Ghosts and secrets

[bloodygranuaile]

 

There are a limited number of works in the aromantic spec fic canon and basically all of them are written by one Nicole Kornher-Stace. I read her post-apocalyptic ghost story Archivist Wasp last winter, and it had lots of things I like in a story, like the apocalypse, ghosts, and socially awkward dorks making friends by having tasks to do, and terrible people getting their well-deserved comeuppance, and lots of feelings!! but that weren’t romantic feelings. So recently I decided to read the sequel, Latchkey, because I wanted more of all of those things.

I had been momentarily hesitant about reading Latchkey because Archivist Wasp was a perfectly complete standalone novel and now it’s going to be a trilogy and there is always the risk that the middle book in a trilogy has, you know, Middle Book Syndrome, but I need not have worried. Latchkey has more ghosts and more feelings and more fucked-up sci-fi stuff, plus some bonus setting things on fire. It kicks off three years after the end of Archivist Wasp, during which time Wasp, now back to her original name of Isabel, has been running a more or less functional all-women’s monastery/commune thing in what is still basically the rectory for Catchkeep’s shrine. She has not seen the ghosts from the last book in three years because the whole town is warded with ghostgrass, for protection from the normal (i.e., dangerous) kinds of ghosts, and it is an unfortunate side effect that it keeps her friends out as well. However, the town has now been hit by an earthquake and is about to get hit by a pack of raiders--devotees of Carrion Boy, who seem vaguely inspired by the Reavers from Firefly--and Isabel decides to hide the better part of the townsfolk in the tunnels underneath the town. This is a good plan but like most plans it survives contact with reality for about 0.5 seconds and then things get weird. Weird in this case involves running into the nameless ghost and his ghost partner Catherine Foster again, but this time Foster has tracked down a bunch of the ghosts of the other subjects of the Latchkey Project, an attempt to turn children into supersoldiers that ended up killing all but a few of them horribly. Saving the town, figuring out what happened in the Latchkey Project, and trying not to drown all become inextricably knotted together into one big and extremely complicated quest. Like the first book, Latchkey is incredibly dark and violent and everyone gets banged up and various levels of deaded and almost-deaded quite a lot, but it also has a humorous streak and is occasionally heartwarming in a fucked-up sort of way. I am sure I will be motivated to read the third book in a much more timely fashion than I read either of these, especially because we still don’t know the ghost’s name and I am absolutely dying to find out if it’s going to be something suitably dignified or if it’s going to be goofy.