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Brain Surgery With Safewords: Lucy Snyder’s Sister, Maiden, Monster (Part 4)
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Brain Surgery With Safewords: Lucy Snyder’s Sister, Maiden, Monster (Part 4)
Dating in the post-pandemic world takes some odd turns…
By Ruthanna Emrys, Anne M. Pillsworth
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Published on October 15, 2025
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Welcome back to Reading the Weird, in which we get girl cooties all over weird fiction, cosmic horror, and Lovecraftiana—from its historical roots through its most recent branches. This week, we cover Chapters 9-11 of Lucy Snyder’s Sister, Maiden, Monster. The book was first published in 2023. Spoilers ahead!
Testing her soon-to-be nightly work commute, Erin stops for gas and gets caught in a SWAT response to PVG-related mayhem. An officer mistakes her for a getaway driver for the “freaks,” and holds her at shotgun point until she convinces him she’s an innocent bystander. Back home, she finally texts Betty on the burner phone.
They make a date. Erin worries she may either walk into a Homeland Security trap or get murdered for her blood. Nevertheless, she shows up at their industrial zone rendezvous. They sneak into a car junkyard. Betty leads Erin to a stretch limo that’s surprisingly pristine inside. She sheds her hoodie to reveal a black dress with serious cleavage; Erin’s worn jeans and a tank top, but with a lacy red bra and thong underneath. Betty talks about the girlfriend who dumped her after Betty contracted PVG. Erin shares that she’s not living with her fiancé. They’ve agreed to an open relationship, but she hasn’t told Gregory about Betty. Good, Betty says. Times are worse than Erin’s realized: The police have posted snipers and undercover officers who are “straight-up merking Types who lose their shit in public.” For accurate news, Erin should watch a YouTube channel hosted by Alexandria Kasabian, aka Dr. Kaz. She’s a virologist who interviews legal experts and activists as well as physicians and scientists.
The two end up having semi-clad sex that includes Betty giving Erin a safe word, “red,” and promising she’ll stop if Erin uses it. She razor-cuts an incision under one of Erin’s nipples and “latches on to the wound, sucking hard.” Erin becomes “an instrument under [Betty’s] mastery” and succumbs to an orgasm so powerful she faints. When she comes to, Betty’s bandaging her breast and smiling a “pleased, bloody Cheshire cat grin.”
Two days later, Erin’s tongue begins growing its tiny teeth. She’ll eventually accept that meeting Betty was “a cosmic inevitability” proving that gods exist.
* * *
Erin witnesses a Type Three man howling “violent nonsense” at the sky while cracking open a woman’s skull. Unlike Erin, he looks flush and healthy. He gives Erin a gory smile of recognized fellowship. Hurrying away, she hears rifle fire and the thud of his corpse. She also overhears two shop-owners bemoaning such incidents, worrying that contagion paranoia that will soon close everyone’s businesses. Erin wonders about how Gregory keeps insisting he’s clean. She figures everyone’s been exposed by now.
She watches the latest Dr. Kaz Chats. With another virologist, Kaz discusses how PVG may be interacting with oncogenic viruses like HPV and Epstein-Barr. Vaccination development has been complicated by the sheer number of PVG strains; as the first Pandoravirus known to infect humans (or, indeed, multi-cellular animals), it’s huge by viral standards both in physical and genomic size.
A call from Gregory interrupts the video. He’s crying and apparently drunk, devastated to have lost his job because he finally “lost his cool with a client.” He can’t be everything to everybody anymore, and his brother Joey’s tormenting him, and he hasn’t been honest with Erin. He looks thinner, unwell, but he screams that he doesn’t have PVG, then hurls his phone into a wall.
Unable to reach him, Erin leaves a message for his mother, then drives to Joey’s house. Joey refuses to let her and her “goddamned plague” inside, but sends Gregory to talk to her. Gregory wants Erin to leave him alone—he’s prayed to God, who’s said they shouldn’t be together anymore. Knowing that PVG can infect the brain, Erin fears for Gregory. She also questions whether the American-standard life she’s imagined for them is what she really wants. She accepts Gregory’s new “boundaries,” but tells him to call if he changes his mind.
* * *
Betty asks Erin to accompany her to an “appointment” that’s “gonna hurt.” Erin meets her at a downtown club. They pass through into a narrow alleyway. At a “battered basement door,” a man with a bouncer’s build demands their password. He conducts them to a surgical suite, where three women greet them. Dr. LaVoie is a neurosurgeon. Dr. Gutierrez is her anesthesiologist. Darnelle is their RN assistant. All became infected with PVG during the same “incident,” making it illegal for them to perform the procedure at hand. Betty agrees to secrecy.
Because Erin’s a Type Three, she must consent to being restrained for everyone’s safety. She’s strapped into a chair chained to the floor, only her right hand free to hold Betty’s. After her head’s shaved, Betty’s strapped to a procedure chair and anesthetized via IV and a bottle of Type Three blood. Though loopy, she remains conscious enough to respond to questions.
Erin holds Betty’s hand, uncertain whether she’s heartened by Betty’s sacrifice to their relationship or horrified that Betty is taking this drastic step. LaVoie saws through Betty’s skull to expose her brain. Its smell weights the air with a magnetism that draws Erin. Thankfully her bonds are “good and tight.” Betty shudders and moans, babbling words in some guttural alien language. Erin can’t understand it, but she “can feel the message deep in [her] core…this cursed prayer [that casts them] both into the event horizon of a star-devouring monster at the core of a distant galaxy.”
It’s wonderful. It’s horrible. And Erin laughs, unable to stop until she knows no more.
The Degenerate Dutch: It’s still not safe for a woman to go walking at night, even if the woman is a brain-eating monster. Or so the government would like you to believe.
Weirdbuilding: If there’s no order or meaning to the universe, then the plague is merely a coincidence. So is Erin meeting Betty. “Random coincidences that just somehow counteracted the entropy of the universe and set enormity in motion.” So maybe not. Maybe it’s the “first proof that gods do exist” and “have a plan for us all.” Uh-oh.
Ruthanna’s Commentary
Triggers are weird. My mother died, four years ago, of glioblastoma, which is one of the worst cancers on the extremely bad scale of cancer badness. I still flinch, as one might predict, at depictions of tumors. I also picked up a rather bad trigger around weight loss. While I had a lot of issues with Beyond Black, my constant desire to scream, “No, you’ll get smaller and then you’ll die!” about the fat-shaming certainly didn’t help me appreciate the book’s literary qualities.
So I would expect to have a lot of trouble getting through the eldritch cancer plague book. And it definitely terrifies me. But it also feels more deliberately like the sort of terror you’re supposed to get from horror, and somehow that helps. Or maybe it’s just that Snyder’s writing is that good, and the depiction of attraction-repulsion around a fricking cancer plague that persuasive. I don’t know if I’d go so far as “healing,” but I look forward to my biweekly readings despite the flinches.
That said OMG true it’s not fair that the vampire gets blood play every date and the zombie goes hungry, but no do not do brain surgery for your girlfriend aaaahhhhhhh. I would also strongly suggest to Betty that part of good BDSM is negotiating scenes in advance, not just giving your partner a safeword. But this is not a book about being safe and sane, and only slightly a book about being consensual. Lovecraft, and every other author who’s written homoerotic mad science partners who never acknowledge the “erotic” part, would faint. Much like Erin. Ahem.
So Erin and her new girlfriend are getting along splendidly if alarmingly. Things are not going so well with Greg. I would say he’s having a gender epiphany, with all that talk about not wanting to be a man anymore, but this book is weird enough that he could also have realized that he’s really a monster. I’m willing to lay my bets, though, on “a monster who is not a boy.” Though he’s dumped Erin over it, I suspect we’ll find out eventually. How vile is the “vile shit” that Joey does? Is he putting the literal toxicity in “toxic masculinity”? Which god did Greg talk to, anyway?
Is PVG polymorphic because each version is sacred to a different elder god? “Kids from the same family who all put on very different Halloween costumes to see who gets the most candy”—yeah, that tracks. Where candy here is worshippers? Sacrifice? Reveling beyond all laws and morals?
You can see why the government wouldn’t approve. They’re not handling it in the sanest possible way, but then, even allowing for an alternate universe that hasn’t suffered from DOGE, they’ve presumably lost a lot of people to the plague. So they lie about the symptoms, track the victims, kill the people who messily abandon laws, and… hide the results? I’m a little dubious about that, because even if they’ve gotten all mainstream media to ignore the sniper massacres, our own world has shown firsthand that “most people don’t know” is not entirely compatible with “most people have cellphone cameras.” But then, if everyone’s cellphones have government spyware on them, maybe that doesn’t matter. Or maybe it’s less “most people don’t know” and more “most people don’t want to know.” Which we’ve also seen firsthand in our own world.
Unrelated note: I’ll be at World Fantasy at the end of October, and would love to meet any of our readers who are also attending!
Anne’s Commentary
I would so subscribe to Dr. Alexandria Kasabian’s YouTube channel for all my pandemic news. From Betty’s description, Dr. Kaz started the channel during the Covid-19 outbreak and has segued gracefully into the PVG crisis. Not that we want to pick favorites, but it’s hard not to consider polymorphic viral gastroencephalitis the flashier gig for a plague vlogger.
In Chapter Six, Erin remembers Dr. Sallow saying the PVG virus could be “too big” for airborne transmission without hitching a ride in sneeze, cough, or spit droplets. In Chapter Ten, a virologist on Dr. Kaz Chats explains that what makes PVG “so interesting, and so dangerous” is that it’s a giant among viruses. It’s been tentatively classified within the Pandoraviridae family, genus Pandoravirus, making it a member of the third largest viral genus in physical size. How big would that be? Big enough to be visible under a light microscope. As big as some bacteria. Even more significantly, pandoraviruses are number one in terms of complexity, as measured by their genome sizes. Megavirus, by comparison, has 1.2 million base pairs to Pandoravirus’s up to 2.5 million base pairs. Dr. Kaz’s guest suggests that the PVG virus carries a genetic “payload much, much bigger than it needs for simple viral replication. What can all that surplus information code for, and what does it mean for “people who get infected”?
The giant viruses infect single-celled organisms with nuclei, primarily protists like amoebas and algae. So far, so good, because that gets humans off their menu. So far, even better, we might be able to use giant viruses to combat pathogens that do enjoy dining on people. Naegleria fowleri, often called the “brain-eating amoeba,” can cause the rare-but-fatal primary amoebic meningoencephalitis (PAM). Recently discovered are the giant Naegleriaviruses, which destroy their amoeba hosts in short order. Getting the viruses through the brain’s defenses poses a difficulty for their direct therapeutic use, but they might also be deployed to control amoebae in human-frequented bodies of water.
The problem with PVG is that it’s the first pandoravirus known to infect humans. The problem is also that it’s earned its designation as “polymorphic” because while the “genetic payloads” of the numerous strains are largely the same, the bits encoding for each strain’s spiky coat or envelope create very different viral exteriors, to the confusion of the host’s immune system. Initially this even caused the doctors to believe PVG was caused by several distinct viruses.
I guess you could also call the virus “polymorphic” because of the different sequelae-syndromes its survivors may experience. When Erin regains consciousness after the acute phase of her infection, she learns of three survivor types. Type Ones underwent a relatively minor course of headaches and nausea. They didn’t need to seek medical help. They seemed to recover completely and might never know they’d had the current plague.
Lucky bastards.
The much less lucky, like Erin and Betty, found they’d undergone—and were undergoing—drastic physical and functional changes. Each Type had lost the ability to digest most food and to make certain proteins. Healing and growth were inhibited. The enzymes needed to repair DNA were impaired. Normal radiation exposure, such as to sunlight and dental X-rays, had to be avoided, along with everyday carcinogens like junk food. To prevent slowly succumbing to overall degeneration, Types needed specialized dietary regimens. Having effectively become vampires (Twos) or ghouls (Threes), they needed the nutrients ideally gotten from fresh blood and raw brains. And who knew what other Types might emerge?
Erin has been wondering, like me, why someone who had close contact with a person on the verge of full-blown PVG, including the free exchange of bodily fluids, didn’t contract PVG himself. She, and I, are looking at Gregory. He keeps claiming his PVG tests have come out negative. But by the end of Chapter Ten, the assertions that he’s “clean” have become a scream that he doesn’t “fucking have it!” That scream comes in the context of a call to Erin that starts with sobbing and drunken slurring and ends with him destroying his phone. He’s been fired from his job for losing it with a client, which is so unlike Gregory. Well, the whole call is. When Erin drives to the house where Gregory’s been staying with his brother, Joey answers the door. He’s disheveled and even ruder than usual. Gregory looks even worse when he stumbles out to her, thin and pale and dazed, a blistery rash on his jaw. Like Joey, he tells Erin she’s not welcome. She should leave him alone. God has told him they shouldn’t be together anymore. He snarls, then “crumples into abject grief.”
It’s a total emotional breakdown that suggests Gregory may have the new strain of PVG, the one Dr. Kaz describes as using genes borrowed from chickenpox to escalator up the spinal cord direct to the brain. Although Erin may not really want the get-married, buy-house, have-kids life she’s imagined, she feels “utterly defeated” by him vacantly, indifferently, acknowledging that he’s breaking up with her. She’s “confused. Worried. Heartbroken.”
She has also been smelling, both on Joey and Gregory, an “expired lunch meat sourness,” “a spoiled bologna note” that ensures she does not want to eat their brains. “This almost certainly means something,” she thinks.
You’ve got that right, Erin. Listen to your wrecked, altering body and decline the gray matter of anyone who smells like rotten cold cuts. Your stomach’s suffered enough.
Next week, we celebrate Halloween with S. P. Miskowski’s “Water Main” from the Autumn Cthulhu collection.[end-mark]
The post Brain Surgery With Safewords: Lucy Snyder’s <i>Sister, Maiden, Monster</i> (Part 4) appeared first on Reactor.
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