Review: A Season of Monstrous Conceptions by Lina Rather
Blurb:
In 17th-century London, unnatural babies are being born, with eyes made for the dark and webbed digits suited to the sea.
Sarah Davis is intimately familiar with such strangeness—having hidden her uncanny nature all her life and fled to London under suspicious circumstances, Sarah starts over as a midwife’s apprentice to a member of the illegal Worshipful Company of Midwives, hoping to carve out for herself an independent life. But with each new unnatural birth, the fear in London grows of the Devil's work.
When the wealthy Lady Wren hires her to see her through her pregnancy, Sarah quickly becomes a favorite of her husband, the famous architect Lord Christopher Wren, whose interest in the uncanny borders on obsession. Sarah soon finds herself caught in a web of magic and intrigue created by those who want to use her power for themselves, and whose pursuits threaten to unmake the earth itself.
Review:
A Season of Monstrous Conceptions has been on my radar since it first popped up on Tor’s Instagram over a year ago. As often happens with novellas in speculative fiction, despite being published by a major SFF publisher, it really didn’t get the initial hype and reception it deserved. At only 150 pages, readers might wonder if the price of such a short hardcover book is worth it, but what they don’t realize is that Lina Rather is a veteran of short fiction, with her debut novella about space nuns living inside a giant slug (Sisters of the Vast Black) published by Tor.Com Publishing in 2019, and other stories appearing in digital and physical collections alongside fantasy giants like C.L. Clark and Seanan McGuire. As a fan of weird fiction, body horror, and queer, feminist fantasy, this latest release was right up my alley.
Rather’s writing is punchy and visceral, and the opening sequence left me very uncomfortable in all the best ways. This book may be shelved as fantasy, and features an assortment of typical fantasy elements, but I would be doing a disservice if I left out the phenomenally grotesque midwifery sequences, eldritch babies, and scientifically-accurate gore. While the creepiness and sense of dread does lessen in the second half, once more information is revealed and the general direction of the plot turns in a new direction, the combination of atmosphere and Rather’s prose is extremely engaging. I was reminded of works like The Salt Grows Heavy by Cassandra Khaw, and The Death of Jane Lawrence by Caitlin Starling.
I do find myself wishing this book had been a little longer. The characters and plot beats are well fleshed out (which can be difficult to achieve in a novella), but I did feel that certain character relationships were rushed in ways that did not earn the resolution they got. I also found the time and place difficult to pin down. A Season of Monstrous Conceptions is set in London in the late 1600s, and while I’m absolutely not an expert on that era, it read much more late-1800s to early 1900s given the historical descriptions and topics of science and women’s rights that were covered.
All that said, I was very happy with my experience reading this book. The cover quote by Meg Elison sums up my take-away perfectly: “A blood sacrifice of a novel.” The opening mysteries, themes of life, death, and humanity, and the epic, emotionally-charged climax all string together into a fantastic fantasy-horror that should not be missed by fans of Jeff VanderMeer, C.J. Cooke, and Lovecraft himself.
