keep centered

I don't seek out horror stories. As a result, when I encounter a piece of media that has a lot of horror in its DNA, my reactions can be a bit off-kilter. The normal failure mode here would be to get too creeped out. But sometimes, trained by happier adventure stories, I go the other way and am not scared enough.

I was off-balance in one direction or the other throughout much of A.D. Sui's novel The Iron Garden Sutra. There's a scene early on where the protagonist Iris, a monk who has dedicated himself to caring for the dead, falls asleep in a mossy clearing beside a pile of skeletons. Iris is comforted by the hard ground and the quiet dead. I, a person who likes moss, loves camping trips, and routinely picnics in graveyards, found it genuinely cozy. I slowly worked out that this was the wrong approach to take.

Iron Garden Sutra is a haunted house book--but the house is an overgrown generation ship, and all of its passengers are long dead. The book contains a gruff but good-hearted engineer, a biologist who's fascinated by tree signaling, and the delights of apples from long-abandoned orchards, all of which are rightfully compelling. But because this is a haunted house book, if Iris is venturing out of his self-imposed isolation to connect with someone or something, there's a good chance that someone's about to get killed.

The element of the book I found personally most stressful wasn't death or dying, but rather Iris's approach to fasting. This is part of his monastic practice, but it's inflected through his childhood trauma in ways that are eating-disorder-adjacent; if that's a topic that's difficult for you, you may want to tread carefully here.

Because I missed or wilfully ignored much of Iron Garden Sutra's classic horror foreshadowing, yet was reading through my metaphorical fingertips in some of the quieter passages, my sense of the book doesn't entirely cohere: I can tell you about the structure from an intellectual standpoint, but my own experience was one of fragments. I liked many of the fragments very much! I enjoyed the authorial stance that one of the scariest things you can do is hand a firearm to an untrained person, and I thought the eventual romance was sweet.

This isn't the sort of horror story where everybody dies; indeed, despite my struggles with haunted-house structure, I'd say science fiction genre demands win out. The gore and the preoccupation with whether it's possible to communicate with the inhuman (or even with other humans) are both at Adrian Tchaikovsky levels, if that helps with your own calibration.

(I read this book via a Netgalley ARC; in the US, it comes out in February. A.D. Sui and I are friendly via Neon Hemlock.)