Helpmeet
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- ¥800
発行者による作品情報
It's 1900, and Louise Wilk is taking her dying husband from Manhattan to the upstate orchard estate where he grew up. Dr. Edward Wilk is wasting away from a mysterious affliction acquired in a strange encounter: but Louise soon realizes that her husband's worsening condition may not be a disease at all, but a transformative phase of existence that will draw her in as much more than a witness.
"Through hauntingly concise prose, Helpmeet both acutely disturbs and captivates. This outstanding novella is a morbidly engrossing exploration of moral and physical decay and the shifting boundaries of love and devotion. The tight, incisive narrative is a chilling dive into mysterious forces that transcend the basic binary of good and evil, and the inherent depravity that humans themselves can't comprehend until it's too late."
— Waubgeshig Rice, Author of Moon of the Crusted Snow
"Naben Ruthnum's Helpmeet is a remarkable throwback. The style, the precise prose, the lush imagery, the dreadful sense of wheels turning just past the reader's sightline—I devoured it in a few delighted hours and it took me back to my teenage years, to afternoons squirreled away in the corner of my local library reading Clark Ashton Smith, Robert Chambers, Algernon Blackwood and the other great elder wordsmiths I cut my horror teeth on."
— Craig Davidson, Author of The Saturday Night Ghost Club
"At the bitter end of the 19th century, a loyal wife cares tenderly for her dissolute husband as he nears his death from a mysterious, gruesomely corrosive disease. Helpmeet by Naben Ruthnum is a sumptuous excursion into surreal body horror and an unsparing exploration of the extreme frontiers of connubial devotion. Ruthnum delivers a uniquely unsettling Gothic love story—and it is first and foremost a love story—evoking the grisly Edwardian tales of W.W. Jacobs, William Hope Hodgson and Algernon Blackwood, while drawing in such modern masters as Barker, Del Toro and Cronenberg. Brief enough to be read in an evening, it holds certain images so grotesque that they will linger in your dreams for weeks."
— David Demchuk, Award-winning author of The Bone Mother, and RED X
"An everyday tragedy spirals into a medical mystery and then into something much darker and more disquieting, executed in prose that glitters like candlelight on an open wound. I loved this intensely claustrophobic study of a complicated marriage twisting itself into something monstrous."
— Premee Mohamed, Author of the Beneath the Rising Trilogy
"In a wholly unique spot between the New York society novels of Henry James and Edith Wharton and the best body horror of David Cronenberg lurks the strange, disturbing and ultimately transcendent novella Helpmeet. Naben Ruthnum's pitch-perfect pastiche is as all-consuming as the disease at its heart, a fever dream of a story as original, elegantly written and chilling as anything I've read in recent memory."
— Pasha Malla, Author of Fugue States, and Kill the Mall
"Naben Ruthnum's succinctly brilliant Helpmeet finds the thin line between intimacy and body horror, and blurs it to create a unique love story that is as moving as it is disturbing."
— Indrapramit Das, Author of The Devourers
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Ruthnum (A Hero of Our Time) mixes body horror, weird fiction, and romance into a viscerally upsetting but quietly moving novella set in 1900 New York. Hospital maid turned unofficial nurse Louise has always known that her husband, surgeon Edward Wilk, has a weakness for womanizing, but that's never stopped her from loving him. Now Edward is dying of an apparent sexually transmitted disease that's causing his body parts to fall off, sink into themselves, and otherwise disappear. Louise does her best to care for him: injecting him with morphine, protecting him from society gossips, and cleaning out his empty eye sockets with gauze. Now, at Edward's request, the pair move from their townhouse to a country estate where Edward may die in peace. As Edward's disease progresses—and he confesses the sordid details of its likely cause—that which might have torn the couple apart actually bonds them more deeply than they could have imagined thanks to an incursion of the supernatural. Ruthnum writes beautifully even in the story's most grotesque moments, and brings wonderful specificity to the burdens of caregiving. ("Edward's illness had caused Louise to split. Just now, the wife had seen the tongue, and the nurse had picked it up and plated it to calm the wife.") Weird fiction fans won't want to miss this.
