Click on a thumbnail to go to Google Books.
Loading... Helpmeet (original 2022; edition 2022)by Naben Ruthnum (Author)
Work InformationHelpmeet by Naben Ruthnum (2022)
None Loading...
Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book. No current Talk conversations about this book. no reviews | add a review
AwardsDistinctionsNotable Lists
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." "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." "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." "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." "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." "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." No library descriptions found. |
Current DiscussionsNone
Google Books — Loading... GenresMelvil Decimal System (DDC)813.6Literature English (North America) American fiction 21st CenturyLC ClassificationRatingAverage:
Is this you?Become a LibraryThing Author. |
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. ( )