SFINCS3 Review: From These Dark Abodes by Lyndsie Manusos
- Angela Boord
- 2 minutes ago
- 3 min read
“The Speculative Fiction Indie Novella Championship (SFINCS, pronounced “sphinx”) is a yearly competition to recognize, honor, and celebrate the talent and creativity present in the indie community. We are a sister competition to both SPFBO and SPSFC, and we highlight greatness in the novella format in all areas of speculative fiction (fantasy, science fiction, horror, etc.).” – From the official SFINCS website.
We're now in Phase 3 of the SFINCS competition: the finals! There's no more elimination in this phase; the ten books in this phase were chosen out of the original hundred and made it to the end! In Phase 3, they'll all be ranked by score until eventually one book comes out on top.
Note: The following review contains only my personal thoughts as a judge and does not reflect the views of the team as a whole.
St. Edah’s, a house without exit: Lethe and Petunia are mortal prisoners, servants to immortal creatures who unzip from their skin each night and party as skeletons.
Lethe has no memory of how she came to be trapped in this nightmare, only that despite the tenderness she feels for Petunia, she must escape. Together, they traverse the infinite house, searching for passage while finding evidence of their former lives—lives that are not what they believed them to be.
Lethe must decide: join the immortals in their revelry or escape St. Edah’s once and for all.
Review
This was another horror story where the MC is suffering amnesia, and another story in which I felt like it was handled well. All in all, From These Dark Abodes turned out to be one of my favorites of the competition. Manusos infuses mythology and folklore into a modern Gothic with deeply personal and emotional stakes, and I liked it a lot.
Lethe and Petunia are servants in a great Victorian mansion they can't escape, where the residents spend their nights stripping off their skins and dancing in their bones. This is a terrifically creepy process and described well enough it gave me shivers. Lethe and Petunia can't remember how they came to be trapped in the house and face a terrible choice--join the skeletons in their eternal dancing or serve them eternally in their hedonistic entitlement. Then one of the skeletons carelessly leaves his skin outside his door. This begins a process of discovery for Lethe in which she realizes that all is not what it seems in this huge, awful place.
From These Dark Abodes contained just the right mixture of creepy horror, dark mythological fantasy and unrequited yearning for me, and the story it spun felt like it really arose organically from inside the MC. Many stories in this competition have felt to me like they leaned either toward vibes or plot, sacrificing one for the other, but From These Dark Abodes has both. It’s a wonderfully atmospheric story, courtesy of the author's descriptive skills and the choice of setting, but the plot and the pacing felt solid to me, too. The events of the outside plot are emotionally impactful, and much of the conflict comes from inside Lethe herself as she seeks ruthlessly for clues to the life she can't remember, while also battling the temptation to surrender and join the skeletons.
Lethe is a prickly protagonist who is nevertheless fiercely protective of Petunia, and I think the author did an excellent job of painting a complicated, three-dimensional portrait of her and her often opposite yearnings in a very short space. The twist was also a good one or at least I didn't see it coming exactly, and I felt like the ending fulfilled the story in a bittersweet way that made it linger. Honestly, for a long time I had no idea how I was going to do this review because I couldn’t really think of anything to say except yes, I liked it!
If I had one small quibble, it was only that I didn't know why an important character left everything alone as long as they did. It felt like there wasn’t really a reason for it except that it was necessary to have the story happen. But in the end, that certainly didn't detract from my enjoyment of the story as a whole.
If you’re looking for a character-driven standalone dark fantasy full of sapphic yearning, Gothic imagery, and mythological echoes, I highly recommend giving this one a try.