It’s deliberately, satisfyingly confusing, and really rewarding when the pieces start to click into place. She is left trying to piece together the true story as reality constantly shifts underfoot, and as a much larger galactic story plays out largely uncaring of her mystery-the metaphysical uncertainty of Inception or a Hitchcock thriller, on top of an already-complex and fantastic plot. Harrow claims to have wrestled with delusional insanity since childhood, and we’re in a world in which neurosurgery, magic, and ghostly possession have all come into play. Very quickly, it’s clear we’ve been plunged into a horror story more psychological than it first appeared. These chapters are interspersed with what seem to be flashbacks to the events of the previous novel, but these memories soon diverge more drastically than can be explained by a simple difference in perspective. In the main storyline, Harrow meets the other Lyctors and begins to learn her new powers as they prepare for a terrible battle. The novel picks up right where the last one left off: Harrowhark, newly ascended to the powerful rank of Lyctor, has joined the God-emperor of the Nine Houses to fight his enemies, corporeal and otherworldly. Harrow herself is a necromancer, more magically and politically astute than Gideon, so we get a lot more about how the world works-but, as a novel, Harrow is an intricate and deceptive piece of work, refusing a straightforward approach to its outlandish story. In Harrow, she takes that wild mash-up and expands on it, while making the reader doubt everything they remember about the first book. The premise of Gideon was so inventive and unhinged that half the pleasure of the book was just watching Muir pull it off-a space opera about wizards, veering constantly into mystery and horror, seen through the eyes of caustically sarcastic teenagers. Muir has once again distilled several variations on “frenemy” to fuel a compelling cast, and the novel’s pacing is amazingly controlled given how chaotic the story is-like a building deliberately falling down.

Returning to that preposterous but somehow organic blend of black magic and science fiction, Harrow the Ninth is a gleeful, genre-bending romp, sliding effortlessly between different modes of horror, and is relentlessly funny without ever dropping its core seriousness. Tamsyn Muir’s second novel, Harrow the Ninth, thankfully, clears it with room to spare.

Picking up a sequel to a book as original as Gideon the Ninth is a little scary-the first book set an incredibly high bar.

Harrow of the ninth