#it's so funny how many of these are nona considering if you'd asked me which has the best prose i would have said harrow i think

[familyabolisher]

do you have any favorite quotes or passages from the locked tomb series?

mmm i don’t really think about prose in terms of “quotes” (not trying to sound like a snob i just find it difficult to make value judgments about a piece of writing when it’s isolated from its broader context!) but i think some of my fav bits of prose in the series are:

like, the whole of john 1:20, but especially the creation of alecto—’from my blood and bone and vomit i conjured up a beautiful labyrinth to house you in, i was terrified you’d find some way to escape before i was done,’ ‘adam and eve, galatea, barbie, frankenstein’s monster with long yellow hair,’ ‘i hid you in me i hid me in you’ etc. just a really really good sequence lmao.

the couple of parts of the john chapters where tm drops the monologuing conceit to have john & harrowlecto do some like rapid-fire dialogue (‘“[...] i couldn’t do a damned thing” / “so what did you do” / “a damned thing, didn’t i” / “i still love you” / “you always say that, harrowhark”’; ‘“do you remember what you said to me once i had done it? when we stood here together? / “yes” / “you said, i picked you to change and this is how you repay me?” / “what else did i say?” / “you said, what have you done to me? i am a hideousness” / “what else did i say?” / “where did you put the people? where did they go?” / “i still love you” / “you said that too”’) are really good.

the final few pages of nona before the epilogue where alecto’s memories start bleeding through into the present-day action (and the splicing of kiriona killing crux with the entry into the tomb + alecto’s memories of entombment … Screaming and throwing up) have some good turns of phrase—’the scrap of black-eyed meat had asked for it—the chain of a kiss: the ice that burnt the flesh of the mouth that had stuck to the mouth that was frozen. the teardrop on the hand. the hand that john had fashioned.’; ‘most human voices sounded alike, after all. they were not beautiful. the waters parted for her and it became possible to walk, crunching through the bones at the bottom. the bones at the bottom; what did they make her think of?’ ‘the terrible face with the terrible arms and legs and the terrible middle part, the terrible hair, and the terrible ears: the nose too short, the ears too brief. [...] her own edge had been pushed out, her swinging edge, her toy.’ walking a VERY fine line between lyrical and overwritten and actually landing it. 

really fond of varun the eater and nonalecto’s exchanges—’green thing, green-and-breathing thing, big ghost, the drinker, transformed, what will you eat now? where will your body go? what did he do to you to make you this way? [...] they are coming out of their tower, salt thing. i will pull their teeth. i will make it blank for you.’ REALLY goes. ‘what did he do to you to make you this way’ immediately after asking nona if she ‘loves’ and nona saying ‘ i don’t know what it means, did i ever know what it meant?’ and ‘john loves alecto, john needs alecto’ as the thing that forces alecto’s ‘return’ of sorts … every day i get emails

‘the shimmering white figure of the dead kiriona gaia’ is a very satisfying turn of phrase. i am fond of it

nona epigraph poem (‘you told me sleep, i’ll wake you in the morning / i asked what is morning and you said / when everyone who fucked with me is dead’ etc)

some of the language used in gideon to describe canaan house sets off my little fictional house sensibilities so bad. ‘castle that had been killed,’ ‘the look of a picked-at body [...] a beautiful corpse,’ ‘abandoned and breathlessly waited to be used by someone other than time.’ horrid horrid house i love her so much.

arm scene, obviously. incidentally—and this is present throughout harrow but i think i notice it more in scenes like the arm scene—i really enjoy how much harrow moreso than the other two is written in a voice similar to that of lolita, wherein you have a protagonist with an incredibly affected pretension which the narration pokes fun at them for but which also enables a kind of indulgence in pretension even whilst painting it as such. anyway—'an exquisite conglomeration of bone beneath skin and meat, pocketed in the middle with soft treasures of parenchyma and muscle [...] you were able to see her skeleton as though she had shyly undressed herself for you, as though in the orange hues of the daytime light she’d sloughed capillaries and glands off the budding rose of her scapula’; ‘prayed for a woman you loved to assist you in disrobing a woman you did not’ (insane line sorry); ‘the lovely cup of the radius, the forked embrace of the ulna.’ cowards will call it overwritten but not ME i love sex scenes

& finally, the descriptions of alecto in harrow (which, incidentally—something to be said for the text of harrow referring to alecto predominantly as the Body and the text of nona referring to kiriona pretty heavily as the corpse prince—anyway) but especially the ‘that night the body consented to embrace you’ bit spliced in with john bringing up annabel fucking lee for the first time. deranged.