Horrific Grief in Harrow the Ninth

Emma Hallock

Traumatic loss and the grief that follows are central in Tamsyn Muir’s 2020 novel Harrow the Ninth. The second installment in The Locked Tomb series, Harrow the Ninth picks up where the first book left off, with the death of Gideon Nav, a cavalier, or swordswoman, who has sworn herself to Harrowhark (Harrow) Nonagesimus. Gideon died so that Harrow could consume her soul and become a Lyctor: all-powerful necromancers who serve the Emperor John Gaius and obtain power by consuming the soul of their cavalier. In the aftermath of Gideon’s sacrifice, Harrow is terrorized by tropes of the horror genre. Undead monsters return, the past invades the present, identities are fractured, bodies are possessed, and at the root of these horrors is Harrow’s grief. Harrow the Ninth shows how grief can be effectively represented and explored in horror literature.

Horror is often concerned with unpleasant human emotions and their violent excesses. In the article “Trauma and Horror,” Kelly Hurley describes how the horror genre naturally represents trauma since “horror’s métier is the violent breach of body and psyche and the lurid display of the breach’s aftereffects: psychic entrapment, repetition compulsions, uncanny returns in the shape of literal monsters” (2). However, in Harrow the Ninth, the “violent breach” does not occur during the traumatic loss, but afterward. Like trauma, grief can be a horrific and violent emotion. In “Embodying Perceptions of Death,” Suzanne Laba Cataldi explains how “we can see this violence, this sense of being ‘ripped’ away from a loved one, reflected in our ordinary language” (199). “Don’t leave me,” Harrow begs Gideon at the end of the first novel Gideon the Ninth (438). But she does, and in her grief, Harrow is torn apart.

Except, it seems that Harrow is not grieving Gideon at the beginning of Harrow the Ninth. In fact, Gideon is conspicuously absent. In the Dramatis Personae, Gideon’s name should be crossed out but legible. Instead, it is entirely blacked out. The first time Gideon Nav’s name should appear in the story, it is replaced with “ORTUS NIGENAD” (21).

Bolded and in all caps, Ortus’s name looks out of place on the page, and he is certainly out of place in the story. Everywhere Gideon should be, Ortus turns up, pasted overtop of Gideon in Harrow’s memories. At the end of the novel, Harrow finally remembers that she refused to swallow Gideon’s soul and stopped the Lyctoral conversion halfway “by removing my ability to comprehend her” (382). However, in this act, Harrow also removed her ability to comprehend and grieve her loss. When John Gaius mentions “Ortus’s” death to Harrow, “…his mouth looked strange. A hot whistle of pain ran down your temporal bone. Your body was numb to grief; perhaps you had felt it once, but you did not feel it anymore” (45). Harrow tries to repress her grief, but that does not mean she is free from its horrors.

In this novel, nothing remains buried. Harrow the Ninth alternates between telling the story of Harrow as a Lyctor and apparently retelling a version of Gideon the Ninth without Gideon. “You rolled a rock over me,” Gideon thinks (434), alluding to the rock John rolled over the mysterious Locked Tomb. When Harrow asks John who he buried, he tells her, “I buried a monster” (195). And yet, Harrow sees “the buried monster [turn] herself so that she was lit in the light of the undead stars” (195). Visions of this monster (known to Harrow as “the Body”) haunted Harrow in her childhood. As a Lyctor, the visions return and remind her of Gideon’s absence. In the first Gideon the Ninth chapter, the Body tells Harrow, “this isn’t how it happens” (23). The question “is this how it happens?” is repeated again and again throughout the novel. Happens, not happened. Grief, Cataldi says, can warp and bend time “so that we may feel stuck or suspended in the past” (197-198). In horror literature, that suspension is literal, whether it is ghosts in a haunted house or slashers returning to the scene of a crime. In Harrow the Ninth, the Body, despite having been buried by John, does not rest. Gideon, despite being buried by Harrow, does not rest either.

Whenever traces of Gideon appear, Harrow feels intense fear. At one point, Harrow hallucinates lying “in a sea of dead bodies…a rubber-bodied toddler with a painted face and very red hair lay dead beside your knee and for some reason it was this that destroyed you… You howled in a purity of fright” (104-105). The child is, or at least strongly resembles, a young Gideon. Harrow reacting with fear is interesting because, as Becky Millar and Jonny Lee explain in the article “Horror Films and Grief,” fear and grief have similar physiological effects (176). Harrow cannot feel grief, but she can feel fear, and she spends the novel terrified. One night, she tells the Body, “I’m afraid of myself. I am afraid of going mad” (161). She asks, “do I have Ortus’s eyes? Are these ones mine?” (161). Lyctors’ eyes change colors after they swallow their cavalier’s soul. Harrow’s fear/grief is so intense that she cannot recognize her own eyes.

Harrow’s identity fractures, and she becomes unable to recognize more than just her eye color. She looks in the mirror “with a certain repelled bewilderment, as if you had never seen your face before, and it honestly seemed as though you had not” (351). Harrow feels like her body does not belong to her, and the second-person narration throughout the novel illustrates that disconnect, distancing Harrow from herself. In an interview with Clarkesworld, Tamsyn Muir describes The Locked Tomb series as “slow” horror, like lifting “a mirror up to your face so you can see the crack. I love it when horror stains backward through an entire text” (“The Horror”). The second-person narration of Harrow the Ninth initially seems like a purely stylistic choice, emphasizing the way Harrow has been torn apart. However, the real horror staining backward through the text becomes apparent when, halfway through the book, a chapter ends with the line, “you never could have guessed that he had seen me” (315). At that moment, it is suddenly horrifically clear that Harrow is not the only one inhabiting her body.

Grief opens Harrow’s fractured mind to possession. In the article “Presence in absence,” Thomas Fuchs says that “the death of the loved one… means a contraction or even a partial loss of self” (48). Immediately after Gideon dies, Harrow’s sense of self splits apart. She asks Ianthe, a fellow Lyctor, to remove her memories of Gideon “‘because you know what it is,’ she said haltingly, ‘to be—fractured.’ Of such banality was grief made” (362). Ianthe tells Harrow she is being foolish, that “the hardest part is over… You answer to nobody now” (363). But Harrow knows that she is “more beholden than ever” (363). “Who is left? What is left?” Ianthe asks (363), and later, Gideon answers: “you’d left me behind. Inside you” (388). The “me” inhabiting Harrow’s body is Gideon because, as Fuchs explains, “like hardly any other psychic phenomenon, grief discloses the fact that… our self is permeable and open” (48). Whether or not she acknowledges her grief, Harrow’s psyche is permeable by Gideon, and the two are inextricably linked.

Harrow’s possession by Gideon makes her a fusion figure. In The Philosophy of Horror, Noël Carrol defines fusion figures as horrific beings that blur categorical distinctions like inside/outside or living/dead. According to Carrol, “mummies, vampires, ghosts, zombies, and Freddie, Elm Street’s premier nightmare, are fusion figures in this respect. Each, in different ways, blur the distinction between living and dead. Each, in some sense, is both living and dead” (43). When the dead Gideon resides inside the living Harrow, they are both living and dead. In the end, Gideon imagines herself and Harrow “layered over each other as we always were. A final blurring of the edges between us, like water spilt over ink outlines. Melted steel. Mingled blood. Harrowhark-and-Gideon, Gideon-and-Harrowhark at last” (499-500). Harrow’s grief has created a literal bond between the living and the dead.

Because of their fusion, Gideon’s death is a part of Harrow, and she cannot avoid her grief. She realizes that if she forgets Gideon, she might as well “let my right hand be forgotten” (380). Her repressed grief manifested as monsters and corrupted timelines, fractured identities and loss of bodily sovereignty. Yet, none of these horrors are so overwhelmingly nightmarish as finally facing “that dizzy unreality of blackness” where all Harrow can think “in exquisite agonies of amazement, was: She is dead. I will never see her again.” (399). Ordinary grief is as shocking as seeing the buried outside their graves, as disorienting as the past repeating itself, as unsettling as watching your identity slip away, and as gripping as possession all at once. Just after Harrow remembers Gideon, the ghost of Magnus Quinn, a character who died in Gideon the Ninth, comes to Harrow and tells her that all of this could have been avoided if Harrow taken heed of “the toughest lesson: that of grief,” rather than keeping Gideon “like a lover keeping old notes” (460). According to Magnus, Harrow’s grieving process turned monstrous because she would not accept Gideon’s death.

Magnus’s argument does not come as any surprise—many of us are used to thinking of grief as a story that ends with acceptance. Otherwise, what are we left with? Grief, Cataldi argues, “reveals how intimately woven, incorporated others are, into the fabric of our own lives” because they are torn from it (197). But fabric can only be torn so many times before it falls apart. At some point, holding those tears open becomes unsustainable, and Harrow knows this. “As though the universe could withstand more holes,” she thinks, “as though the fabric of the universe had not become a series of lacework cut-outs linked by the thin, snappable joins of those who remained” (461). Harrow the Ninth was published in August 2020, a time of personal and global catastrophe. I saw my own grief reflected back at me in Harrow’s words. I remember acutely feeling that, unless someone were to take a needle and thread to the lace of my heart, it was in danger of collapsing into some unknown terror. Accepting and moving on are essential to survive.

After acknowledging Gideon’s death, Harrow has the chance to do precisely that. She can choose to stay in the River, the metaphysical realm between life and death, or “she could go back to her body, and let her go,” finally destroying Gideon’s soul (459). When Harrow removed her memories of Gideon, she sent a letter to her future self, asking her to “look upon me as a Harrowhark who was handed the first genuine choice of our lives; the only choice ever given where we had free will to say, No, and free will to say, Yes. Accept that in this instance I have chosen to say, No.” (61). In the end, Harrow is “back again with what she had always wanted—the choice to say Yes, and the choice to say No” (459). This time, Magnus and his wife Abigail urge Harrow to make a different choice. Abigail tells Harrow that if she stays in the River, she will join the throng of “mad, directionless” souls (397). The clear antidote for terror, pain, and horror is moving on. “You stand before a known quantity and hideous unknowns,” Abigail tells Harrow, “don’t walk back toward the unknown” (461). But that is exactly what Harrow does.

In the final moments of the novel, Harrow chooses to hold onto grief and its horror, dramatizing the appeal of the horror genre. Before, I said I needed someone to sew my shredded heart back together to survive. But, of course, that did not happen—it could not. It is easy to find advice about “letting go” and “moving on” after a death, but often those words feel wholly inadequate. Moving on is not so easy, and horror literature does not pretend that it is. Horror offers a space where you can sit with pain and terror. Horror lets you scream, weep, and bleed. As Harrow the Ninth shows, horror tropes are well-suited for exploring the intense emotions of grief. And like no other genre, horror accepts that while grief might be survivable, it will forever alter you. It is no wonder I and so many others find the genre appealing. It is no wonder that Harrow picks “the revenant’s path,” knowing that she will doom herself to madness (461). I pick that path too, every time I pick up a horror novel. In horror literature, readers can walk into the hideous unknown, just like Harrow, and we can stay there as long as we want.

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Works Cited 

Carroll, Noël. The Philosophy of Horror, or Paradoxes of the Heart, Routledge, 1990.

Cataldi, Suzanne Laba. “Embodying Perceptions of Death: Emotional Apprehension and Reversibilities of Flesh.” Chiasms: Merleau-Ponty’s Notion of Flesh, edited by Fred Evans and Leonard Lawlor, State University of New York Press, 2000, pp. 189-201.

Fuchs, Thomas. “Presence in absence. The ambiguous phenomenology of grief.” Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences, vol. 17, 2018, pp. 43-63, doi.org/10.1007/s11097-017-9506-2.

Hurley, Kelly. “Trauma and Horror: Anguish and Transfiguration.” English Language Notes, vol. 59, no. 2, 2021, pp. 1-8, doi.org/10.1215/00138282-9277216.

Millar, Becky and Jonny Lee. “Horror Films and Grief.” Emotion Review, vol. 13, no. 3, 2021, pp. 171-182, doi.org/10.1177/17540739211022815.

Muir, Tamsyn. Gideon the Ninth. Tor.com, 2019.

—. Harrow the Ninth. Tor.com, 2020.

—. “The Horror of it All! A Conversation with Tamsyn Muir.” Interview by Arley Sorg. Clarkesworld: Science Fiction & Fantasy Magazine, May 2020, clarkesworldmagazine.com/muir_interview/. Accessed 6 Mar. 2023.