The Strange Case of the Alchemist's Daughter

Starred review from April 17, 2017
World Fantasy Award–winner Goss’s debut novel, richly reworking a short story (published in Strange Horizons in 2010) with influences as diverse as The Castle of Otranto and Mystery Science Theater 3000, brings her gothic-inflected fantasies roaring into the steampunk era. The main narrative is a standout pastiche of late Victorian mystery fiction, set in an alternate 1880s London and featuring Sherlock Holmes and a quintet of remarkable women: Diana Hyde, Beatrice Rappacini, Catherine Moreau, Justine Frankenstein, and Mary Jekyll. Mary is penniless and hoping to remedy that by claiming the bounty on the fugitive Edward Hyde. She partners with Holmes to find him—though Holmes is somewhat distracted by a killer who’s targeting Whitechapel prostitutes—and in the process discovers the other “monstrous” daughters of infamous scientists. Goss easily surmounts the challenge of making such a male-defined premise belong to the women as shapers of their own destinies. A peppering of the daughters’ wry comments, first presented as brief marginalia, swiftly blossoms into dialogues and alternative takes on the tale—in some cases nearly 200 pages before the commenter herself enters the plot. This is a tour de force of reclaiming the narrative, executed with impressive wit and insight.

April 15, 2017
The daughters of literature's most infamous scientists band together in Goss' (Red as Blood and White as Bone, 2016, etc.) Gothic adventure story.Goss, who has been nominated for many awards, including the Nebula, and has won the World Fantasy and Rhysling awards, collects characters from titans of her genre and does a little reanimation of her own. When Mary Jekyll, daughter of Dr. Henry Jekyll, finds herself orphaned and penniless, she decides to pursue a police reward for information leading to the capture of her father's former assistant, the murderer Edward Hyde. With the help of none other than Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson, Mary follows the trail and soon finds herself the ringleader of a troupe of young women who have been cruelly experimented on by the likes of the doctors Rappaccini, Moreau, and Frankenstein. Giving these young ladies much-needed agency is such a ripe premise for a novel that it's frustrating to see them suffocate under Goss' decision to have them recount their stories of origin. Between an overreliance on the referenced novels, a distracting literary device in which characters comment on each other's stories, and allusions to a wider mystery, there is no room for the characters to have the independent characterizations they so richly deserve. One hopes for further installments if only to give them room to breathe. Despite a potential-laden premise that stands out from the many character-mashup stories on the market, this collection of parts fails to come alive.

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May 15, 2017

After her mother's death, Mary Jekyll is penniless. Her father had died not long before, and in searching through her mother's few papers, Mary finds a reference to payments to a person named "Hyde." Mary remembers her father's disturbing associate, Edward Hyde, who disappeared after murdering a man. If she can collect the reward for information about Hyde's whereabouts, she may be able to stay afloat. But the slim clue leads not to Edward, but to his illegitimate daughter Diana, and Mary turns to renowned detective Sherlock Holmes for help. Not only do Arthur Conan Doyle and Robert Louis Stevenson's characters get an outing, but we dip into Frankenstein, The Island of Doctor Moreau, and Nathaniel Hawthorne's story "Rappaccini's Daughter" for a cast of women who join Mary's adventure and constantly interrupt the story more in the manner of a peanut gallery than a Greek chorus. VERDICT World Fantasy Award winner Goss (In the Forest of Forgetting) takes us on a delightful romp through Victorian gothic literature, with a decidedly feminist slant.--MM

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