Gideon the Ninth
Lesbian necromancers in space. Sword fights in a haunted palace. Muir's 2019 debut mashes together genres with anarchic energy, voice like a sharpened bone, and a central relationship that earns its emotional payoff through misdirection.
The opposite of an exposition dump: “thickets of unexplained jargon so dense” arrive with no orientation, and readers say they felt lost for a long stretch. Eight Houses each fielding two people means most stay indistinguishable by number rather than personality. More than one reviewer describes a dead stretch: “I read 150 pages…Nothing happened.” Gideon’s voice, the thing fans credit most, is exactly what others reject, a book that “tried so hard to be edgy and goth” and for them failed, “overwritten in the hopes of disguising all the ways it’s underwritten.” And the wider empire never comes into focus.
The case for it and the rest of the canon open with Pro.
