The Scarlet Ball by Nghi Vo
Genres: Adult, Fantasy, Historical Fantasy, Queer Protagonists
Representation: Biracial (Vietnamese and French) bisexual MC
PoV: First-person, past-tense
Published on: 6th October 2026
ISBN: 1250904978
Goodreads

I received this book for free from the publisher via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. This does not affect my opinion of the book or the content of my review.

Highlights

~nightmare of manners
~hedonism as defiance
~intoxicating prose
~more solidarity between humans and demons than poor and wealthy
~Nghi Vo’s best yet

Have you ever had truly excellent red velvet cake? I mean really excellent, not the bland stuff they serve at most coffee shops. The kind that’s so rich you have to take breaks between bites, or be overwhelmed; the kind with frosting so sinfully sweet each taste feels like you’re getting away with something. The kind you linger over, because you’ll mourn when it’s gone; that turns you into something predatory, hunting down every last crumb on the plate. The kind that would get a friend stabbed with your fork, if they tried to steal a piece.

That’s The Scarlet Ball.

If you’ve read and loved Nghi Vo before, you are not ready for this book: she has outdone herself a thousandfold. If you’ve never read a Nghi Vo book before, then this is the perfect place to start, the book that will leave you addicted to her decadent prose, her wild, beautiful magic, her heroines who revel in everything they are.

>It emerged like wickedness from Pandora’s box, dark and eager to ruin the world.

Judith, Judith, Judith. Here is the protagonist I’ve been longing for, razor-sharp and ruthless with it, not just willing but able to dance with demons for her dreams. Morally-grey? Oh, in spades. She isn’t Nice, she isn’t Gentle, she is not any kind of Good Girl – she’s amoral at best, a starving tiger, wary and hungry and merciless, and I love her for all of it. I love how unabashed she is about her hunger, how untender she is with others as well as with herself, how unashamed she is of her everything. She makes me think of Lilith from Jewish folklore, that same kind of – elemental, feral freedom, the same sense of being untamed and untameable.

Which makes her such a perfect candidate for the Scarlet Ball, for the demon lords. Vo’s demons aren’t the Abrahamic kind; they’re elementals, forces of nature, natural disasters that have taken the form of men. (Been given those forms, even.) No wonder so many of the women who try for a demon husband fall; they’ve living in a world that stamps the wildness out of them, and you have to have more than a little wildness in you to be able to spar and dance and marry a wildfire, a mudslide, a flood.

(Except one of the many things Scarlet Ball does is explore the strength and power of these women, even if it’s not the strength or power we might think it is at first.)

But though she is wild, Judith is not fearless. Over and over again throughout the book, she is afraid, terrified, and that – makes her so much more vividly real than if she was contemptuous of the danger. She knows her own strength, in all senses of the word, and she knows what she’s capable of – which means she fully understands how completely outclassed she is by these wildfires and floods that look like men and want to eat her alive. That Judith is a long-time survivor enriches the whole scenario, because if she is afraid, we understand, after everything she’s been through – if she’s afraid, then we definitely should be. We can trust Judith to – accurately assess the situation she’s in, the threats to her, in a way we couldn’t if she had a more typical kind of confidence.

In so many ways, Scarlet Ball is a horror novel, and it can be difficult to decide whether the demons or New York’s ‘elite’ are the more monstrous. This is very clearly intentional. Judith is biracial – Vietnamese and French – and her poverty would put her at the bottom of the social hierarchy even if she were white; she is very, very aware of how disgusting the 1% are, and of how completely they would tear her apart if they realised she is not the mask she wears. Her terror of the demon lords is visceral, but at least they’re honest about what they are and what they want, and in a very real way they can’t help it. They’re not human and never will be. But the wealthy elite Judith’s infiltrated? What’s their excuse for the damage they do? This book is so full of beauty, an endless waterfall of wonders pouring into our laps, and I cannot express how much I love beautiful things being written with beautiful prose (which of course Vo’s always is) – but despite how much I loved it, Judith’s awareness of the context of all that beauty often had me wanting to spit. The shallow, meaningless things the wealthy spend their money on, when there are people starving and broken and dying a few hundred feet away! How dare they?

>You feared a wildfire for its devastation, for the sudden and unthinking loss of life and property. You feared people that rich for their idle whims alone.

And that’s very far from all their monstrousness. Some of those overseeing the Balls seem eager for the new generation of would-be demons’ brides to fail and be slaughtered; at various points, other debutantes deliberately sabotage Judith, in moments and ways that could get her killed – that are clearly intended to get her killed! And they do so without knowing she’s a pretender; they do it while fully believing that she’s one of their own. Probably I am terribly naive, but I was stunned every time it happened. WHAT IS WRONG WITH ALL OF YOU?!

But of course, this is what these women have been reared and trained for, and it’s not even a metaphor, it’s just straight-up Patriarchy. All other women are competition; the only thing that matters is getting the best husband. It’s not like that’s an unfamiliar concept, alas.

(What would happen if the women banded together, instead? If they became allies instead of competitors? If they rejected the competition? Months after finishing this book, I’m still wondering about that.)

You can’t even blame these young women for trying to take out the competition. They’re not deluded or working from false information: gaining a demon husband IS power. Everyone who wins such a husband will have the power of a natural disaster at their beck and call – and we swiftly learn that these husbands worship their wives. A demon husband is never mad at you, never disagrees with you, will never divorce you or beat you or cheat on you; a woman with a demon husband is immune to almost all of the dangers married women faced at this point in history, in this part of the world. At first glance – at second and third glance, even – it looks like a feminist power-fantasy.

>It was seen as wise for girls to starve a bit before the events. It kept us from throwing up out of nerves or needing to maneuver those fancy clothes overmuch in a powder room, but more than that, I think it kept us docile and woolly-headed, even when we were impressing bankers and industrialists rather than demons.

But it’s more complicated than that. Because the young women have been groomed for this from birth, because it’s their families that want these husbands, it’s the families, more than the wives, who will benefit. New York’s Four Hundred (or at least, the ones invited to participate in the Balls) offer up their daughters to monsters, sacrifice their sons to them, for more – more money, more power, more more more. That the demon husbands literally eat their wives, piece by piece? Well, that’s a cost these families can live with. Even if their daughters, sooner or later, can’t.

>Girls like her balanced their wealth and reputation of their families on their heads. They were expected to bite their tongues and swallow the blood, and you saw in their perfected faces how they were prepared to do so all their lives.

None of which erases the fact that these women are not only victims. The opportunity to and process of winning a demon husband is a study in the kyriarchy, with multiple shifting forces and dynamics of power and privilege in play at any given moment. These women are sacrificial lambs, but they really will have power, power in the world and power over their husbands; in many ways having a demon husband is safer than having a mortal one! Which is one reason, of course, that all these mothers train and offer up their daughters: not only for the familial benefit, but because they want their daughters to have what they have. Especially in this time period, it’s not at all hard to see why mothers who do love their daughters would want this for them.

Nothing about this, or about the book as a whole, is reductive.

>“At the White Ball, you chose to call down the demons. At the Rose Ball, the choice is ours. Be graceful, be lucky, be without fear in the face of the first things that made men afraid, and we will love you. Be otherwise, and be eaten.”

There’s so much more to the magic than the titular Scarlet Ball. For one thing, winning a demon husband takes far more than a single night at a single party; there are three capital-B Balls, the White and the Rose and the Scarlet, each of which anchors a different part of the – process, trials, and there’s a lot of work to do between them. But also…magic suffuses this setting. Vo has created a world that feels like a natural progression from the ones she’s shown us before; there are echoes here that speak of Siren Queen, or The Chosen and the Beautiful, or even City In Glass. It’s as though all of those were practice for Judith’s world – a world where for a few pennies a witch will let you see through the eyes of a pigeon and survey the city from the sky; where servants swap their memories of the household they worked at for their final paycheck; where a girl caught in amber can become your best friend. It’s an extravagance of wonder, of stunning strangeness and exquisite imagination, and I delighted in it endlessly, even when I probably should have been more horrified.

And obviously, there’s the mask Judith wears – the mask that has to be sewn on over her own face, every time she masquerades as Iphigenia. (Pun fully intended.) There are endless layers of symbolism to that mask and Judith’s wearing it; to the fact that she is so very good at wearing it, good enough to fool New York’s Four Hundred. I could talk about it as straight-washing (a brief line confirms Judith’s bisexuality, though queer readers will pick up on the signs long before it), or white-passing, or how perfectly it showcases that there is nothing special at all about being rich, no intrinsic difference between people who are poor and people who are not; anyone can become either, anyone can be either, the 1%’s insistence that they are special is a pathetic delusion. If it weren’t, there would be some quality of wealth Judith couldn’t mimic no matter what she wore, and there isn’t.

>Walk like your spine is a sword, walk like you balance a feather on your head, that was what all those fraudster dance instructors say, but they were wrong. You walk like you’re on the way to the gallows, and the only thing left that matters is that you are beautiful as you do it.

This is a book about hunger; so many different kinds of it. There’s the hunger of New York’s wealthy for more, and the hunger of the demon lords for life, and most of all Judith’s hunger, her soul-starved hunger for beauty. There’s a substantial body of philosophy that says humans need beauty, that beauty feeds our souls like food feeds our bodies, and I couldn’t stop thinking about that throughout Scarlet Ball, because Judith’s hunger feels like a need, feels like something starved to the point of ferality, viciousness, ruthlessness. Without reading the book, it would be so easy to dismiss Judith as a gold-digger, as greedy, but instead – instead Vo uses her to not just argue, but prove that Judith’s hunger is real and valid and something we all share – a hunger we all deserve to feel sated.

Which makes the decadence, not just of imagery but of prose, into something very powerful. Like the works of Poppy Brite or Cassandra Khaw, when Vo takes the horrific, the terrible, and makes it beautiful, it breaks the fourth wall, brings the horror into us, makes us part of it. Is it not horrifying, the realisation that you find this awfulness beautiful, the realisation that you’re savouring every word and every drop of blood? Does it not make the reader into a kind of participant? Does it not make us, just a tiny little bit, monstrous?

But as well as that, Scarlet Ball’s approach to beauty is immensely subversive. Calvinist philosophy – which states that wealth and privilege is God-given and if you don’t have them you’re not meant to – is baked into the history of the USA and stains quite a lot of the modern West (brace yourself for a proper research rabbit-hole if you go look into it), and Scarlet Ball is a contemptuous, glorious middle-finger to it. I don’t know how to articulate the way that this book is a merciless refutation of that whole philosophy, the idea that the world doesn’t need to be beautiful, the poor don’t need beauty, that beauty itself is suspicious at best and no one should yearn for it. The idea that beauty cannot factor into economy. That hedonism is a bad thing. But all of that – all of that is here, in this book, and it whispers beneath the words, growing louder and louder until it’s nearly all you can hear, until it roars. There is a healthy kind of selfishness, and there is greed that is not greed, only the symptom of a famished soul. Living is for living. Existence without pleasure is evil. Everyone deserves better.

The more I followed Judith through the pages, the more convinced I became that her unapologetic hunger for beauty is a rebellion against the status quo of her time and mine. The narrative never punishes her for what could have so easily been demonised (hah) as greed; she is not struck down for straying from ‘her place’; her hunger is celebrated. When was the last time you saw a female main character treated that way? Especially a queer BIPOC one?

So, so many times, I’ve read stories where the heroine can only win by rejecting luxury and ease, or must do so to remain Good, and the messaging is unsubtle and pathetic, that there’s some kind of moral satisfaction in being poor, in struggling, in having your life be so damn hard. Scarlet Ball says that’s bullshit, that’s propaganda, that’s what the 1% want you to think, and fuck that. There’s no greatness to suffering. Poverty isn’t righteous. Miserable, grinding survival is only that, and wouldn’t you rather live? Wouldn’t you rather be wicked than ‘pure’?

Aren’t you so fucking hungry?

>I had walked in the halls of palaces before, an invader, a thief, stealing glamour even if I wasn’t stealing the silverware. The memory of those places lived deep in my head, and now Sebastian was offering them back to me, something to play with, something to break if that was what I wanted.

We see the same subversion in the…I hesitate to call it a ‘romance’, and when you read the book I think you’ll understand why. It’s difficult to discuss without spoilers, but as much as I adored the dynamic between Judith and her storm – a powerful woman and the monster who kneels adoringly at her feet – I was never sure if Judith loved him in the romantic sense. Sebastian is a delight, a feral elemental, deadly as a hurricane with no understanding of humanity at all, see-sawing between endearingly sweet in his bafflement at human rules, and terrifyingly, destructively alien. But they match, is the thing; for all that Judith doesn’t have magic of her own, psychologically, she’s a perfect match for him. Her vivacity is the equal of his, her rage the mirror to the threat of him, her wildness the twin of his frenzy, and she is as hungry to be worshipped as he is to worship her. Whether you call it a romance or not, it is without question one of the most compelling dances I’ve seen two characters do around each other in a long time, and the tension! Is less ‘will they won’t they’, and more ‘is Judith going to SURVIVE this?!’ Their relationship had me constantly breathless, at the edge of my seat, hypnotised and panicking and never, never sure that Judith was safe.

(Because she isn’t.)

>as much as I wanted him, I wanted power over him or something like him even more. That power would be mine like he could be mine.

And Mielle! Oh, Mielle! Mielle is the handmaiden Mrs Howard…acquires for Judith, and long before it was stated outright, Judith’s feelings for and about Mielle were what convinced me that there was no way this woman was straight. (Called it.) Mielle is magic – literally, because she’s not human, is something like the demon lords, and she is one of the highlights of the book, dryly hilarious and coolly wry, all still water at the surface and oceanic depths beneath. I don’t know how to talk about her but I can’t NOT mention her. She is so important – not just because she’s fun, but because of how Judith treats her, because of the bond they weave, because for all Mielle’s unhumanity her presence helps Judith hold on to her own. The other debutantes see Judith as competition, but Mielle becomes an ally, and there’s something about that – about how the not-demon is more human than the actual humans who are going through what Judith is going through; about how there can never be any trusting the rich, siding with the wealthy, depending on them; about how you can only and always trust the others who are trapped like you are trapped, no matter how different you seem to be. About how human and not-demon have more in common than poor and rich.

(I think the wealthy are the true monsters. They’re the ones who summon the demon lords in the first place, after all. Without them there would be no demons to fear!)

>her glitter was not a kind thing. It wasn’t the sparkle of paste or even of gemstones. It was the glitter at the edge of a rough butcher’s cleaver, where the nicks will throw back the light and it would cut the moment she touched you.

Scarlet Ball is gilded, intoxicating, deliriously resplendent, all dark silks and bloody jewels, hedonistic to a degree that feels indecent – and revelling in every moment of it. It is a fantasy spun out of nightmares, a storming fantasia of velvet, a midnight incandescence. It is unabashed, unapologetic, desire unrestrained. It’s a magnum opus on hedonism as defiance, not just against Calvinism or the 1% but against entropy itself; this is a book about demanding the right to live instead of just survive – no, not demanding it, but taking it. It’s about living without apology, living gloriously, deliciously, decadently. Nothing about it is nice, but everything of it is exquisite, even the blood, even the terror.

(Maybe especially those.)

>They spun madly, gorgeously, fireworks if fireworks knew they were alive and therefore could die.

This is Nghi Vo’s best book yet. Forget the best of year list; it’s going on my Best of the Decade list, come 2029. I’ve spent months working on this review, typing through fibro flares and migraines, bleeding my heart out onto the keyboard, and haven’t come close to doing this book justice; I’m not sure anyone could. The only way to understand how utterly perfect it is is to read it for yourself.

If you read only one book this year, let it be this one.

Applicable r/QueerSFF reading challenge squares: Intersectional Cubed

You can find more of my reviews, rec lists, and weekly publishing roundups at Every Book a Doorway!

A Dubious Clamor by Marissa Lingen
Genres: Adult, Fantasy, Historical Fantasy
Representation: Sapphic MC, secondary nonbinary character, major biracial character
PoV: First-person, past-tense
Published on: 15th September 2026
ISBN: 1998390241

I received this book for free from the publisher in exchange for an honest review. This does not affect my opinion of the book or the content of my review.

Oh, how I ADORED this!

I did not realise this was Historical Fantasy until I started reading, but it is: set sometime during the Victorian era, I think? Well, it’s England and there’s a queen, anyway. Women don’t have the vote yet. But this is not our world’s Victorian (or something) era, because magic exists and everyone knows that it does. Harpies exist! In fact, our protagonist was a harpy for two years, and that is extremely plot-relevant, even though she managed to break the curse a while before the start of the book.

>Anthony’s great-aunt Violet had had several fine qualities. She was firm of purpose in a world that expected women to be meek and yielding–not that I personally ever paid attention to that bit either–she had taught Anthony to insist on high standards in several important matters including pastry, and she had looted her own country’s magical past rather than those of others.

So: there’s a magic sword, and it is Not Happy. Turns out, it’s unhappy for very good reason: parliament wants to pass a law, which is also a spell, that will make everyone in the UK ‘certain of their place in life’. This is obviously terrible if you think about it for .2 seconds, but it’s even worse than it sounds, because if you don’t have a clear ‘place’, this spell…well, no one’s sure if it will kill you, or ‘only’ make you walk out into the ocean, or what, but you won’t be staying in the UK. And by the definitions of this spell, almost nobody has a clear place – everyone is many things! If you have a job, but also a family? Oops, that’s two ways of categorising you, you have a problem.

And it’s going to be much, much worse for human immigrants, or magical creatures, or gods forbid anybody nonbinary.

>“Do you often think that people need to get married for the sake of a sword? Is that the first thing swords make you think of? Because I have some important and upsetting news about the uses of swords.”

>“All right, enough! Tell me about this very ineligible sword!”

The sword wants this spell stopped. So does Jules, and almost everyone else Jules knows. (Alas, not the friend who brought Jules the sword in the first place, which is a source of heartbreaking tension throughout the story.) Figuring out HOW to stop it is not the simplest thing in the world – especially because it’s important that well-known ‘foreigners’ not be seen to be involved, for fear of legal issues later. And the most badass magicians Jules knows? Happen to be ‘foreign’. She has to do this without their help, somehow.

Eek.

Lingen’s prose is both brisk and delicate, absolutely lovely, and Jules’ first-person narration was an utter delight: she’s such a practical sort of person, someone who has been shoved stepped outside of the role society cast her in and made a very good home there, and even when she’s feeling overwhelmed and helpless, she’s very no-nonsense about it in a way that made me admire her. Plus, she’s just really fun: I loved her appreciation for fancy cakes, and her humour, and her sense of justice, and the genuine passion she has for her community of misfits and outcasts. She decides she can’t keep addressing the sword as Sword, and names it Grandmother. Like. I approve so much!

The prose and pacing keep things moving along, but this is a novella with teeth, that’s tackling some big questions, even some borderline frightening ones. It’s very much a story about – the sort of people Society disapproves of, or at best doesn’t know what to do with, and the forces rallied against them. Dubious Clamor is about how too much certainty can be a terrible thing – and so can the desire for too much certainty. There’s a really great exploration of – or contrast between? – the villains who have written and introduced this law-spell…and the weak, pathetic ‘unintentional’ villains who will let evil happen for the sake of chasing certainty. Lingen actually spends more time focussing on the latter, which I think is both really smart and really effective, especially in a story that’s basically about preventing fascism (what else do you call total certainty + a disdain for anybody ‘different’?) Fascists can’t do their thing if the cowards don’t support them, you know?

But it’s not just about fascism. Lingen explores how even in completely different contexts, unqualified certainty can be a huge problem. And there are just so many ways it can be a problem, whether we’re talking small-picture issues like parents who disapprove of their daughter’s paintings, or much bigger things like how to steer a nation. I’m not sure this is an issue/theme I’ve seen in Fantasy before, but I love it and would like so much more of it, please! (The ending of Dubious Clamor leaves things very open for sequels, and I hope we get a BUNCH because, um, HELLS YES I want Jules questing to find the other swords of uncertainty! LET’S GO LET’S GO LET’S GO!) It’s definitely left me with lots of thinky-thoughts; there’s so much that I think Lingen managed to articulate really well, and convey well – lots of stories are very preachy or info-dumpy with their messaging, but this one isn’t. Lingen is too good a writer for that.

>The box was half full of their other friends, a peacock crowd in every shade aniline and its relatives could supply, mauve and fuchsia, indigo and scarlet.

I love everything about this novella – I love how Lingen centred immigrant communities in this story, I love that a ‘flock’ of dandies were vital in saving the day, and I adored the harpies! (Including Jules’ ex, the harpy she was romantically ‘with’ while she was under her harpy-curse, and whom she now has a bittersweet but beautiful dynamic with.) I loved that, FOR ONCE, a protagonist had a good, believable reason for choosing Justice over Vengeance – it’s not that Jules is a milksop, the kind of wishy-washy do-gooder who makes me roll my eyes, all ‘Violence is never the answer!’ Nope, Jules is fine with violence, actually, but she has great reasoning for declining the Road of Vengeance and I think her call is the right one. (And if you know me, you know how rarely I say THAT!) I love that we got glimpses of Finnish mythology, and even Welsh, towards the end (neither of which get enough page-time in modern Fantasy, imo). There’s all these gorgeous little details – like the mention of aniline in the above quote! Or Jules and her mother speaking Swedish together, or her mother’s servants having Opinions…

I could go on and on, honestly. This is a brilliant, clever, deeply delightful novella that pushes back at the foundation of fascism, puts the Power of Friendship front-and-centre, and had me giggling as often as it had me gasping. It’s dazzling, so completely original and distinct. It’s left me with so much to think about, but it’s also left me feeling hopeful about the world and other people. It sparks joy.

Instant new fave. MORE, PLEASE!

(And to make sure we GET more, you should go preorder it – it comes out this Tuesday!)

Applicable r/QueerSFF bingo squares: Queer Families, Intersectional Cubed

You can find more of my reviews, rec lists, and weekly publishing roundups at Every Book a Doorway!

The Halls of the Dead by S. M. Hallow
Genres: Adult, Fantasy, Historical Fantasy, Horror, Queer Protagonists
Representation: Bi/pansexual MC with chronic pain, bi/pansexual MCs, >!F/F/M polyamory!<
PoV: First-person, present-tense; three PoVs
Published on: 18th August 2026

I received this book for free from the publisher via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. This does not affect my opinion of the book or the content of my review.

Highlights

~feral necromancers
~feral necromancers feral for each other
~resurrect your gays
~horror as adoration
~queer as in fuck you
>!~polyamory > love triangle!<
~let’s be monsters together

If Gideon the Ninth had a baby with Kushiel’s Dart that was then raised by Showtime’s Penny Dreadful, this is the book you’d get.

If the right-wingers ever find out about it, it’s going to be banned EVERYWHERE.

All of which I mean as the HIGHEST of praise!

How do I even BEGIN to tell you how breathtakingly, viciously gorgeous this book is? How extremely mandatory it is that you read it? Where do I start – with the spellbinding prose, so exquisite I filled my copy of the book with highlights? The characters, who are feral, and feral for each other? Or maybe the GENIUS of what Hallow has done here with the horror: taking so many tropes and tableaus that would usually be nightmare-fuel, and reinterpreting them, reframing them, presenting them to us as moments of incredible love – but, crucially, without stripping them of the blood and rot and muddy grave-dirt. Without ‘prettifying’ any of it. Without making it one iota more palatable, more conventional, more comfortable for the pearl-clutchers.

This is a book that revels in the gore, the ick, the rot; that is thrillingly, gleefully transgressive in its depictions of love and sex and violence. It’s a war-cry and a howl, it is so furiously angry, it is bared teeth and blood-stained kisses and cut throats. It’s cathartic wish-fulfilment for the queers and the weirds and the crips, for everyone who’s ever wanted to claw a fascist’s eyes out, for everyone who would rather their True Love come back Wrong than not come back at all.

It is glorious.

>The world is ours, now. We snatched it with broken fingers and ate it with kicked-in teeth. We’re never giving it back.

This is the first book I’ve come across that deserves the label ‘horrormantasy’; not because there is horror and magic and also romance, but because Hallow has genuinely fused the three, melted and forged them together into something new and awe-full. The horror is romantic, adoring, worshipful; the magic is filthy and raw and gross, by normal people’s standards; the romance is definitely one most people would find disturbing. We’re talking making out while covered in blood; getting off on the fact the mouth kissing you just literally devoured someone; finding it sexy when your lover comes back from the dead very, very Wrong. It feels Gothic to me, impossibly intense and decadent, all blood and velvet, lovers relishing and celebrating each other’s monstrousness and calling it beautiful.

>my Venus flytrap of a wife, my pitcher plant made flesh. Our hands palming each other’s bodies are the claws of wolves holding down their kill. My fingers inside her are vultures’ beaks diving into the rancid ribcage, unafraid, inspired, delighted by the rot they find when buried to the hilt.

To quote Simon Jiminez for a moment, this is a love story to its blade-dented bone, and that is evident in every aspect of the book. >!It is so much a love story that two lovers just aren’t enough; Irene and Agnes and St. John are all in love together by the end of Halls of the Dead, disdaining the nonsense of a love triangle in favour of polyamory.!< Love is spilling out of all these characters just as much as necromancy is, and that’s why the necromancy is there at all for them to use: because necromancy is love made manifest, in this setting. It’s an approach I haven’t seen before; CSE Cooney’s Saint Death series reframes necromancy as a love of life and living, and this is similar but very different. Hallow’s necromancy isn’t about loving life: it’s about love of the individual (or individuals), personal and primal and raw. It’s the ugly, unsanitised, we-all-pretend-it’s-not-there side of love; the love that wails with grief at a funeral, the love that would trade the lives of a thousand strangers for the beloved’s in a heartbeat, the love you really would kill for, die for, break the laws of nature for.

>“Necromancy is the art of saying no,” I say. “‘No, I won’t let you go. No, I won’t let you be destroyed.’”

Which is maybe why Hallow’s necromancy is so honest: by which I mean, horrifying, as it should be. Most of the time, storytellers skim over the fact that this is a magic of death and the dead, and what that must inevitably entail; they handwave away the grosser details. And I completely get why! But Hallow doesn’t do that, and I’m so glad, because this take on necromancy is fantastic – both because it feels original and new, and because it keeps the reader grounded in the reality of the magic and the story. There is no handwaving here, and Hallow doesn’t allow us to do any handwaving, either. We’re not allowed to skim over the gore and the cannibalism and the husband stuffed full of dirt and bugs. To engage at all, we have to admit what we’re looking at, what we’re reading. We’re never allowed to forget it.

>the necromancer’s tongue, the backward language of cutthroat murder and spiritual slaughter, that rough and hard-earned dialect of the dark. When I speak it, a snake slides up my throat and hisses with my mouth; the shadow behind my mangled soul wraps its raven wings around my ribs.

>It is a homecoming.

>It is the world of the dead welcoming me to the place where I belong.

That is part of why Halls of the Dead feels defiant, I think: it has been written in defiance of so many things – ideas – genre conventions – people – and it refuses to be anything but what it is. Take it or leave it. It’s not interested in being mass-appeal, or easy, or palatable. It’s queer as in fuck you in book form, in spirit and philosophy – as well as literally having an all-queer cast.

The villains are people who burn books. I mean. I feel like that tells you so much of what you need to know!

Speaking of books: OMFG I HAVE TO TALK ABOUT THE GRIMOIRES! When the publishing deal for this one was first announced, it was the mention of ‘sentient grimoires bound in human skin’ that had me adding it to my ‘keep an eye out for’ list and setting up allll the Google alerts to make sure I knew the second it was available to preorder. BECAUSE HOW COULD I DO OTHERWISE??? That’s such a magnificent idea and I love it. I love the grimoires. But besides being ‘just’ EXTREMELY COOL, they’re also a perfect example of what I was talking about before, the way Hallow has reframed/reinterpreted horror. Books bound in human skin are a horror staple, we’ve all come across them in pop culture before; they’re unambiguously terrible, evil, horrific, long before you get to their contents! But in Halls of the Dead, they are objects of intense love and devotion, connecting necromancers to their predecessors, to their magical ancestry; they’re not textbooks, they’re the literal embodiment of a necromancer’s knowledge, a necromancer’s soul. They’re sacred, priceless treasures, the holiest of relics. They’re not stand-ins for a necromancer’s community, they are that community; each one exists because a necromancer somewhere thought it more important to share their knowledge than to have an afterlife, an immense sacrifice for the benefit of people that individual has never met. Is that not one of the most inspiring things you’ve ever heard? Imagine valuing knowledge that much, imagine loving your community so much that you would do that for them?

Just thinking about it makes me tear up a bit.

>“STOP STARING,” says the book. The voice is not a singular voice but rather an echoing chorus, like Heaven’s army in my hands. “HAVE WE NOT WRETCHED WORK TO WREAK?”

The grimoires are my Exhibit A for what Hallow is doing with the horror here, this big, bold, thrilling subversion. What is meant to be ugly – what IS ugly – is beautiful in Harrow’s prose; nightmare-fuel becomes deeply romantic; violence becomes a gift better than roses or chocolate. There’s a scene towards the end of the book when all three characters are soaked in blood from head to toe, and it’s charming, it’s sweet, it feels like a Hallmark moment. And that makes it so much more chilling, doesn’t it? Horror is never more horrifying than when an author seduces you into loving it, and Hallow is the Casanova of horror, the Shakespeare, the heir to Poppy Brite. Every page is a dark object d’art, a lover’s gift, a new black blossom in an endless bouquet of them.

If you’re like me, you’ll swoon. This is going to squick so many readers – I can think of so many people I would never gift a copy to! – but MY GODS, if it’s for you, it is for you. I feel like I’ve been waiting my entire life for a book like Halls of the Dead, a book this queer and beautiful, this angry, this triumphant, this untamed and untameable. A book that revels in itself without apology, and dares you to revel in it too.

>I am the beating heart of this world I am going to make.

I could go on and on and ON about this book; it is my newest Special Interest and I am not the tiniest bit sorry. There’s so much that DESERVES to be talked about: Irene’s chronic pain, and the way I burst into tears at how NOT a big deal it was for her partner to adjust to during a sex scene; the set-up of the eponymous Halls of the Dead, where souls go when they die; Agnes’ trauma and her arc of claiming her own power; the ridiculous deliciousness of St. John being perfectly happy to be a lavender husband until the Feels become catching; the way all three protagonists worship the ground the others walk on. The cannibalism! And the soul-cannibalism! The symbolism and hypocrisy behind the villain! Themes of community and history and rebellion! Horror being all about perspective! The worldbuilding (JESUS AS A NECROMANCER?!) The respectful handling/examination of depression and trauma! Necromancy = love-magic! First-person present-tense being the perfect POV for this story, despite how much I usually hate it! The genius of turning bury your gays into resurrect your gays! Irene being a miracle, in so many senses of the word! St. John walking around as a skin-suit over grave-dirt-and-bugs stuffing! Agnes as avatar-paladin! IT IS SO VERY HARD TO SHUT UP AND NOT DROWN YOU IN ALL MY THOUGHTS, ALL THE REASONS YOU SHOULD ADORE THIS BOOK!

>He is an apocalypse, inviting every vulture and rat and beetle all the world over to the feast of his body. Come, says the smell of St. John, there is plenty of rotten meat for us all.

I am clinging by my fingernails to the fact that a lot of it would be spoilers, and I refuse to spoil anyone, you deserve to have it all be new to you when you read and Halls of the Dead deserves being read that way.

Halls of the Dead deserves to be lovingly dissected in a university course, a slew of academic papers; the symbolism, the tableaus, the many, MANY lines of prose I want to get tattooed! You could point at any detail here and uncover a wealth of meaning behind it with just a little thought.

>We are each other’s inevitability.

It is a feast. It is perfection. It’s going on my Best of the Decade list.

It is not for everyone, but also, I need absolutely everyone to read it anyway.

Bingo squares: Afterlife HM, Duology Part 1, Published in 2026.