Why not quote Ecclesiastes: For everything there is a season, and a time for every matter under heaven. January 1675 in London marks a season of newborns, but these pregnancies are more unpredictable and deadly than the norm for the time: More and more babies are coming out of the womb with horns, or gills, or enough eyes to pass for a Biblically-accurate angel. Are the rumors true, of expecting women crossing paths with a devilish figure that imprints on their wombs? Or could it have something to do with the new apprentice midwife, unassuming widow Mrs. Sarah Davis, who has her own unusual origins? Lina Rather’s A Season of Monstrous Conceptions is a dark, thoughtful novella about what it means to pass from the relative safety of one world into another that offers more opportunity but also more danger.
This particular time in history and society is the perfect setup for this speculative plot, because of the unfortunate norm that pregnancies did not always ensure a living child and/or mother: Between breech babies and postpartum complications, birth was a bloody and often fatal affair. That’s even before you add in this particular crop of newborns not surviving the night, whether due to aforementioned inhuman features like gills if not born in water, or superstitious and God-fearing folks drowning the infants themselves.
Sarah has a personal incentive for delivering these particular babies, which is that twenty-odd years ago she was one of them, albeit born in the quiet but gossipy village of Cookham. A sixth child already rendered extraneous by birth order, she also came out with a nubby little tail that her grandmother matter-of-factly snipped before anyone could be the wiser. Yet Sarah’s otherworldliness goes deeper than a missing appendage, and she grows up with the uncanny sense that there is another world existing right beyond the borders of our own… and must eventually leave Cookham, and her unhappy marriage, when she discovers the ability to tap into that realm’s power.
But while the London births that Sarah and her mentor Mrs. June attend are becoming ever grimmer, that doesn’t stop them from taking on new clients—especially when Sarah hooks a big fish in Lady Faith Wren, genteel and gravid. Her husband, Sir Christopher Wren, is a renowned architect building a monument to the Great Fire that devastated London nine years before. Despite immediately recognizing the fetus in Faith’s womb as one of her kind, but far less able to pass in the human world than she, Sarah takes on the pregnancy as if it is a normal gestation. During those final weeks, Sir Wren recognizes something in Sarah, too: her uncanniness, yes, but also her intellect and curiosity.
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A Season of Monstrous Conceptions
Sarah’s intelligence is not appreciated by her harsh mentor figure Mrs. June, nor by the rest of the midwives’ guild—unofficial, of course, as the king will not recognize a group of women on the same level as the (male) surgeons. Their meetings are in pubs rather than universities or hospitals, but their studies are just as intensive, except they already know the workings of the female body and are instead concerned with the encroachment of what they call the Other Place. Despite the midwives having devoted years to trying to contact this world and its inhabitants, Sarah is instead drawn to midnight rendezvous (purely platonic) with Sir Wren in his underground laboratory, as he lets her in on his true blueprints for crossing over to this other sphere of existence.
Because no matter how canny (like Wren) or driven (like Mrs. June), intellectuals and magic-users cannot access the Other Place in the way that these otherworldly children can. And with most of the crop still learning how to self-regulate and sleep, Sarah is the rare specimen with enough life experience moving through our world to attempt any sort of crossover. But passing doesn’t mean that Sarah has ever felt safe or like she has a home. Her eagerness to become a teacher’s pet to Sir Wren is so poignant, not least because we’ve already witnessed her plaintive insistence on casting herself as a surrogate daughter to Mrs. June.
Yet when offered a place in more liminal spaces, Sarah recoils. For such a slim story, Rather endeavors to explore as many different spheres of London as she can. Most notable is anywhere where Margaret is: A serving girl at a brothel whose births Sarah and Mrs. June frequently attend, she represents the life that Sarah would have had if she had been born with horns instead of a tail. The attraction between the two women sparks on multiple levels, drawn to one another by desire but also repelled by fear. Their interludes are the novella’s most powerful, as Margaret endeavors to show Sarah that it doesn’t have to be parallel spheres, but that magic can bleed into the mundane and vice versa.
Rather’s novella is most effective when it demonstrates how the uncanny manifests in our familiar world. Sarah’s recollections of using her power, at first unintentionally and then with more conviction, are chilling in how she subtly bends others’ will to her frustration and rage—interrupting the natural course of things by compelling someone into a body of water or a wall of fire. Her night out on the town with Margaret, in which queerness is a symphony of meanings, brings tantalizing zaps of pleasure to a mostly grim tale. And on the other end of the spectrum, a climactic scene involving common people misunderstanding the thin line between child and demon is the most disturbing yet necessary part of the tale.
But as the veil between our world and the Other Place grows thinner than an effaced cervix, the subsequent passages do not inspire the same sense of distraught wonder. Our glimpses of this alternate world are so rare that the brief moments in which we are dropped within, it’s difficult to know whether to regard the human subject as feared oddity or harmless interloper. We have the sense that these unwanted children could survive better there, but we don’t really know how much they’d fit in, either.
However, Sarah’s constant sense of belonging to neither world, of straddling them at best, aches like a phantom limb. Rather doesn’t entirely resolve that dilemma—in fact, the climax creates as many new questions as it answers existing ones—but she comes out the other side much like a mother giving birth, a bit worse for the wear but also with the closure that she has experienced a transformative journey of her body and mind.
When it comes to A Season of Monstrous Conceptions, it’s rather like the quandary of family size: On the one hand, I would love to see “sibling” novellas further exploring Sarah’s midwifery after the events of this story. On the other hand, this is a lovely dark standalone that begins and ends within a particular season. Who knows, maybe there will be a surprise addition down the line.
A Season of Monstrous Conceptions is available from Tordotcom Publishing.
Now Natalie Zutter is on the hunt for more SFF about pregnancy, childbirth, and all the horrors and joys contained therein. Feel free to recommend some to her on Twitter or Bluesky!
