#apothecia

Y'all, turns out there's lots of imagery and themes in TLT that Muir was already playing with in her earlier fiction. A lot of it is easily available online, in which case I'll link to it. (The short stories that aren't can also be easily read if googled, to be quite honest—that's how I read The Deepwater Bride and Why the Mermaids Left Boralus). • The House That Made the Sixteen Loops of Time (2011)

5K. Short sort-of-cozy romance (?) with (you guessed it) a time travel loop. Explores a very queer potential relationship. CamPal enjoyers might find a similar sweetness.

• The Magician's Apprentice (2012, Lightspeed Magazine)

5K. This is the one that stopped me dead on my tracks. It features an older, male mentor figure called John (a “very ordinary man” with “dark eyes”) who introduces the young, female main character to magic that has a terrible cost—and to literature such as Lolita. This excellent post by @familyabolisher does an incredible job of analyzing the very deliberate intertextual links between TLT and Lolita.

• The Woman in the Hill (2015, Lightspeed Magazine, originally for Dreams From the Witch House anthology of Lovecraftian horror by women)

4K. Possibly my favorite! It's a straightforward Lovecraftian horror, centered on the image of the woman (is it human though?) trapped in an unnatural pool inside a cursed cave. Chain imagery too. It does something different from Alecto, mind, but you can see links, ways of playing with facets of a strong central image. It's fun to consider how reliable the two narrators are. Here's an analysis and afterthought from Reactor Mag.

• Chew (2013) 4K. Zombie abuse and cannibalistic revenge story ft. an uncanny woman revenant, told from the eyes of a traumatized German boy. I was strongly reminded of Harrow's conversations with the Body. Tamsyn gave an interview on the themes and her intentions. Interesting to read in light of Alecto, I think, although I don't think she's going the same route in TLT: “the idea of post-war rebuilding connecting to rebuilding the body of the zombie; a Frankenstein who once rebuilt doesn’t act as planned or desired. […] I love cannibalism […] it’s innately spiritual […] any afterlife she goes to, he’s going too.”

• Apothecia (2014, published on Tumblr and tapas.io)

Short webcomic where an alien monster tries to corrupt the ruthless human girl who holds it captive. Musings on responsibility and murder, mention of child abuse. The alien's speech patterns remind me of a Resurrection Beast. You get wonderful dialogue like “Murder is a profession. Job. Employment, you tiny leg dog. There you are, walking along. Walk walk walk. Now you are a walker. Good job. Special child. Murder is like this.” Art by Shelby Cragg.

• The Deepwater Bride (2015, Fantasy & Science Fiction Magazine)

The opening line is: “In the time of our crawling Night Lord's ascendancy, foretold by exodus of starlight into his sucking astral wounds, I turned sixteen and received Barbie's Dream Car.” Need I say more? Extremely fun. A novelette where a young queer girl from a clairvoyant family struggles with an apocalyptic event while being annoyed by another very plucky girl. Lots of descriptions with nerdy marine zoology terms. Close in tone to Gideon. In the background, someone dies EXACTLY like that one death at the end of Gideon, which makes me wonder what happened to make Tamsyn interested in this particular image. I also liked that Tamsyn is aware of Nightwish. No link, but you'll get a PDF immediately if you Google.

• Union (2015, Clarkesworld Magazine)

5.5K. Very weird, extremely Kiwi story about a town that gets sent lab-grown wives by the government, but they're not made the usual way so they're Weird and people have feelings about it. Fascinating and eerie description of non-human (in some people's eyes, sub-human) women (?) who cannot be observed to have recognizable feelings or thoughts, yet have some sort of inner life. Quite touching, very uncanny.

• Princess Floralinda and the Forty-Flight Tower (2020)

Short novel (~200 pages). Very funny. I was reminded of Coronabeth because the whole plot is “princess finds herself branching out into decidedly non-princess-like activities”, but other than that—this is a fairytale for adults about people who make eachother worse. No particular links to TLT but a very fun read with some gut punches. Extremely Tamsyn through and through, what with the dubious morality and all.

• Why the Mermaids Left Boralus (2021, in Folk & Fairy Tales of Azeroth by Blizzard Entertainment)

Set in the World of Warcraft universe. Haven't read this one yet, will report back lmao. As with The Deepwater Bride, no link but I easily found a PDF of the entire compilation. It's illustrated!

• Undercover (2022, from Into Shadow, Amazon Original Collection)

Frosty saucer 》 Ochrolechia africana

One of the most beautiful lichens I've found recently. I love the texture the apothecia create when they cluster together like this. What I wouldn't give to be small enough to wander this structure like a field.

The one in the fourth image is possibly a different species.

so i read the webcomic she did with shelby cragg, Apothecia.

god damn

god fucking damn. i was worried that the glimpses that i had seen in the locked tomb trilogy were just me reading stuff into it or were merely an artifact of the specific story she had decided to tackle but no. there is a theme. there is a common ethos to all her works, which if i had to try and capture it would be something akin to "humans are complicated, our emotions are complicated and for all that we talk about Love with a capital L as this all powerful emotion that grants purpose and meaning and worth to life, love is just but one tiny shard of the much bigger, much more complicated, much more twisted and ugly and weird and uncomfortable spectrum of human emotion"

it makes me think of that one lovecraft story, the other gods, about a priest who climbs a mountain to found there the Gods of earth but then he also finds there the other gods, "the gods of the outer hells that guard the feeble gods of earth"

and is like when writers explore the depths of the human heart and soul they are content with finding the feeble gods of love and hate and such but tamsyn fathoms deeper for those eldritch emotions we cant put words to.

she explores those emotions i only felt when i was 5 and in the bathtub and my parents were arguing in the other room, the feeling i had when i decided not to put my stuffed toy with me for the night because i always did and i wanted to see what it was like to draw on its own and then i started crying because it felt like my toy was abandoned, she comunicates that emotion i felt when walking alone in the hallways of my college during a weekend and i realize i was completly alone in the building and for reasons i still cannot understand i had to crawl beneath a table and just lay there on the ground, that feeling i had at 3am in front of my computer browsing incomprehensible websites from 1996 that seemed like they had risen spontanously from the ether of the internet because i couldnt understand who or why would bothe making this, she....

words fail me.