Books Reading the Weird Mary Magdalene Strikes Back: Lucy Snyder’s Sister, Maiden, Monster (Part 5) By Ruthanna Emrys, Anne M. Pillsworth | Published on October 29, 2025 Comment 0 Share New Share 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 12-14 of Lucy Snyder’s Sister, Maiden, Monster. The book was first published in 2023. Spoilers ahead! Erin asks Dr. Shapiro to increase her prescription brain supplement. She’s having trouble with her memory, forgetting things at work. She doesn’t mention her cravings or her desire for more energy. Shapiro says there’s been a supplement shortage. If Erin wants more, she’ll have to undergo humiliating testing, again. At work she meets a new employee, Devin. While he talks about database errors, she knows he’s actually thinking about his band’s next gig—she can smell the sweet chemicals shifting in his brain, and she’s flooded with Want and Need. She makes a date with Betty. They meet at a decaying downtown hotel. No cops detain Erin as she enters. No traps await in Room 512, where Betty’s already spread a tarp over the couch and carpet. Betty looks wan and starved, but her smile is reassuring. They keep conversation short. Betty pulls off her wig, revealing the inflamed scar that circumscribes her bald scalp. Erin wonders if Betty’s seeing other Type Threes, or if the fresh irritation’s because Betty’s being treated for a pituitary tumor. They kiss. Erin’s tongue enlarges, its maws nipping. Though Betty pulls away, the tongue continues to enlarge, curling back into Erin’s own throat. They undress, and Betty settles between Erin’s legs, back to Erin’s front. Erin uses an oyster knife to reopen Betty’s scar and gently pry off the lid of her skull. Her brain’s the most beautiful thing, glistening with golden “brain honey.” In turn, Betty opens a vein in Erin’s elbow crook. She drinks Erin’s blood, while Erin’s tongue courses eel-like over Betty’s brain, its maws lapping up the “honey.” With it, she ingests Betty’s memories of being with other Type Threes and helping them murder people. Erin can’t care. She longs to plunge her tongue into the brain itself, but that would end Betty. They finish reinvigorated. But cleaning up, Erin experiences visions. She’s with Shapiro, who tells Erin that she has a fast-growing mass on her back. Next she’s in a motel room, with a body—and a bloodied Betty telling her she shouldn’t have come, they will arrive soon. Next, she’s at work, in the elevator with Devin. Her dorsal mass begins to rupture, and he moves to help. Overcome by Want, she plunges her tongue through his eye, into his brain, devouring will and memories along with flesh. When Devin’s empty, she feels membranous wings burst from her back. She’ll soon fly free. She hears her cosmic masters, knows others of her kind gather in caves outside the city. She revels in purpose: she’s an Archivist, collecting the memories of the world before bearing them to her masters “in the star shadows.” * * * Part Two: Dolore Stimulatus (Stimulated by Pain) People who knew Savannah’s father were shocked when this nice man killed his wife and children, then shot himself. Savannah wasn’t shocked. In her family, behind closed doors, “violence was always on the table.” She only survived because she was away at marching band tryouts. After two years with an uncle addicted to “Christian moralizing,” she took up the world’s oldest profession, becoming a top earner at the Pink Rose, “one of the most exclusive, expensive, progressive” brothels anywhere, and one of the first to go online after sex work was legalized. Her madam, Em, tries to ensure her workers are “happy with who and what [they’re] doing.” She allows them to keep guns or Tasers in their playrooms for self-defense and gets them immunized as soon as the FDA approves the emergency PVG vaccine. Savannah started out working freelance, mostly in BDSM. After being recruited by Em, she expanded her clientele from the usual straight cis males to lesbian, bisexual, and curious women. She’s studying psychology, because part of her job is listening to clients pour out “their black little hearts” to a nonjudgmental ear. Gregory has seen Savannah a few times. Shy and polite, he struggles with gender dysphoria, “fronting hard” to meet people’s expectations. He supposedly has a girlfriend and is terrified of being photographed going into the brothel; he uses the secret “celebrity” entrance. If the guard hadn’t been half-asleep on Gregory’s last visit, none of this would have happened… Fascinated by viruses and their ability to hijack host cell biology, Savannah has learned all about PVG. She knows that her PVG vaccination may not defend her from transmission through physical intimacy. She knows the infection control protocols, including stringent site disinfection and rapid antigen tests for customers. She didn’t know Gregory was infected until she found him in the playroom shower, moaning and swaying, a massive hump on his back. In his discarded clothing, she finds a Glock nine-millimeter pistol, fully loaded. Gregory stumbles from the shower, begging for Savannah’s help. He weeps, saying God isn’t giving him the body he wanted, that he doesn’t want the mission to which “angels” are called. She tries to calm him, but he’s obviously wracked by pain and begs her to shoot him. Something is clawing its way out of his hump. Skin splits, blood spurts, bones crunch. His facial  structure and voice alter. Bat-like wings erupt from his back. Baring anglerfish-pointy teeth, he rants about “seven powers of wrath,” about souls chosen to be “Archivists” and others chosen to cull those not worth recording, about using Earth’s blood to write praises to “our ancient lords.” Envisioning the slaughter of mankind, Savannah lunges for Gregory’s gun and empties its ten rounds into his chest. Each bullet she fires exhilarates her; as Gregory collapses lifeless, she comes so hard she loses consciousness. Libronomicon: Savannah is reading The Future Therapist’s Guide: Theory and Practice, by Garza-Fieldman, in her Psych 450 class. She is not, precisely, a therapist. Weirdbuilding: The elder gods are returning to feast and revel and “write dark, beautiful poetry across the walls of the universe” with the world’s blood. Oh, joy. Madness Takes Its Toll: Savannah is understanding of her clients’ mental illnesses and neurodiversities. But she warns that “our society tends to assume that dangerously psychotic white men are just having a bad day until they make it a bad day for the whole house, too.” Anne’s Commentary Way back in Chapter Zero of Sister, Maiden, Monster, Erin found in her apartment a pink business card bearing only the name Savannah and a local phone number. Gregory claimed Savannah was a massage therapist—before the epidemic, he was researching gifts for Erin. The truth behind that lie is Gregory’s continued client relationship with pro sex worker Savannah, about which Erin has known nothing. It would have hurt her to realize Gregory needed something she couldn’t give him, so how could she have possibly handled his gender dysphoria, and his desire to be the one penetrated instead of the penetrator? Given Erin’s openness to blood and brain play with Betty, maybe Gregory underestimated her kink capacity. In any case, welcome to the book, Savannah! You promise to thicken the plot nicely. Pragmatic Savannah can cop to a fascination with viruses, specifically with their core function of “giving an unsuspecting cell new assembly instructions.” She can look at the result as “just… new information,” even as she’s aware of how a “new assembly” can be “a complete horror show,” not only from a medical but from a social viewpoint. Savannah regards human sexuality as a highly flexible continuum of preferences, impulses and desires rather than as an assemblage of rigid categories; as a result, she swims in that fluid continuum like a champion. Similarly, she doesn’t see the classification of PVG patients into a “type taxonomy” as tablets handed down to “Dr. Moses” by a God of absolute answers. PVG Types are “descriptive, not prescriptive.” As the virus changes constantly, so do its products. The virus “doesn’t give a shit about categories,” she concludes. In addition to the “Ones, Twos and Threes,” there have emerged the Type Zeros, who are in theory “completely asymptomatic carriers.” Also a new Type are the Fours, whose infections supposedly center in the brain and may be treated with antipsychotics and antiepileptics. It sounds like Type Fours haven’t suffered the gastrointestinal manifestations of the disease, thus escaping from the drastic metabolic sequelae of the Twos and Threes. Before Gregory’s last visit, Savanna can embrace the CDC’s contention that PVG is “an incurable, complex, life-changing infection,” manageable “just like HIV.” It’s an “overall message” that she and fellow sex workers “roll with” in lieu of the chaos of conspiracy theories. PVG has followed cruelly close on the heels of the COVID-19 pandemic. Like COVID and other scourges going back to and beyond the Black Plague, it must have spawned companion infodemics. I imagine them paralleling the COVID conspiracy theories, which included strident convictions that the disease was caused by: 5G, as if biological viruses worked like digital ones. Bill Gates, in order to “vaccinate” the whole world with mind-controlling microchips. a Chinese lab, either by accident or by dastardly intention. some enemy (probably China) for biowarfare. No, it was the US military that released COVID into China! It was all because GMOs cause a genetic “pollution” that encourages viral proliferation!! It was the deep state and/or Big Pharma!!! Forget the above. COVID, like climate change etc., doesn’t exist!!!! ALIENS DID IT! (I guess that could cover either migrants or xenointelligences.) Or MIGRANT XENOINTELLIGENCES! Hold on. Given a PVG sequela like morphing into a bat-winged, needle-toothed, proselytizing monster, that last theory doesn’t sound so wacky. No sooner does Gregory achieve the final “new assembly” granted by the PVG virus than he starts quoting from the Gnostic Gospel of Mary Magdalene. Unlike Snyder in her epigraph to Sister, Maiden, Monster, Part Two, he leaves out the line that follows “Whence do you come, slayer of men?” That would be: “Where are you going, conqueror of space?” The “conqueror of space” line actually does appear in the Magdalene text, written by an unknown author in the 2nd century AD. Gregory completes his sermon by distilling an apocalyptic vision into Savannah’s mind. It’s the same sort of vision Erin has upon becoming a “raptor” angel Archivist. Add “conqueror of space” to “Archivist” and “old gods” who reside in the “star shadows.” The first things I think of are Lovecraft’s Yith and Mi-Go. Both are conquerors of space, the Yith via space- and time-spanning mental projection and the Mi-Go via actual bat-winged interplanetary “flight.” Both are collectors of “soul,” so to speak. The Yith collect the memories of all sapient races via the archived journals of their captives. The Mi-Go collect entire brains in canisters that keep them alive and aware, capable of communication and travel through space with the Mi-Go. Holy Mythos, Bat(Winged)Man! Plus, at the close of Chapter Twelve, an entranced Erin hears not only the whispers of the old gods but a faint murmur from the “castle manor” of her visions and dreams. Somehow she realizes that her “masters in the voids of the cosmos” would disapprove of this other voice. But it’s part of her “special secret,” and so she resolves to explore it sometime. Savannah and Erin. You two are indeed thickening the plot! Ruthanna’s Commentary Well, I guess Erin and Greg aren’t going to have that follow-up conversation after all. And the rest of us have… bigger problems. I apologize for calling the Archivists zombies. I should have called them illithids. It’s always good to pay respect to those who document mortal lives—even if the cost is higher than those mortals would prefer to pay. “Earth is ripe.” Don’t like that. This week, we end Part 1 with Erin’s revelation about her nature. For her, it’s an invitation to wonder and glory, to knowing her purpose and her gods. And to knowing… something… that her “masters in the voids of the cosmos” would rather keep hidden. There’s another power, in that dream castle, and she’d like to “see what it’s about sometime.” Cue Cozette singing “Castle on a Cloud”? Or not. We then begin Part 2 with Savannah, a.k.a. Mary Magdalene, reporting something Erin doesn’t know: what happened to Gregory. Greg’s been suffering from the combination of gender dysphoria and her fundamentalist upbringing, unable to fill the roles that her family requires and unable to fully accept that inability. Oh, and she’s been avoiding Erin so she can keep insisting that she’s “clean” of plague, despite the thing growing on her back. Which is, in fact, the same thing growing on Erin’s back. But that Erin’s wonder and glory is Greg’s “not the Becoming that God promised me”. And thus she goes to her high-end brothel with a gun, to beg death from a courtesan who really doesn’t like guns. And who has way too much experience with monsters already. And who is apparently turning into a monster as well. “Thy duty is to cull the unworthy so that those inferior souls shall not distract us from our duty.” Don’t like that, either. All these revelations make the snipers and surveillance a little more understandable—and a lot less likely to be effective. Homeland Security’s usual methods, and even their unusual ones, are not sufficient to deal with the immanent eschaton. As an expatriate policy wonk I can’t help but ask: what should the government do about the return of the elder gods? First piece of policy analysis: “keep everyone from panicking” is a tempting goal that basically never works. We know this from a million and one zombie plague stories. You have to tell people what they’re dealing with, and get them invested in solving the problem. “Avoid disruptions to the economy” is another bad one. All the CEOs lobbying you to hide the bad news are going to seriously regret it when the species goes extinct; you gotta take the long-term view. Presumably the State Department is trying to negotiate with the elder gods; presumably it’s not working. (“What exactly is your definition of ‘ripe’? Would you consider waiting until we have interstellar travel?”) So the question then becomes whether we’re dealing with zombie apocalypse rules or something more nuanced. When someone gets bit by a zombie, you kill them right away. Witness the surprisingly sensible response in Mira Grant’s Feed series: rapid blood tests every time you go through a door cut down rapidly on new infections. But could the Types, if given full knowledge of what’s going on and a high-status role in defense, be persuaded to stay on the side of humanity? “Help us fight to save the world” seems like a much more appealing pitch than “Give up your civil rights and keep going to work until we shoot you.” I’m not saying the odds are good. But it beats convincing your incipient angels that it’s them or civilization—while dumping the worst that civilization has to offer directly onto their budding wings. Next week, John Langan’s “Errata” describes a problem with his publisher. Nothing to worry about, we’re sure. You can find it in his new collection, Lost in the Dark and Other Excursions.[end-mark] The post Mary Magdalene Strikes Back: Lucy Snyder’s <i>Sister, Maiden, Monster</i> (Part 5) appeared first on Reactor.