Jane Eyre With Blood Magic and Krakens: Claire McKenna’s ‘Monstrous Heart’
Ever wanted your Brontës with blood tithe magic, plesiosaurs, and sisters of sappho? LOOK NO FURTHER.
I first heard of this book at YALC 2019 and devoured the sampler in about 5 minutes. This was a fantasy world unlike anything I had read before. There were airships and automobiles that put me in mind of Philip Reeve’s steampunk Mortal Engines quartet and the berserkers and motorball players of Alita: Battle Angel, yet its storm-wracked and primeval seascape was ruled by plesiosaurs, krakens, and leviathans, and suffused throughout with a bewitching magic system described as an “alchemical ouroboros” in which blood tithes counteracted the entropy of the elements.
Suffice it to say, it’s fresh, it’s fierce, and it will enchant fans of the likes of Tasha Suri and Aliette de Bodard.
The curtain rises on Arden Beacon, the new lighthouse master of Vigil, as she’s appointed to keep its perpetual coldfire lantern burning following the death of her uncle. But before she even sets foot on the island off the coast of Fiction lost somewhere in the heaving north Atlantic, she hears horrific rumours about a certain leviathan hunter who just happens to be her new neighbour.
Enter Jonah Riven *she says in parentheses*. He’s been the talk of the town ever since the remains of his wife washed ashore with her iconic krakenskin coat and the whispers started to spread, spinning stories of how he had been slicing her slowly into bits to assuage the hunger of the legendary Deepwater King and the insatiable demons that seeped into the elements after the ancient war of the angels.
But as Arden learns more about the political nuances surrounding the guilds of Fiction, the notorious Eugenics Society that acts as matchmaker for all those with the hereditary blood magic of the sanguines, and the spycraft of the mysterious Lions of the nearby country of Lyonne, she realises all may not be as it seems…
The tech and social norms draw on Victorian/Edwardian Britain but Arden and sapphic best friend Chalice are both badass broads who shake the shackles of these restraints in a manner reminiscent of Empire of Sand. There’s discussion of and allusion to assault and abuse but the only on-page occurrence is very quickly cut short when Arden yeets herself into the sea. There’s still gender discrimination, influenced by the traditional seafaring roles determined by physical ability, but this is a world completely absent of homophobia/racism. It’s not quite a secondary fantasy world as we get references to the likes of Vinland (what the Norse called North America), Manhattan, and Lebanon, among others, and so the premise is that imperialism and colonialism weren’t a thing because of the aforementioned dominion of the sea monsters. There’s also still trafficking, but it’s like the Vikings with the Celts rather than colonial slavery. And though the central romance is m/f, we get Arden’s stormbride Chalice being a relentless legend, and a very sweet secondary m/m romance. The narrative focus is very much on the relationships of these seven or eight characters hence the classification as fantasy romance or romantic fantasy (see more recs here), and the writing itself is sumptuous and seething with sensory detail, reminding me very vividly of Jay Kristoff (also a HarperVoyager author).
In short, this book is basically Jane Eyre with airships and alchemy and oceans ruled by krakens and you should definitely let yourself be swept away by the manifold treasures within.
“The nights had been strange to her, aloft in the sea-facing tower while the clockwork motor ground out its constant refrain of escapement and arbour. The wild messenger pigeons in the dome, cousins to the ones Chalice kept in a roost behind the lighthouse to run the daily observations, cooed to each other in the darkness, an avian language, full of augury. The ocean breathed and retreated. Arden was held captive by such nights, overwhelmed with a physical hunger of missing – something.”
