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Harrow the Ninth
648 pages
A hallucinatory, grief-fueled puzzle box of bone magic and shattered memories that demands you surrender to its brilliant chaos.
What it feels like
Reading this book feels like being trapped inside a brilliant, fracturing mind. It is a deeply disorienting and wildly rewarding experience, built on a foundation of profound grief and wrapped in a gothic, claustrophobic atmosphere. The narrative hurls you into a surreal puzzle box where memory is unreliable, the timeline is fractured, and the prose swings wildly between dense, macabre poetry and jarringly hilarious modern slang. You will spend much of the journey feeling just as haunted and confused as the protagonist, piecing together the devastating truth of what she has done to herself to survive. It is a masterpiece of emotional devastation and dark humor, perfect for readers who love complex, demanding narratives that reward absolute trust and surrender.
- Mood
- claustrophobic
- gothic
- surreal
- dread-soaked
- macabre
- Tone
- irreverent
- darkly comedic
- hallucinatory
- grief-stricken
- chaotic
- Pace
- propulsive
- Themes
- unprocessed grief · unreliable memory · identity fragmentation · toxic devotion · the burden of survival
- The writing
- A wildly inventive blend of dense gothic lyricism, second-person narration, and jarring internet-era shitposting.
- The arc
- From profound, disorienting grief and confusion to a shattering, cathartic revelation of love and sacrifice.
- Who it's for
- Readers who love complex, unreliable narrators, deeply buried emotional devastation, and puzzles that require them to piece together a shattered psyche.
Content notes
- graphic violence
- body horror
- gore
- psychosis
- profound grief
- suicidal ideation
About the book
"She answered the Emperor's call.
She arrived with her arts, her wits, and her only friend.
In victory, her world has turned to ash.
After rocking the cosmos with her deathly debut, Tamsyn Muir continues the story of the penumbral Ninth House in Harrow the Ninth, a mind-twisting puzzle box of mystery, murder, magic, and mayhem. Nothing is as it seems in the halls of the Emperor, and the fate of the galaxy rests on one woman's shoulders.
Harrowhark Nonagesimus, last necromancer of the Ninth House, has been drafted by her Emperor to fight an unwinnable war. Side-by-side with a detested rival, Harrow must perfect her skills and become an angel of undeath ― but her health is failing, her sword makes her nauseous, and even her mind is threatening to betray her.
Sealed in the gothic gloom of the Emperor's Mithraeum with three unfriendly teachers, hunted by the mad ghost of a murdered planet, Harrow must confront two unwelcome questions: is somebody trying to kill her? And if they succeeded, would the universe be better off?"
Description from Open Library.
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