King Nyx (Kirsten Bakis)

I kinda forgot how I found out about King Nyx in the first place. I remember it being thanks to the Litterary Liberation but can’t find trace of it in their feeds or it could be through the Too Many Damn Books podcast interview with its author Kirsten Bakis. Anyway, I guess the main and actual thing that main be buy it is the huge corvid on its cover.

What is it about?

Anna and her husband have been invited by a secluded rich canned-fruit industry baron to spend the winter on an isolated island. Her husband sees it as the perfect opportunity to write his book on unexplained phenomena.

Even before setting foot on the island, they are told that 3 girls in maid training / rehabilitation on the property have disappeared which brings Anna back to her own time as a maid and remind her of her long time lost friend of the time Mary.

A bit more

Even though the book takes place in 1918, there’s a Victorian feel to the book, setting and story. Rich families, humongous manors and properties, factory struggle and strikes etc.

We are introduced into the book through unexplained phenomena and how Anna’s husband Charles researches them and rejects the scientific explanations and how that’s the core tenant of his book and the reason both of them are on the island. Add to this that Anna suffers from some kind of psychological trouble (called hysteria in the book but more like PTSD in the end), which brought her to an asylum a few years back and to ongoing care with a psychiatrist. Combining the two, and as we are living the story through her eyes, we are compelled to doubt the reality of what is happening. Is it an unexplained phenomenon? Is she having visions?

Based on a real person

Anna Fort and her husband are actual persons. His book The book of the damned focuses on scientific anomalies and is still in print today.

The whole premise of the book stems from a note of one of his benefactors: “this woman does not think, she feels” when the household and Charles’ life, career and opportunities depended on her.

I was glad for him to be recognized, knowing his work could not have existed without me helping with his notes, feeding him, taking care of him, putting in grueling workdays with washboards and scrub brushes, so he could sit at the kitchen table and write. I thought Dreiser’s glowing biography would be a testament to my hard work as much as my husband’s.

But after I read the notes on the table, I understood that the version of me that would be in that bokk was this:

This woman cannot think, she feels.

As he’d said, he knew women. I guess when the public finally accepted that novel of his as a masterpiece they accepted his authority on the subject of us. And they would accept his authority on the the subject of me.

And the final paragraph of the prologue:

One version of me exists on the page in a famous man’s study, in his handwriting: a chattering, simpleminded servant to a brilliant husband.

This woman cannot think, she feels.

I pause and look at the tortoiseshell pattern on the pen in my hand, and I think….

I think, Charlie, maybe I will write about that week after all.

The story in the book on the other hand is not based on actual events but Kirsten Bakis wanted to offer her a better place in history and more depth.

Final word

I really enjoyed the book and its non-Victorian Victorian feel, the feminist undertones, hints of class struggles etc. The reminder through other characters that other societies or community making at the beginning of the 20th century was great too and the contrast with the ossified way of working and living in the industrial barons’ household was striking.

The mix between reality, scientific anomalies and psy troubles was great and always surprising.

The final unraveling and intrusion of hard-, bloody reality in the story, though not unexpected, was nice.