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Helpmeet by Naben Ruthnum
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Helpmeet (original 2022; edition 2022)

by Naben Ruthnum (Author)

MembersReviewsPopularityAverage ratingMentions
855314,757 (3.79)3
Fiction. Horror. HTML:

It's 1900, and Louise Wilk is taking her dying husband from Manhattan to the upstate orchard estate where he grew up. Dr. Edward Wilk is wasting away from a mysterious affliction acquired in a strange encounter: but Louise soon realizes that her husband's worsening condition may not be a disease at all, but a transformative phase of existence that will draw her in as much more than a witness.

"Through hauntingly concise prose, Helpmeet both acutely disturbs and captivates. This outstanding novella is a morbidly engrossing exploration of moral and physical decay and the shifting boundaries of love and devotion. The tight, incisive narrative is a chilling dive into mysterious forces that transcend the basic binary of good and evil, and the inherent depravity that humans themselves can't comprehend until it's too late."
—Waubgeshig Rice, Author of Moon of the Crusted Snow

"Naben Ruthnum's Helpmeet is a remarkable throwback. The style, the precise prose, the lush imagery, the dreadful sense of wheels turning just past the reader's sightline—I devoured it in a few delighted hours and it took me back to my teenage years, to afternoons squirreled away in the corner of my local library reading Clark Ashton Smith, Robert Chambers, Algernon Blackwood and the other great elder wordsmiths I cut my horror teeth on."
—Craig Davidson, Author of The Saturday Night Ghost Club

"At the bitter end of the 19th century, a loyal wife cares tenderly for her dissolute husband as he nears his death from a mysterious, gruesomely corrosive disease. Helpmeet by Naben Ruthnum is a sumptuous excursion into surreal body horror and an unsparing exploration of the extreme frontiers of connubial devotion. Ruthnum delivers a uniquely unsettling Gothic love story—and it is first and foremost a love story—evoking the grisly Edwardian tales of W.W. Jacobs, William Hope Hodgson and Algernon Blackwood, while drawing in such modern masters as Barker, Del Toro and Cronenberg. Brief enough to be read in an evening, it holds certain images so grotesque that they will linger in your dreams for weeks."
—David Demchuk, Award-winning author of The Bone Mother, and RED X

"An everyday tragedy spirals into a medical mystery and then into something much darker and more disquieting, executed in prose that glitters like candlelight on an open wound. I loved this intensely claustrophobic study of a complicated marriage twisting itself into something monstrous."
—Premee Mohamed, Author of the Beneath the Rising Trilogy

"In a wholly unique spot between the New York society novels of Henry James and Edith Wharton and the best body horror of David Cronenberg lurks the strange, disturbing and ultimately transcendent novella Helpmeet. Naben Ruthnum's pitch-perfect pastiche is as all-consuming as the disease at its heart, a fever dream of a story as original, elegantly written and chilling as anything I've read in recent memory."
—Pasha Malla, Author of Fugue States, and Kill the Mall

"Naben Ruthnum's succinctly brilliant Helpmeet finds the thin line between intimacy and body horror, and blurs it to create a unique love story that is as moving as it is disturbing."
—Indrapramit Das, Author of The Devourers

.
… (more)
Member:ShelfMonkey
Title:Helpmeet
Authors:Naben Ruthnum (Author)
Info:Undertow Publications (2022), 94 pages
Collections:Your library, Signed Copies, CanLit, Horror, Mindfuck
Rating:*****
Tags:body horror, disease, infection

Work Information

Helpmeet by Naben Ruthnum (2022)

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» See also 3 mentions

Showing 4 of 4
At the turn of the 20th century, Louise Wilks is caring for her husband, Dr. Edward Wilks, who is ailing from a mysterious wasting disease. And I do mean wasting, as his body is gruesomely melting and falling away. Not always a faithful husband, it is assumed that he has contracted a syphillis-like disease, but that couldn't be further from the truth.

There's a lot of atmosphere in this slim volume, all very Gothic and dripping in body horror. I'm not going to pretend to understand everything that takes place here, and that's ok. Really takes the idea of a marriage and the term, "till death do us part", to a whole new level. ( )
  tapestry100 | Jan 16, 2024 |
What a strange little gothic body horror love story. It travels along innocently enough as a women helping her husband die of a strange illness where the body flakes away. Then it takes a bit more sinister and alien turn which is a delightful situation. Nice little novella for a rainy afternoon! ( )
  noblechicken | Jan 12, 2024 |
Never before have I been struck by a story's beating heart -- both its gruesome, decaying meat and the bloody romance within. But Ruthnum manages to craft a compelling, gothic, and oddly sweet story with Helpmeet.

A wonderfully disturbing surprise. ( )
1 vote keithlaf | Mar 2, 2023 |
Harking back to Poe in type of subject matter, although with some modern touches, a Gothic novella in which a wife, caring for her husband wasting away physically and gruesomely from a mysterious disease, becomes one with him. Surreal. ( )
  janerawoof | Jul 17, 2022 |
Showing 4 of 4
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Epigraph
Does not all blood within me / Leap to meet thee, leap to meet thee / As the springs meet the sunshine / in the Moon when nights are brightest? -Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Dedication
For Ian Worang, my friend
First words
When their knock summoned a hired caretaker, and when this caretaker told them he did not know if the Wilks would return, they would say Louise Wilk had removed her husband.
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(Click to show. Warning: May contain spoilers.)
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Fiction. Horror. HTML:

It's 1900, and Louise Wilk is taking her dying husband from Manhattan to the upstate orchard estate where he grew up. Dr. Edward Wilk is wasting away from a mysterious affliction acquired in a strange encounter: but Louise soon realizes that her husband's worsening condition may not be a disease at all, but a transformative phase of existence that will draw her in as much more than a witness.

"Through hauntingly concise prose, Helpmeet both acutely disturbs and captivates. This outstanding novella is a morbidly engrossing exploration of moral and physical decay and the shifting boundaries of love and devotion. The tight, incisive narrative is a chilling dive into mysterious forces that transcend the basic binary of good and evil, and the inherent depravity that humans themselves can't comprehend until it's too late."
—Waubgeshig Rice, Author of Moon of the Crusted Snow

"Naben Ruthnum's Helpmeet is a remarkable throwback. The style, the precise prose, the lush imagery, the dreadful sense of wheels turning just past the reader's sightline—I devoured it in a few delighted hours and it took me back to my teenage years, to afternoons squirreled away in the corner of my local library reading Clark Ashton Smith, Robert Chambers, Algernon Blackwood and the other great elder wordsmiths I cut my horror teeth on."
—Craig Davidson, Author of The Saturday Night Ghost Club

"At the bitter end of the 19th century, a loyal wife cares tenderly for her dissolute husband as he nears his death from a mysterious, gruesomely corrosive disease. Helpmeet by Naben Ruthnum is a sumptuous excursion into surreal body horror and an unsparing exploration of the extreme frontiers of connubial devotion. Ruthnum delivers a uniquely unsettling Gothic love story—and it is first and foremost a love story—evoking the grisly Edwardian tales of W.W. Jacobs, William Hope Hodgson and Algernon Blackwood, while drawing in such modern masters as Barker, Del Toro and Cronenberg. Brief enough to be read in an evening, it holds certain images so grotesque that they will linger in your dreams for weeks."
—David Demchuk, Award-winning author of The Bone Mother, and RED X

"An everyday tragedy spirals into a medical mystery and then into something much darker and more disquieting, executed in prose that glitters like candlelight on an open wound. I loved this intensely claustrophobic study of a complicated marriage twisting itself into something monstrous."
—Premee Mohamed, Author of the Beneath the Rising Trilogy

"In a wholly unique spot between the New York society novels of Henry James and Edith Wharton and the best body horror of David Cronenberg lurks the strange, disturbing and ultimately transcendent novella Helpmeet. Naben Ruthnum's pitch-perfect pastiche is as all-consuming as the disease at its heart, a fever dream of a story as original, elegantly written and chilling as anything I've read in recent memory."
—Pasha Malla, Author of Fugue States, and Kill the Mall

"Naben Ruthnum's succinctly brilliant Helpmeet finds the thin line between intimacy and body horror, and blurs it to create a unique love story that is as moving as it is disturbing."
—Indrapramit Das, Author of The Devourers

.

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