Book: The Halls of the Dead by S M Hallow
Reviewed by Rallie X
Rating: 3.5/5
Gothic romantasy sapphic necromancers (and their undead husband) in Victorian London.
Okay, I should probably say more than that, but come on what an amazing starting point! The Halls of the Dead by S.M. Hallow is a character driven exploration of loss, sacrifice, death, and queer love/family in an inventive, reimagined 1840s London where certain types of magic are legal while necromancy is punishable by death. Hallow sets the dark tone for the book opening with Irene and her husband St. John digging up the grave of her freshly executed lover, Agnes - it's dark, it's gruesome, and so so enthralling.
“I am the haunter of the Halls of the Dead. Mine is the soul and the body and the blood. I pour my blood in libation for she who is buried here.”
My favorite part of this book is Hallow's depiction of necromancy. Spells are preserved in grimoires made from dead necromancers; any spell the necromancer knew in life is preserved on the pages and can be called forth via a sacrifice of blood - Irene does lots of stigmata-ing, if you are squeemish about blood this book is not for you because there's so much blood all the time everywhere (as soon as St. John has cleaned everything up it's time for more blood). The spell chants read like beautiful gothic poetry, every time Irene or Agnes started chanting "I am the haunter of the Halls of the Dead" I locked in like, here we're about to see how the characters are thinking about whatever problem they're up against. Just SO cool. It's one thing to describe spells and rituals, it's another thing entirely to write the dangerous and spooky poetry that brings them to life.
Irene, Agnes, and St. John each had their own unique addition to the story, although I'm not going to go into detail here for fear of spoilers because the way this book is written we get revelations steadily in sort of flashback moments woven together with the present. But what I will say is that DAMN Hallow describes St. John in the most perfectly disgusting way, like being undead and stuffed with your own grave dirt, bugs included, just doesn't seem very nice (gross, it seems gross).
My one gripe is that there is a long stretch in the middle that just got really really slow and I struggled to keep going. That can sometimes be an issue with character-driven stories, though, so it might just come down to a matter of taste. The parts that I did like I loved, but there was enough meh that although I enjoyed the book I don't think I'd read it again. I do know that Hallow's version of necromancy will stick with me, though, because she really did do such an excellent job crafting this exceedingly dark, deeply poetic method of interacting with Death (as well as the dead, but a lot of it is dealing with Death itself) for these characters who have all gone through intense loss and turn to magic to refuse to accept the finality of mortality. After all, necromancers aren't afraid of death, for they alone know what follows the flesh.