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I don’t tend to read a lot of novellas, which is unfortunate, because novellas are a perfectly good story length and many of them are quite good. But I tend to just reach for bigger books, most of the time (I should really reconsider this for the time being), and so I have had a copy of Seanan McGuire’s Every Heart a Doorway sitting around on my shelf since some long-past Readercon; I’m not even sure which year it was. Probably the publication year, which was 2016.
Anyway, part of the reason this book sat ignored on my shelf for so long (besides having too many things on the shelf) is that, in my typical Readercon fugue state, I seem to have picked up this book and gotten it signed without having any idea what it was about, and therefore it didn’t ring any bells in my brain when I saw it on the shelf later. But I read the back cover copy when I was rearranging my fiction shelves the other week and saw that it appeared to be one of those genre-savvy meta-story type things, and I do love a good shorter story about stories, so I made a mental note to pack it for Maine. You see, it turns out that Every Heart a Doorway is about kids who come back from portal fantasies and don’t fit into the real world anymore, and I love portal fantasies (and misfits, obviously).
Our protagonist is a teenage goth named Nancy (a possible The Craft reference? Who knows), who has come back from the Halls of the Dead, a sepulchral underworld whose standards of decorum revolve heavily around being extremely still for long periods of time. This is a thing that Nancy became rather good at in her time there, and that she is still good at, which creeps people out.
Nancy’s parents are not dealing so well with the whole sudden statue-y goth thing, and have sent her to Eleanor West’s Home for Wayward Children, but not before sneakily repacking her suitcase with brightly colored clothing instead of the carefully chosen black and white wardrobe she’d packed and a note lamenting that she wasn’t as cheerful and rainbow-y as she used to be. Honestly, you’d think these people had never heard of the concept of a seventeen-year-old before having children; even without the falling into a portal to the Halls of the Dead and becoming a potential bride for the Lord of Death, the whole un-bubbly teenage Goth phase thing is perfectly normal. A lot of them grow out of it; those of us that don’t still often manage to survive and become functional and productive members of society, or at least to become technical editors, which is close enough.
Nancy arrives at the school, which is overwhelmingly populated by other girls, and overwhelmingly populated by ones that went to happy colorful fairyland type worlds. Nancy does end up making sort-of friends with her assigned roommate, Suki, who does fit this description; the other folks she winds up hanging out with are Jack and Jill, twin girls who went into a sort of Hammer Horror universe (where Jack was a mad-scientist-in-training and Jill was a vampire’s bride); Kade, a trans boy who got kicked out of a disappointingly transphobic fairyland for becoming the Goblin Prince because apparently that was supposed to be someone else’s job; and Christopher, who went to a sort of Dios de los Muertos themed underworld/fairyland and learned to make skeletons dance (his parents think his obligatory love interest, the Skeleton Girl, is a regular girl he liked who died of anorexia, because that’s the sort of thing that makes sense to parents).
Nancy’s obligatory love interest is Kade, which on the Kade side of things is fine--he’s a good character, especially for a Male Romantic Lead. On the Nancy side of things I had some issues with it, some of which may constitute critiques and others of which are purely personal spleen. Nancy is ace, and, as I Was A Teenage Asexual Goth myself, one would think I’d be happy about teenage ace goth rep in YA literature, except that the aspec community is extremely diverse and it’s always sort of personally disappointing when someone tries to rep People Like You in literature and comes up with the absolute opposite of your experiences. Nancy is a romantic ace, and the fact that aces in YA literature, on the occasions they do pop up as viewpoint characters, seem to frequently (to the degree that there is a “frequently”) be romantic aces, so that they can have obligatory romantic subplots and their aceness can present A Challenge (and, it being YA, A Teaching Moment) within their romantic subplots gets up my nose far more than it should--it always makes me sort of mentally stamp my feet and go you are missing the point! which I am intellectually aware makes no sense as an actual argument. Romo aces exist and don’t deserve representation any less than aroaces just because I find it personally obnoxious how much it underscores how absolutely obligatory all those obligatory romantic subplots are. Also, there is no “point” to having a sexual orientation in real life, so there doesn’t need to be one in fiction, either. Except that I always felt like there was a point--including in real life--and the point was to avoid irritating romantic subplots, because my feelings about amatonormativity are stronger than my feelings about any actual person have ever been. (I’m reasonably sure the shift in the discourse toward “inclusion” of romo aces as the more visible kind of ace, especially in the kinds of books that I read a lot of, has at least as much to do with my ditching that label in favor of just “aromantic” as a standalone at least as much as anything that’s happened out in reality.) Also, and possibly I am only having this thought because I was already annoyed, but writing a cis/trans romance where the cis person is asexual feels a little like chickening out? Like, we’re going to do three pages of “don’t worry, just because this person is asexual doesn’t mean they get to skip having a romantic subplot like a normal person” internal monologuing but we’re going to combine it with “this person is attracted to a trans person, but not like that.” This is a combination of things that can easily happen in real life, but as a sequence of deliberate authorial choices in fiction it could not but make me go “hm.”
Other than that bit it is very much my kind of book and I did enjoy the murder mystery bit quite a lot; it has strong callbacks to many of my favorite stories but not so obviously as to kill the suspense. It is full of weird creepy shit like people getting dissolved in acid and body parts going missing, and several very good jokes. Overall I’d be interested in reading the rest of the series sometimes, especially since I believe they are all of similar length and I am very, very behind on my Goodreads challenge this year.
Anyway, part of the reason this book sat ignored on my shelf for so long (besides having too many things on the shelf) is that, in my typical Readercon fugue state, I seem to have picked up this book and gotten it signed without having any idea what it was about, and therefore it didn’t ring any bells in my brain when I saw it on the shelf later. But I read the back cover copy when I was rearranging my fiction shelves the other week and saw that it appeared to be one of those genre-savvy meta-story type things, and I do love a good shorter story about stories, so I made a mental note to pack it for Maine. You see, it turns out that Every Heart a Doorway is about kids who come back from portal fantasies and don’t fit into the real world anymore, and I love portal fantasies (and misfits, obviously).
Our protagonist is a teenage goth named Nancy (a possible The Craft reference? Who knows), who has come back from the Halls of the Dead, a sepulchral underworld whose standards of decorum revolve heavily around being extremely still for long periods of time. This is a thing that Nancy became rather good at in her time there, and that she is still good at, which creeps people out.
Nancy’s parents are not dealing so well with the whole sudden statue-y goth thing, and have sent her to Eleanor West’s Home for Wayward Children, but not before sneakily repacking her suitcase with brightly colored clothing instead of the carefully chosen black and white wardrobe she’d packed and a note lamenting that she wasn’t as cheerful and rainbow-y as she used to be. Honestly, you’d think these people had never heard of the concept of a seventeen-year-old before having children; even without the falling into a portal to the Halls of the Dead and becoming a potential bride for the Lord of Death, the whole un-bubbly teenage Goth phase thing is perfectly normal. A lot of them grow out of it; those of us that don’t still often manage to survive and become functional and productive members of society, or at least to become technical editors, which is close enough.
Nancy arrives at the school, which is overwhelmingly populated by other girls, and overwhelmingly populated by ones that went to happy colorful fairyland type worlds. Nancy does end up making sort-of friends with her assigned roommate, Suki, who does fit this description; the other folks she winds up hanging out with are Jack and Jill, twin girls who went into a sort of Hammer Horror universe (where Jack was a mad-scientist-in-training and Jill was a vampire’s bride); Kade, a trans boy who got kicked out of a disappointingly transphobic fairyland for becoming the Goblin Prince because apparently that was supposed to be someone else’s job; and Christopher, who went to a sort of Dios de los Muertos themed underworld/fairyland and learned to make skeletons dance (his parents think his obligatory love interest, the Skeleton Girl, is a regular girl he liked who died of anorexia, because that’s the sort of thing that makes sense to parents).
Nancy’s obligatory love interest is Kade, which on the Kade side of things is fine--he’s a good character, especially for a Male Romantic Lead. On the Nancy side of things I had some issues with it, some of which may constitute critiques and others of which are purely personal spleen. Nancy is ace, and, as I Was A Teenage Asexual Goth myself, one would think I’d be happy about teenage ace goth rep in YA literature, except that the aspec community is extremely diverse and it’s always sort of personally disappointing when someone tries to rep People Like You in literature and comes up with the absolute opposite of your experiences. Nancy is a romantic ace, and the fact that aces in YA literature, on the occasions they do pop up as viewpoint characters, seem to frequently (to the degree that there is a “frequently”) be romantic aces, so that they can have obligatory romantic subplots and their aceness can present A Challenge (and, it being YA, A Teaching Moment) within their romantic subplots gets up my nose far more than it should--it always makes me sort of mentally stamp my feet and go you are missing the point! which I am intellectually aware makes no sense as an actual argument. Romo aces exist and don’t deserve representation any less than aroaces just because I find it personally obnoxious how much it underscores how absolutely obligatory all those obligatory romantic subplots are. Also, there is no “point” to having a sexual orientation in real life, so there doesn’t need to be one in fiction, either. Except that I always felt like there was a point--including in real life--and the point was to avoid irritating romantic subplots, because my feelings about amatonormativity are stronger than my feelings about any actual person have ever been. (I’m reasonably sure the shift in the discourse toward “inclusion” of romo aces as the more visible kind of ace, especially in the kinds of books that I read a lot of, has at least as much to do with my ditching that label in favor of just “aromantic” as a standalone at least as much as anything that’s happened out in reality.) Also, and possibly I am only having this thought because I was already annoyed, but writing a cis/trans romance where the cis person is asexual feels a little like chickening out? Like, we’re going to do three pages of “don’t worry, just because this person is asexual doesn’t mean they get to skip having a romantic subplot like a normal person” internal monologuing but we’re going to combine it with “this person is attracted to a trans person, but not like that.” This is a combination of things that can easily happen in real life, but as a sequence of deliberate authorial choices in fiction it could not but make me go “hm.”
Other than that bit it is very much my kind of book and I did enjoy the murder mystery bit quite a lot; it has strong callbacks to many of my favorite stories but not so obviously as to kill the suspense. It is full of weird creepy shit like people getting dissolved in acid and body parts going missing, and several very good jokes. Overall I’d be interested in reading the rest of the series sometimes, especially since I believe they are all of similar length and I am very, very behind on my Goodreads challenge this year.