically trying to figure out what’s going on, instead just going along with a weird slightly insane ride where, like in a haunted
“I could protect you, if you’d only ask me to,” said Ianthe the First. A tepid trickle of sweat ran down your ribs.
“I would rather have my tendons peeled from my body, one by one, and flossed to shreds over my broken bones,” you said. “I would rather be flayed alive and wrapped in salt. I would rather have my own digestive acid dripped into my eyes.”
“So what I’m hearing is … maybe,” said Ianthe.
“But Harrowhark—Harrow, who was two hundred dead children; Harrow, who loved something that had not been alive for ten thousand years—Harrowhark Nonagesimus had always so badly wanted to live. She had cost too much to die.”
“In the real world, I have been fatally stabbed. The place that holds my body is about to be overrun by thanergetic monsters created by a galactic revenant. I am, put bluntly, on the verge of death. My soul is under siege, and I overwrote my real memories with a ghost-filled pocket dimension, which has now apparently been co-opted by some kind of poltergeist. From what I can tell I am stuck in here. I cannot get out. And I am about to die—I may even be dead already—which will render this all somewhat moot.”
"Do not fucking ask me for information. I could not be more lost right now."
“Memory hit Harrowhark Nonagesimus with the inexorable gravity of a satellite sucked from orbit, flinging itself to die on the surface of its bounden planet; the world hit her like a fall.”
“Is that the truth, or the truth you tell yourself?” asked Augustine.
“What is the difference?” said God.
“I think the main thing I should have said was, You sawed open your skull rather than be beholden to someone. You turned your brain into soup to escape anything less than 100 percent freedom. You put me in a box and buried me rather than give up your own goddamned agenda. Harrowhark, I gave you my whole life and you didn’t even want it.”
“Harrowhark, I gave you my whole life and you didn’t even want it.”
Then everything changed, forever. Harrowhark fell in love.
“Falling” was not the right term, precisely. It was a long process. She more correctly climbed down into love, picked its locks, opened its gates, and breached its inner chamber.