Harrowhark Nonagesimus is one of those people who makes you feel like she was already halfway through some baroque, centuries-long internal monologue before you walked into the room, and when you leave she will just keep right on going (she’s basically a walking parenthetical clause). The child-prodigy necromancer, high priestess of skulls and martyrdom, every word she speaks comes with the aftertaste of twenty-four hours of sleep deprivation and a lifetime of repressed grief. She is magnetic and mesmerising, like a solar eclipse.
Her parents are never far from any thought you might have about her. In combination they produced her, and then they performed her, as one might perform a ritual with exacting steps that include both offering and excision. To understand Harrow’s terror of affection, you must understand that in her family affection was not a substance but a faint, almost geological trace, present but not useful, detectable only as an absence that shapes everything around it.
Her genius is inseparable from her paranoia, which is also inseparable from the weight of having survived her parents’ exacting and grotesque form of attention. The world is stupid and broken and not nearly as clever as she is, and if she has to prop it up with splints of bone and manic contempt, she will (often literally, since the bones of the dead are her duct tape). Her interiority is a constant knife fight between her compulsive need for control and her equally compulsive disgust with that need (which yes is exhausting to read but also electrifying!!)
And yet she is deeply funny, but in the way a collapsing cathedral is funny. The jokes are jagged necrotic little things, bone shards she flings in the general direction of people she cannot quite bring herself to trust. There is no punchline, only the echo of the ruin, which is a ruin she inherited, excavated, and has now personalised with exquisite attention. The mausoleum of her parents’ making looms in every glance, every posture, every flinch at unbidden affection, and it is impossible to separate her from it, impossible to stop tracing her skeleton back to theirs, impossible not to marvel at the way she walks forward carrying that weight while making it look like gravity itself is merely decorative.
germansingergirl
dailybridgerton
origamiaround
romaincrisis
dededos
janainaart
snowghoul
yousharknotpass
