Hah, Ok I thought maybe doing this short story was a little bit cheeky. But then I saw that fellow Cannonballer Monty had beaten me to the punch! All the permission I needed.
In physical sense, The Unwanted Guest was initially a little tricky for me to track down and read because I have so far only seen it in the paperback copies of Nona the Ninth. I wasn’t going to buy a paperback version, as I have already purchased two copies of the book so far…(Audio and digital.) And the libraries I’m a member of did not have paperback copies.
But then the digital version updated, and I felt that I had run around like a chicken with my head cut off for nothing? Check your Kindle app. But I was super slow to realize.
To me all Locked Tomb material is something that I am eager to get my hands on. But the The Unwanted Guest is extra special to me, as the two key characters are favorites of mine: Palamedes and our favorite, love-to-hate-her, sleazy mega-bitch, Ianthe. I love reading about Ianthe. I delight in reading about Ianthe. But I also love dreaming about her having some kind of terrible, dreadful comeuppance, because she kind of has it coming.
The Unwanted Guest takes place during a certain scene in Nona the Ninth, so it makes sense that it’s bundled in at the end of the novel. It’s written as a one act play over several short scenes. The first opens with Pal and seven coffins. And a tray of meat. Which seems a bit ominous. But it’s The Locked Tomb and you never know what counts as just decor for a Necromancer.
Then enters Ianthe, donning various kinds of cosplay. Pal is trying to start up a dialogue with Ianthe, while Ianthe counters with mind games. It’s like Socrates struggling to engage in a dialectic while his interlocutor is prancing around in a French maid outfit. Again, might be unexpected elsewhere, but not in The Locked Tomb.
The topic of discussion here is the nature of the soul. Which, if you have read the series up until this point, is a critical part of Lyctorhood. And throughout Pal’s exchange with Ianthe, both the reader and two participants come to some realizations about how souls operate. And that potentially has some huge implications coming into Alecto the Ninth.
But there is a third presence here in our play—a voice that appears whenever Ianthe exits the stage. And it is truly wonderful when you work out who they are:
VOICE: I died.
PALAMADES: You died.. . again?
VOICE: Truly, wonderful news for my haters.
Yes, wonderful. I really can’t say too much more about the story, as it is very short, and I don’t want to ruin it. But if you are a fan of the series, you won’t want to miss it; it gave me an awful lot to think about while waiting for the next book
White out again, but for those who have read it: While I am gleeful that this has caused so much horror for Ianthe, I am, as always, thinking about my favorite millennial fail-child and disaster bisexual, John. Just what does this mean for him and Alecto?!?!
Also, yeh, he probably did blow up the Palais Theater, didn’t he?
I still don’t understand the coffins or the meat though.
For cbr16bingo, this is Games. Ianthe does try
