Welcome back to Reading the Weird, in which we get girl cooties all over weird fiction, cosmic horror, and Lovecraftiana—from its historical roots through its most recent branches. This week, we cover Chapters 6-8 of Lucy Snyder’s Sister, Maiden, Monster. The book was first published in 2023. Spoilers ahead!
At their monthly meeting, Dr. Shapiro asks if Erin’s gotten her IUD yet. Erin asks whether she can put that procedure off while she and Gregory are living apart. Shapiro agrees.
Flashback to Erin’s discharge day from Greenlawn: A Homeland Security counselor named Candy Kleypas arrives in full PPE to lay out Erin’s new realities. Type Threes are a danger because they remain contagious and some have committed acts of violence. She gives Erin a folder of regulations, then summarizes them. Erin carries the PVG virus in all her bodily fluids and must drastically limit her contact with other people. If she counts more than ten people in an area, she mustn’t go there. Gyms, playgrounds, day care centers, schools are off-limits.
She must stay in daily contact with her care team through the Health Check-In app, and her phone must always remain on network. No sex with new partners. Pre-existing partners must agree to testing and quarantine. And she may not have any physical contact with other Type Twos or Threes due to possible cross-contamination with mutated PVG viruses. Her employers will follow guidelines to safeguard co-workers. In public, she must wear a mask. If she’s noncompliant, she could end up in a supermax prison. Oh, and churches are unfortunately off-limits, though “y’all need Jesus.”
Erin wishes she could have faith that Jesus—or some other god—existed to endlessly love and forgive and welcome her into an afterlife of communion with others who “served a unique, divine purpose.” Critical thinking keeps Erin skeptical, but she envies true believers “really, really hard.” Especially now.
Finally, Erin needs to get an IUD. Pregnancy could cause dire complications, including embryos turning into cancers. But Erin remembers a college classmate’s traumatic IUD implantation, and the surgeon’s callousness. She’s afraid to mouth off to Kleypas, but can’t resist asking if male PVGs have to get vasectomies.
Whatever for, is Kleypas’s response.
* * *
Dr. Shapiro asks if Erin has made any new friends. Other Twos and Threes, Erin says, but of course she only meets them online.
Flashback to Erin’s discharge. Gregory was supposed to drive her to her apartment. He cries off due to last-minute work emergencies, but he arranges a “DocRyde” for her. She cries, feeling “utterly abandoned, discarded,” but really, Gregory’s doing his best.
The DocRyde driver is a young woman with long chestnut hair and a side-shave. Erin recognizes her as the woman from her recurring dream—the one who rescues her from a tar pit, and urges her into a fall during which she grows raptor wings. It’d be crazy to tell driver Betty, who even through the Plexiglas barrier separating their seats smells “delicious.” Betty confides that she’s a Type Two—she’s gotten this job to ferry other PVGs around. She startles Erin by asking if they’ve met before. No, Erin answers.
Home at last, minus Gregory, Erin turns off the news when the first story is about a neo-Nazi group blowing up PVG vaccine production sites. Gregory calls. He apologizes for not picking her up, then shows her pictures of the manor that solar power magnate Mark Mayne is restoring for public use—it was built by his “great-whatevs” Charles Castaigne. Gregory met Mayne at work, and they’ve clicked. Mayne has even promised to reserve the manor for Gregory and Erin’s sometime-in-the-future wedding. Erin’s recognizes the manor from another dream, in which, raptor-transformed, she flew over it.
After Gregory signs off, she’s too wired to sleep. Near midnight, someone knocks gently on the apartment door. When Erin checks, she finds a package on the doormat. It contains a burner phone, with a message that Erin should text “B” sometime, signed with a heart emoji.
* * *
Dr. Shapiro asks if Erin’s been able to engage in “rewarding” hobbies or activities. Erin says she’s been keeping busy.
Erin carefully checks Betty’s burner-phone and decides it should be a secure way to contact the strangely alluring woman. Can Erin really be thinking of cheating on Gregory? Would that make her a monster?
She must be straightforward. During another video chat, while eating comfort-food pork brains, she suggests that during their separation they might put the relationship on an open basis. Not that she wants or legally can see someone else, but she won’t be angry if Gregory does. At first Gregory looks stunned, even offended. What if he falls in love with someone else?
Erin doesn’t want that to happen, but maybe she’ll never get well. Maybe Gregory finding another love would be fate. Most of all, she’d never want to be a barrier to his happiness. Finally he says okay to her proposal.
They sign off with “I love yous.” It’s been the best conversation Erin’s had with Gregory for weeks. And she feels “like an absolute monster.”
The Degenerate Dutch: Erin dismisses the violent criminality rate of Type 3s, thinking of the percentage of women who experience intimate partner violence. The cop being brutally honest about her “situation” thinks Jesus would help.
Speaking of violence against women, just because you can’t bring a fetus to term as anything but a tumor doesn’t make abortion legal in this state. What were you thinking?
Weirdbuilding: Last post, I couldn’t figure out “the architect named Castle or Stayne.” This week I sat bolt upright and yelled “Oh shit, Castaigne! From Repairer of Reputations!” Hildred Castaigne is presumably a relative of the architect, and of his great-whatevs ancestor Charles Castaigne. So, anyway, I guess that was the Yellow Sign in the courtyard. Can’t wait to see what he does with Castaigne Manor, and how good an idea it is for a Type 3 to get married there.
But I’m sure it’s the perfect center of power for a god-king.
Madness Takes Its Toll: Type 3s are subject to feelings of derealization—i.e., feeling like nothing is real.
Anne’s Commentary
Erin’s discharge day from Greenlawn is an emotional rollercoaster ride. Her caregivers called it D-Day for good reason; like the Allied invaders of Normandy, she’s entering a new arena of warfare. By surviving the acute phase of PVG, she’s won the first battle. But as described by Homeland Security “counselor” Candy Kleypas, the “realities” of Erin’s new life as a Type Three Post-PVG may make the victory a Pyrrhic one.
I doubt that Kleypas was ever a softie. I don’t doubt that whatever hardass tendencies she started out with have been lapidified by this strangest of human pandemics. She’s got an official Post-PVG briefing she delivers with Middle American blandness, but she often lapses into Southern-accented plain-speaking with all the bitterness of old mustard greens scraped burned from the bottom of the pan. It ain’t good what people like Erin have become, and what they could become (about 15% of ‘em) is much worse: assailants, murderers, eaters of their own babies, unashamed, on national TV! Erin wants to counter Kleypas’s statistics with the 28% of women who will suffer intimate violence or the 43% of women students who will suffer violence on campus, but she knows if she wants to get out of Greenlawn, she’d better keep her mouth shut. Can leper status be worse than the hospital?
Well, noncompliant leper status could land her in a supermax prison with the “particularly violent” PVGs, presumably including the baby eaters. Better virtual home confinement, 24/7 surveillance via cell phone, daily health check-ins and monthly doc visits, possibly ankle monitors, and IUDs for the women (but no vasectomies for the men).
That last “reality” is enough of a sticker in Erin’s craw that she gets Dr. Shapiro to agree to a temporary reprieve. Another restriction will prove even more intolerable, and that within a short DocRyde from Greenlawn to her apartment: Thou shalt not have physical contact with other Post-PVGs.
Erin has supposed that other Post-PVGs would be precisely the people she could interact freely with, and she’s skeptical about Kleypas’s vague explanation about why it’s forbidden. She’s already reconciled herself to living apart from Gregory. She can see the need to isolate herself from the uninfected, given her high level of contagiousness. After doing her own research, she may even buy there’s a possibility of mutated viruses cross-contaminating Post-PVGs to dire effect. But shouldn’t she have some people of her own?
Forget what she should have, compassionately speaking. The actual situation may be more about what she must have, what her virus demands of the body and psyche it’s remaking. Within seconds of seeing Betty, Erin identifies her with the woman in her recurring nightmare. Her impulse is to tell Betty about the dream, but who wants to sound insane and creepy, especially if they’re a Type Three PVG? Besides, her mind could be playing tricks with her memory. A few minutes into the drive, a stronger impulse sweeps Erin with tidal force: Despite the Plexiglas barrier between them, Erin can smell Betty, and not her perfume—Betty herself. And Betty smells “fucking delicious.”
Driven by her newly emerging nature, Erin simultaneously wants to make out with Betty and crack her skull open. During her food preference testing, she wanted to crack open Dr. Sallow’s skull. She’d “occasionally wanted to kill [other hospital staff] for their brains,” but she’d never been “viscerally attracted” to them like she is to Betty, who could be “an absolute, entire snack,” both sexually and gustatorily.
As it turns out, Type Two Betty feels the same for Erin, strongly enough to risk providing a burner phone on which they can chat without fear of Homeland Security monitoring. Does anyone else sense that Betty’s done this kind of thing before? That her picking up Erin might not be a coincidence?
After examining the phone and agonizing over possible Homeland Security traps, Erin’s about to surrender to Betty’s “power move.” Only then does her mind turn to Gregory. Is she seriously considering cheating on him with a stranger who’s, so far, a mere object of “lust and fantasy”?
Actually, that’s just what she’s considering, rationalizing that her bond with Gregory can survive as long as she’s honest with him, sort of. She proposes opening up their relationship as more fair to Gregory. What with them having no idea how long they’ll be apart. Gregory appears shocked, hurt, even offended by the suggestion, which might be because Erin implies that she will of course remain celibate, PVG and all that. She doubles her saintliness by saying she’ll even understand if he falls in love with someone else. It’s Gregory’s happiness she cares most about; she couldn’t stand being a barrier to that.
Erin has this talk with Gregory shortly after he’s shown her pictures of the ultimate wedding venue he’s nabbed. I’m still unsure about Gregory. Is he really that stone-committed to the marriage, or is he trying to make up for the DocRyde: Hey, I might have declined actual contact with you, but would a guy trying to dump you commit to Mark Mayne’s gothic manor and gardens?
Which gothic manor and gardens happen to be the ones Erin flew over in another dream. Besides a savage hunger for human gray matter, has PVG also inflicted (gifted?) psychic vision to its victim (chosen one?)
Ruthanna’s Commentary
In the list of answers to the central Horror question of “What should we be afraid of?”, a regular answer has always been “female anger.” As an angry teenager who didn’t like expressing my anger, I was always eager to read these as power fantasies. Stephen King might think a young woman with pyrokinesis was terrifying, but imagine being a young woman with pyrokinesis! The older I get, the more I want to read books by people who were in my position, and who understand the appeal of being terrifying.
That’s clearly where we’re going with Sister, Maiden, Monster. Erin has that first moment of pleasure at the doctor’s fear when she first tastes gray matter. But this week is rich in the backdrop for her anger, and the parts of it that long predate her transformation. The statistics on violence against women1, and the ongoing risks she faces, are plenty of cause. Even the cop comments on her continuing vulnerability to sexual violence. Then there’s her experience with a friend’s unanesthetized IUD insertion, and the doctor’s dismissal of her pain.
A man who isn’t afraid of you might be a prince like Greg, but might also be a threat. A man who is afraid of you is even more likely to be a threat—unless, perchance, he’s a meal.
Speaking of Greg, that was a bit of cowardice, wasn’t it? He can’t get away from work to drive his fiancée home from the hospital. Sure, dude. That sounds totally plausible, and I’ll bet you told them right away how important this was and begged for a couple hours off. Or maybe, just maybe, you still don’t want to deal with anything messy.
“Vanilla” Greg flinches at the initial proposal for an open relationship, and I’m also completely sure that was due to prudish shock, and not to him already being way ahead of Erin. She dismisses the idea that he might already be cheating—to be fair, she’s distracted by thoughts of the hot vampire who just gave her a burner phone. She doesn’t want to cheat, but she also doesn’t want to tell Greg that she has ulterior motives. So we’ll call this one even.
Continuing the list of things to be furious about: Beyond boyfriends who chicken out of in-person contact, we have the removal of civil rights, massive surveillance, the prison-industrial complex, being expected at work while forbidden all social activities, and anti-vax terrorism. On the other hand, there are journalists willing to call neo-Nazis neo-Nazis on air, so that’s a plus.
It’s an angry book, is what I’m saying. And even if brain-eating isn’t as cinematic as pyrokinesis, I’m here for it. I’m also here for the second half of Horror’s big question: what should you be afraid of, and what should you do about it? If your anger really is justified… there are still probably things you shouldn’t do. But there are also maybe things you should. And the people who are frightened of you… there are definitely still things they shouldn’t do, and Erin’s government is doing several of them. The situation raises so many questions. Crunchy, delicious questions—much like the bones around a lovely fresh cranium.
Next week, we go horse-crazy with Poe’s “Metzengerstein.”
- Without at all diminishing the dangers of intimate partner violence or playing the “not all zombies” card, I feel the need to distinguish between the percentage of a given group that experiences attacks, and the percentage of a group that’s responsible for attacks. Men who commit gender-based violence are frequently repeat offenders. Fifteen percent of a group is actually an unusually high rate for attempted murder – though I would want to see the data collection methods. Thank you for coming to Statistics for the Social Sciences 101. ↩︎
