And What Can We Offer You Tonight

The brothel at the end of the world. In an endless city the beautiful resourceless are saved from culling to be courtesans, trapped in interminable debt to their owners and at the mercy of the clients, deadly in itself. One returns from death seeking revenge and the narrator's ambivalent connection to the returnee and to her own life is a tale not of a heart of gold, but of a heart, as stained and tattered as her world, but still beating. It is a bit softer really than it should be, this conclusion a bit less pitted than the body of the story.

Rating: 5* of five

The Publisher Says: Winner of the 2022 Nebula Award and World Fantasy Award for Best Novella.

In a far future city, where you can fall to a government cull for a single mistake, And What Can We Offer You Tonight tells the story of Jewel, established courtesan in a luxurious House. Jewel’s world is shaken when her friend is murdered by a client, but somehow comes back to life. To get revenge, they will both have to confront the limits of loyalty, guilt, and justice.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: Self-esteem, self-love, class solidarity, friendship, Love...big, big themes to tackle in under a hundred pages. Yet as one expects from Premee Mohamed, tackled they are, and indeed show more pinned to the mat of argument.

There are those who say they have no patience for future-set stories, yet who will gobble the stories that center amateur sleuths who are not arrested and abused by police and courts who do not approve of this behavior...inconsistent much? Each is unbelievable in its own way, and this story’s amateur sleuths have some *very* powerful motives for their far higher stakes poking around. I know others whose taste in storytelling excludes tales that begin in medias res. That being a taste that can not be argued with, I warn those folk that this is not one for them.

The authorial voice here, Jewel’s stream of consciouness and self-aware of its floridity, would wear on my nerve if it lasted more than the eightyish pages that it does. In this size of a dose, it counterpoints the horrifying, bleak dystopia that these young people are...existing is a better fit than living...within. The brothel where they work is a reputable one, yet a client murders one of them and no one in power cares, or pursues justice.

Sound familiar, y’all?

Unlike boring old twenty-first century reality, though, the murdered party returns for revenge, not as a zombie or vampire but simply undead. Go with it. As the co-sex-worker Winfield sets about getting the revenge that I myownself feel is richly deserved, the story meditates on the larger, darker themes of living in a hypercapitalist hellscape. The ending is, as expected, satisfying. The truths Author Mohamed tells us in the course of this bleak vision of a future where money = justice, where might = rights, where even the meagerest of existences is contingent on selling one’s own body for the gratification of others, are readily applicable to the world around us.

That horrifying truth is how this very short, sharp shock to the reader’s system won the very high-powered awards that it did. Very highly recommended. show less

Wow, there is a lot going on here. This book is thick with atmosphere, gradually filling us in on a dystopia with extreme disparities between rich and poor and what that means for our protagonist and her friends. There's tech involved in some important ways, but also a desperate mysticism among the courtesans of the House. And the evolving situation with Win, and the sickening abuses of power, but then the ending where so much changes and so much stays the same -- I love it!

In a drowned future where individuals have no value except as workers at the mercy of their employer, the courtesans of the House survive on little rebellions: friendship, grief, honouring the dead with gifts rendered useless by the act of giving. In their tightly-controlled world, the House controls everything except their love for one another.

Winfield’s murder is surprising only because she was the House’s best: the one who commanded the highest prices, the one who earned generous tips. It’s not enough for the House to seek justice from a wealthy patron shielded by privilege.

Premee Mohamed’s jagged little novella explores what happens when the overlooked and undervalued get a chance to push back against those who exploit show more them. The brutal challenge for Jewel is whether to believe that they can resist. I had a great deal of sympathy for her even when she made terrible choices, appreciating her perspective all the more for being unusual in a genre that typically prefers active protagonists tearing down the status quo over passive protagonists caught in its iron grip. But how do you decide what’s best when all your choices have been taken away?

I also appreciated this novella as a fuck you to all the cyberpunk novels and grim futures that casually sacrifice sex workers to show how dark and gritty their worlds are. Here, the focus is unwaveringly on the victims rather than the murderer (who is untouchably bland; not some monster, just another rich asshat) – humanising, demonising and redeeming them by turns.

Full review show less

🔮 Future dystopian capitalist hellscape
💸 High end brothel
🧟‍♀️ One of the girls doesn't stay dead
🪽 she transforms herself into an avenging angel
🔥 White hot core of rage
🌿 Lush sentences

I have been intimidated by Premee Mohamed for too long.

I mean, she sounds great, as a person, and I have followed her online for years, but she mostly writes horror and I struggle with horror a lot of the time, so I had her in the "great, but not for me" category. But I saw this at the library again, and it seemed horror-adjacent, at most, so I decided I could always just bail if it didn't work for me.

IT REALLY, REALLY WORKED FOR ME. I love a book that is on fire for justice, but also one that acknowledges that what justice looks show more like is sometimes tricky to see/agree upon, and this book does BOTH. Also another one that I really enjoyed just at the sentence level as well, there was a lushness to the writing that felt really immersive and pulled me along.

Also excellent FUCK CAPITALISM vibes. show less

And What Can We Offer You Tonight is a gorgeously devastating little book. Mohamed’s lush, expressive prose creates a tangible world for readers to sink inside and builds the complex and intricate story into something unforgettable.

This book’s great glory is its attention to language. Mohamed’s descriptions are intoxicating: “a grand jagged ruin bleeding rust into the slowlapping sea”; “the sky is blueblack as a bruise and the water is the same and between them, very often, is a single knife-thin slice of gold sun”; “the music, from floating speakerlights, comes down ghostly and slow, like snow rather than sound”. In other hands, the tumbles of descriptions might trip over themselves, but here they soar, lifting the show more story out of the simmering dark cauldrons of rage that underpin its events and transforming it into something luminous and transcendent.

One minor criticism is that, every so often, the lovely, flowing sentence and paragraph structure rushes into a tangle and becomes difficult to follow. It does not happen often, and, with careful reading, is easy enough to untangle—but it did, in a few places, jar me out of the story. My only other quibble is that it’s never made clear how, or why, every character appears to simply understand and accept a central plot point that does not strike me as the obvious assumption for them to make about what is happening. However, neither of these points ultimately detracts terribly much from an otherwise spectacular story--if anything, they only serve to highlight how a story that has its little flaws can still be magnificent.

Overall, I found this book engrossing, enchanting, heartrending, and entirely worth several reads. One of the best things a novella can do is to somehow leave its reader at once satisfied by a fully-realized story and yet still longing for more. This book amply satisfies that potential; I am glad to see that Mohamed has several other books currently in print and more forthcoming.

I received a digital advance copy of this book from Neon Hemlock Press via NetGalley, in exchange for an honest review. I also ended up purchasing a paperback copy for my novella collection, which I think says as much as anything else about how much I liked it. show less

A book that leaves you with a sense of having visited a different world, a haunting memory, and a longing to return is certainly one in which I can say the author accomplished their goal of telling a damn good story. And this book by Premee Mohamad does that. With lyrical, flourishing prose it paints a picture, sometimes one as cloying as the perfumes I imagine which linger in the hall of the capital-h House. A woman who doesn't stay dead, and upon realizing the power she holds by being outside of the societal structures, it could be an allegory for the lives of those today who choose to operate outside of the bounds of our capitalist, patriarchal society. Especially since the world of this book, the world outside of the House, show more definitely could be considered our own should things be allowed to continue unchecked and the people disposed of, uncared for.

I'm not sure we cheer for any of the characters, but their journeys certainly are intriguing. Their motivations sometimes fully on display and other times elusive and chameleon-like. Revenge may be a dish best served cold, but it can also taste sweet, and sometimes as heady as a rich, whiskey.

If there's one complaint I have about this title, it's that the writing with it's reliance on over-long sentences combined with the flowery prose almost becomes too much at points. And to my editor's eye, it took a couple of chapters before I quit looking at just...how...long... the sentences were and became swept up in the story. This book won a Nebula award for best novella, and I can see why, if nothing else than for the fact that it had a very literary feel to it, more atmosphere and mood, and not so much a play-by-play of the action. Which, to be fair, in this story, I'm not sure a play-by-play would be warranted.

In the end, this is a book which kept me reading and drew me into its strange and twisty world that I'm still thinking about the morning after. So while I may still be having extensional thoughts about sentence length and grammar rules, I have to say, that if the story pulls in the reader and leaves a hunting memory, do the mechanics really matter that much? The story worked. show less