Welcome back to Reading the Weird, in which we get girl cooties all over weird fiction, cosmic horror, and Lovecraftiana—from its historical roots through its most recent branches. This week, we’re starting our new longread with Chapters 3-5 of Lucy Snyder’s Sister, Maiden, Monster. The book was first published in 2023. Spoilers ahead!
Dr. Shapiro asks if Erin is having trouble staying awake during the day. Not since she left Greenlawn, she answers.
* * *
At Greenlawn, shortly after her food test, the orderly Darius takes Erin outside for fresh air in a transport chair. They enter a boxwood-lined courtyard paved in dark slate and yellow ceramic tiles. Two benches and a star-shaped fountain are its only furniture. From the base of the waterless fountain, three large yellow arms radiate, arcing and winding. Erin imagines their pattern viewed from above might reveal a symbol or glyph.
A “code grey” sounds over the hospital PA system. Darius hurries to assist, leaving Erin alone in the chill nighttime air. She studies the paving until her vision blurs. She pitches backwards, into darkness where the wind bears her aloft on raptor wings. She flies over a city nestled in a valley. A manor house with a stone tower perches on a limestone cliff, surrounded by gardens and hedge mazes. Somehow she knows the manor holds priceless artifacts fit for a king, or a living god.
Suddenly she’s yanked back to the courtyard. Darius leans over her, relieved that she’s alive—when he returned from the emergency, she looked “real dead.” Erin says she was dreaming about flying. Still shaken, Darius eyes the tile pattern. It creeps him out, he admits, but since it was laid by the famous architect who designed Greenlawn, they can’t tear it out.
* * *
Dr. Shapiro asks if the “daily health app” on Erin’s phone is still working well for her. As well as ever, Erin replies; she knows Shapiro will misinterpret the spirit behind her words.
* * *
At Greenlawn, Erin gets back her phone, for limited use. She’s upset to find that someone has tampered with it, removing her security passcode. Nurse Tesfaye hesitates, then admits that the hospital is required to turn patients’ phones over to Homeland Security. Biting back fury to avoid sounding agitated, Erin asks why the search was allowed without her consent. Tesfaye looks uncomfortable. She explains that Congress has passed a law, the Pandemic Security Act. It suspends HIPAA requirements and allows authorities to use cell phone data for infection management. Erin protests that it’s the Fourth Amendment that prevents unwarranted digital searches. It strikes her that some political cabal must be using the pandemic to “turn civil rights into civil privileges.” Her screen holds a new app called HEALTH CHECK-IN. Tesfaye says she’ll need it to log her daily symptoms, so her care team can monitor whether she’s “in crisis.”
Again Erin bites back anger. But she knows her phone has become her own “personal digital spy.” Tesfaye looks relieved when she stops asking questions to call Gregory.
* * *
Dr. Shapiro asks how things are going with Erin’s boyfriend. As well as possible, Erin says, with a long-distance relationship.
* * *
During their first video call, Gregory is loving and sympathetic. Tesfaye has told him she’ll have to follow a restricted diet. Erin downplays the situation. She’s lost the ability to digest muscle meat, heavy fiber, and acidic foods, but she can at least have some dairy and egg whites. Her body has stopped making certain proteins, so she’ll need to take supplements. Such as a daily bowl of brains, she doesn’t say. Gregory has tested twice for the PVG virus, and he’s “clean.”
Nettled, Erin reminds him of how early on he claimed he was “clean” of STDs, and yet he gave her a killer case of herpes. Tests are fallible. There could be asymptomatic carriers. Maybe he gave her PVG. But when Gregory vehemently denies the possibility, she backs down.
Gregory then shares bad news: Her sister Claire and her father have both “passed on.” Erin’s shocked. Everyone she loved is now dead, except Gregory.
The next day, Dr. Sallow tells Erin the facts of her life to come, and she’s too devastated to call Gregory until the next morning. Erin’s viral activity hasn’t decreased—it’s increased, rendering her still contagious and subject to chronic problems, such as sun sensitivity and the inability to synthesize proteins vital to healing, DNA repair, and cancer resistance. Her chance of delivering a healthy baby is practically nil. Plus she can expect her brain to degenerate over time.
Gregory calls. He hopes she’s a Type Two survivor, who’d only need to supplement with animal blood. No such luck. Erin’s a Type Three, with a ghoulish need for brains and a much higher susceptibility to violent psychotic episodes if deprived. Plus she’ll remain contagious unless research into antivirals and vaccines pans out. That means she and Gregory can’t live together.
Gregory volunteers to let her keep their apartment, while he goes to live with his brother Joey, a chauvinistic bully, but hey, family, and with a big house to himself now his divorce is final. Erin cringes at the idea, but Gregory urges optimism. Eventually, vaccines and better treatments will let them live together again. With so many people affected, solutions will have to be found.
What else can Erin do but agree to “keep a good thought.”
Libronomicon: Erin compares the “hard facts” of her condition to bricks in Fortunato’s wall.
Weirdbuilding: I’m pretty sure that courtyard glyph is an elder sign. I’ve got one from Necronomicon somewhere in my jewelry box, along with two One Rings.
I also suspect that the architect named Castle or Stayne is another reference, but I’m missing it.
Madness Takes Its Toll: Type 3s require fresh brains to avoid “rages and violent psychotic episodes.”
Anne’s Commentary
In its acute phase, PVG rendered Erin functionally unconscious. Now, for the good of her convalescence and safety of her caretakers, she’s been cut off from news that might agitate her. Evidently, her only safe media inputs are weather reports and Bob Ross repeats. She doesn’t need to know that the Operation Warp Speed of COVID-19 days has been superseded by an Operation TransWarp Speed to deal with PVG. When Erin detects that her cell phone’s been tampered with, Nurse Tesfaye is forced to tell her about the Pandemic Security Act that Congress has rushed into existence. Tesfaye tries to soften the impact it will have on infected citizens, but Erin knows that the Act goes beyond suspending HIPAA requirements in order to facilitate infection management. It’s also a violation of the Constitution’s Fourth Amendment, which confirms the peoples’ right “to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures.” Like the seizure of PVG patients’ cell phones by Homeland Security and that agency’s insertion of a HEALTH CHECK-IN app onto said phones.
The trick to getting around the Fourth Amendment rests in how one defines “unreasonable searches and seizures.” In the face of a disease that can render “long PVG” victims not only fatigued and sickly but prone to episodes of murderous rage, is it unreasonable for the government to impose close surveillance? Plus Gregory tells Erin that since her hospitalization, he’s taken two tests to determine whether he’s PVG-positive. Given his hypochondria, he might have taken the tests voluntarily. Or maybe he was constrained to accept testing under the provisions of the Pandemic Security Act. Maybe everyone must be sorted into the infected versus the uninfected.
Given what we learn in Chapter Five, the sorting would make some sense. Type One PVG victims are those who suffered only mild symptoms—headaches and nausea cured by bedrest, no medical intervention needed. Does that mean there could be asymptomatic PVG carriers like there were asymptomatic COVID carriers, Erin asks. In which case, couldn’t Gregory have been the one who gave her the disease? Like that time he gave her genital herpes, because he wasn’t as “clean” as he thought he was.
Erin does not like Gregory calling himself “clean.” He resents the implication that he may not be “clean.” A flaw-line in their relationship cracks open, and Erin’s apology may only momentarily halt in its widening. I figured that after Gregory’s panicked self-distancing when Erin collapsed in their bathroom, he wasn’t going to stick with her even to the extent of bringing her clothes to Greenlawn, video-chatting with her once she had phone access, and championing her with her employer and landlord. Did I misjudge him? Is he just such a “gentleman, and a prince,” as Knutsdottir’s Iðunn called her Mar?
Given Gregory can’t visit Erin in person, he’s been able to continue self-distancing under the blameless excuse of quarantine. Maybe his intercessions with Erin’s bosses and landlord are partly (subconsciously?) a way to break up without seeming heartless—at least she’ll still have a job and a place to live. He’s educated himself about PVG, what’s actually known to date, not just crazy rumors. He’s hoped Erin will end up a relatively safe Type Two, kept tolerably calm and alert by ingesting blood, and not even necessarily fresh human blood, or fresh animal blood, but pasteurized animal blood, no doubt available in neat, shelf-stable packaging, as innocuous as tomato juice.
A highly contagious Type Three housemate and fiancée? Hungry for brains, with Gregory’s not excluded should the rage take her? Even if their cohabitation were allowed, would he chance it? Would any rational person? Gregory tells Erin it will be better for him to live with his jerk of a brother. At least Joey’s “the devil [Gregory] knows.”
Whereas Erin may be a “devil” he doesn’t know. Neither do the doctors, scientists, and government officials. Gregory can say that because so many people are affected by PVG, the authorities will have to come up with solutions, drugs, treatments, vaccines. It’s the “Failure is not an option” fallacy. The “if we just want it enough and think positive” bromide.
“Sure,” Erin says. They can keep good thoughts all day long for free. What is and will be costing them are the emerging hard truths. If Gregory’s done as much research into PVG as he claims, he can’t have avoided those truths. Erin’s having them shoved on her: the slip-sliding of civil rights into civil privileges, the fact that her virus load is not subsiding but busily messing up her DNA to the point where she must give up the thought of children, hide from the sunlight, face early dementia, possibly become a “total cancer farm” by age thirty-five.
Luckily (?) she may be increasingly open to mysteries outside herself, like how the weird pattern tiled into the courtyard pavement can send her into exhilarating dreams (?) of other realities (??) where she flies on raptor (hawk? falcon?? veloci-???) wings over rich feeding grounds?
Beware of architects so famous no client dared argue with them about their eccentric pavement designs, and I mean that both literally and metaphorically.
Ruthanna’s Commentary
It’s so much easier to write an exciting book in which people overreact to a pandemic, isn’t it? In which the government uses your chronic brain-eating condition as an excuse to remove your civil rights? I just want to mention, up front, that this sort of thing makes me flinch reflexively in a world where (1) claims about this sort of thing are used to discourage or withhold real treatments, at the same time that (2) the government is happy to remove your civil rights with much stupider excuses. But fiction needs to be believable.
And but so anyway. Homeland Security has gotten in on the pandemic, which is actually reasonable because one of the useful things they (used to) do is counter biological threats. Given that this threat is maybe an extradimensional attack, they should absolutely be out there scanning for chemical weapons and spatiotemporal rifts. Getting on patients’ phones still seems like overreach. Do they think that there’s a correlation between patient type and social media history? (Is there?) Or that Patient Zero conveniently posted Off to summon Cthulhu on WhatsApp? If they find the King in Yellow on someone’s e-reader, we’re going to have even more problems very quickly.
To me, it seems more likely that advertisers used the preexisting corporate phone-spying algorithms a bit too cleverly. But you do your flavor of paranoia, I’ll do mine.
Speaking of the corporate side of paranoia, pandemic capitalism is alive and well amid the zombie-and-vampire apocalypse. We’ll get you the cheapest and least squicky kind of blood, but don’t worry, it “still works well enough to keep you calm and alert enough to work an average white-collar job.” If you’re contagious and prone to brain-fueled rages, we’ll give your co-workers tasers, but don’t expect to work from home. Gotta keep productivity up, after all! And consumer confidence too, no doubt.
There’s a deep, apocalyptic bitterness here. It’s a world that cares more about your economic contributions than your survival, let along your happiness or human dignity. It’s the sort of world that just might make dreams of god-kings and delicious corpse-piles more appealing, even without the help of an ongoing eldritch metamorphosis.
At a smaller scale, I’m trying to decide how I feel about Greg. He obviously really does care, and he’s thoughtful—romantic dinners, blackout curtains, their shared apartment, whatever she needs. His love language is definitely acts of service. And he’s so far sticking with Erin even as her illness means their kid and dog plans are shot, even as they have to stay long-distance while she grows increasingly contagious. But he also shies away from communicating messy truths in a way that causes problems, and is likely to cause more. That starts before page 1 with his STD, and continues here with his “burying the lede” on the deaths of Erin’s father and sister. It’s honestly a common sort of flaw, but in the middle of an extremely messy situation it may end up being a deal-killer. Or a someone-else-killer.
Next week, join us for Michal Ajvaz’s “The End of the Garden” and komodo dragons in translation. You can find it in The Weird.
