Full Disclosure: This book was read as an e-ARC (Advance Reader Copy) obtained via Netgalley from the publisher in advance of the book's release on September 12, 2023 in exchange for a potential review. I give my word that this did not affect my review in any way - if I felt conflicted in any way, I would simply have declined to review the book.
The Death I Gave Him is a Science Fiction adaptation/retelling of Hamlet, with a bit of a Queer twist. It's not a long novel and it's also one that is, while updating the setting and details, kind of faithful in many ways to the original play: certain acts Hayden (our version of Hamlet) does and certain tricks he tries to pull as he seeks to discover the truth behind his father's death and to get revenge come kind of right out of the play. At the same time, the novel combines certain characters and its change of setting - from historical revenge drama to a drama over future biotechnology that could lead to breakthroughs in both healing and perhaps in reversing death itself - work really really well, especially as told from several points of view through pseudo archival materials.
And the result is pretty damn interesting honestly, even as its most prominent character Hayden is probably the least changed in tone. But the story's atmosphere and writing is excellent and its secondary POV characters Felicia (this book's version of Ophelia, who has bits of Ophelia's brother Laertes mixed in) and Horatio (who keeps his name from the play but is now an AI who gets hooked into Hayden's being) are fascinating in their actions, emotions, and changes. All in all, an adaptation well worthy of your time.
Plot Summary:
Hayden Lichfield enters his father's lab one day to find a shocking sight: his father murdered and the camera logs erased. Hayden believes there's only one likely reason for his father's murder: Hayden and his father's research on the Sisyphus Formula, which can regenerate human flesh so well it might even be able to reverse death itself. And so he steals the research, hooks up the lab's Artificial Intelligence Horatio (the only person Hayden trusts) to his very body, such that his thoughts and feelings can be shared between them, and begins a plan to unravel who could've killed his father.
But it soon becomes apparent that the only possible killers are those still locked in the lab with them: his Uncle Charles, lab tech Gabriel, research intern Felicia (Hayden's ex), and Felicia's father Paul (the lab's security chief)...and evidence suggests his Uncle was responsible. And so Hayden embarks on a desperate plan to prove his uncle's complicity and to revenge his father...a plan that could easily go awry, and could kill and destroy what little Hayden still cares about in life....
The Death I Gave Him is told as if it is a research project from a researcher in the far future, who has cobbled together the story from various sources. The result of this is that the story is told from multiple perspectives as if it is made up of different texts (with a few segments the fictional narrator claims he or she made up), so you have Hayden and Horatio's segments based off of the records of their shared link and Hayden's eventual testimony at trial, and you have Felicia's large segments coming in part from an interview she gave after the fact and in part from a book she wrote about the events of the story. This presentation sort of keeps the work kind of in the frame you see it read today by people from our time reading an ancient play - one step removed and needing context from footnotes to understand some of what's going on and the language used.
And this works in allowing Liu to tell a really excellently written story with some excellent characters, even as she doesn't change much other than the context from some of the events of the play. First and foremost is Hayden, who is kind of the least interesting - like his inspiration Hamlet, he's an utter mess, spiraling into more and more bad decisions and finding little left to live for by the end other than his revenge...or so he thinks. But this Hayden is a lab researcher who was trying to prove himself so desperately with the formula and who was so grateful to his dad for the chance that he has basically left himself with little else to his core, so the killing of his dad throwing him off feels very natural in how it throws him so dangerously off balance.
More prominently interesting are Felicia and Horatio. Felicia's inspiration in the play (Ophelia) is generally considered a character without much agency - she loves Hamlet, sees the result of his machinations result in the death of her father, and then goes mad and dies. Here, Felicia may have once loved Hayden, and certainly still cares for him, but she broke it off with him when he was too devoted to his work to find anything else and she got into the lab because she wanted to prove her OWN self. And so, even as Felicia sees similar tragedies befall her as her inspiration, she responds in a much more active way to try to take matters into her own hands and to make sure she comes out as okay as feasibly possible. Hayden may be a mess she wants to help with, but she will not let him - or his uncle - take her out with him. Horatio meanwhile may be an AI, but Liu writes the AI as someone who has admired Hayden from afar, and now connected to his nerves essentially falls in love with Hayden (and vice versa) in a kind of queer human/AI relationship (complete with a simulacrum of sex). It's a fascinating relationship that gives both characters more to them as it gives them both something to lose they didn't in the original play.
And so, even as The Death I Gave Him keeps some of the plot beats from Hamlet, recontextualized to its sci-fi setting, it manages to breath new life into the characters and combine it with excellent prose. And so it results in a new work well worth reading.
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