Where Spirits Walk as Monsters

Self-Published

Community Rating

Description

It has been eight hundred years since human beings came through the Door of Hasra, but the land still hasn’t fully accepted their incursion. People no longer die of eating innocent looking vegetables, but monsters still roam the hills and forest. And now the earth itself is rejecting the buried dead. Manrie, a slave in the library city of Libreigia, must discover what is causing the dead to walk again, and whether there can be an end to the enmity between human beings and the land that they stumbled into.

Information

Status: Hiatus
Year: 2024
Author: KPB Stevens

Royal Road Stats

Rating: 5.0/ 5.0
Followers: 7
Views: 4,343

Reviews

No reviews yet. Be the first to share your thoughts!

Community Reviews(1)

FremdaRoyal Road
★★★★★ 5.0
“We came naked through the Door of Hasra. Do you know that? It was more than eight hundred years ago, so you probably wouldn’t remember. All we had was our bodies, and words. But the words were from the previous world. We used them to describe the things we found here, but how do we know that the creatures we decided to call “cows” actually resemble the cows of the previous world? We don’t. Cows there might be carnivorous. They might be smaller or larger. They might have seven tails. We cannot know the true cow, only that our ancestors were lonely and grieving and they wanted the things they found here to become familiar to them. So they used words that they already knew.”
There are a few bigger pieces of proses in the work, and I like all of them, but this may be favorite so far
It's only about 10,000 words but it currently is my favorite thing that I've read on the site. It feels like something that would have a Hugo award on the cover. It reminded me of Coetzee.
The story is thematically dense. I think the beginnings of a mature analysis could be made, and it's still only some pages past being a short story. I think there's overtones of collective grief, topics concerning diaspora and like, social ecology??? These people are humans in a strange land. That land does not recognize sovereignty, and it has no interest in accommodating them. Some of the humans are trying to do to it what they have done to the main character, and all of this seems like it has very direct application to our own experiences and the way humans have sought to "tame", to subordinate, to objectify individuals and groups and ecologies that we've imagined as monstrous or hostile in the past.
I am making it sound like a treatise, but I found it very very relaxing to read. The main character has a rich inner life. I usually have feelings of anxiety when I read something.
The only notable on the subject of grammar to me is that the first chapter is formatted in an unusual way, but that was change