Fantasy/Horror Novella Review: Yellow Jessamine by Caitlin Starling

Yellow Jessamine by Caitlin Starling:

Yellow Jessamine is a new horror novella by author Caitlin Starling, who I was previously familiar with from her excellent SF/Horror novel "The Luminous Dead".  Like that novel, this is very much a queer horror novel with much of the horror coming from an atmospheric horror, as it's not quite clear how much that's happening is real.

But whereas The Luminous Dead was quite clearly in the genre of SF horror, Yellow Jessamine is more in the form of not just fantasy, but honestly is just outright weird (I don't think of it as part of the "Weird" SF/F genre but I don't know a better word to describe it).  The story spends its entire runtime in the head of its protagonist, who the horror spends its entire time taking apart mentally....and I'm honestly not quite sure if it works?  I think it does, and it's at the very least quite interesting, but well....more after the jump:

Note: I listed to this in audiobook format, and I'm honestly ambivalent about whether I'd recommend that format or not - the reader is very slow and deliberate and at times, given the slow pace of the story, that felt kind of annoying, but by the end, it really added to the atmospheric horror of it all.  I'd probably not recommend it but it's a tough call.

Quick Plot Summary:  Evelyn Perdanu, the owner of a rich shipping company that she inherited when her father and brothers all mysteriously died within a few weeks, is a bit of a curiosity in the city of Delphinium, living in mostly isolation and always remaining veiled in black in public.  Of course, privately, to a precious few, she is known for peddling cures and poisons that she grows in her garden, to help the girls/women who seek her out and merit her trust.

But Delphinium is dying, victim of a coup d'etat against the Empress and a blockade slowly starving the city, and Evelyn knows her power will fade with it.  But what she could not have imagined was the strange disease that comes to Delphinium onboard one of her own ships, a disease that seems to have a mind of its own, a mind that is seeking out Evelyn, and threatens to unravel everything.......

Thoughts:  Yellow Jessamine is a novella centered wholly around Evelyn, a woman of contradictions.  On one hand, she's a woman whose actions - revealed through flashbacks - led her as a child to take over her family and become one of the most powerful women in the city, a woman who uses other people's expectations of her against them, and carefully plays upon them all as she uses her greater understanding of the world situation to survive and thrive.  On the other hand, she's a woman wracked with guilt about what she considers her greatest sin; a woman who is incredibly afraid of losing power as everything falls apart around her; a woman who is desperately alone, unable to admit to herself that she cares about another person (and she does care about a specific person, as becomes quite clear early on in the story).  Due to when the story takes place, we see far more of that second Evelyn than the first, as the horror that comes and preys upon her weaknesses, and the City is so far dying that the strong Evelyn is mostly in the past.  It requires the reader then to have a bit of faith that the strong Evelyn exists for the story to work....but it does just enough to pull that off.

And well the horror is truly existentially scary as it plays upon Evelyn's weakness and fears - a disease that takes over its victims and seems to spread to those Evelyn knows....and then begins to not only leave them all breathing corpses, but to actually inhabit their bodies as it stretches for Evelyn and forces her to confront once again her past.  It all leads to an ending that that is not some triumphant victory for the protagonist, but one that manages to work through her own self realization of her own guilt and loves, and yet also ends in an ambivalent tone.  Like I said above the jump, it's a bit weird, a horror that essentially distills its protagonist down to her very essence, and I suspect that readers may have very polarized opinions of whether they like or not as a result.