Books Reading the Weird Plan B From Outer Space: Lucy Snyder’s Sister, Maiden, Monster (Part 11) Mareva deals with the cosmic apocalypse in the conclusion of Sister, Maiden, Monster By Ruthanna Emrys, Anne M. Pillsworth | Published on February 4, 2026 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 29-30 of Lucy Snyder’s Sister, Maiden, Monster. The book was first published in 2023. Spoilers ahead! Erin sprouts a new growth from her temple: “a shiny gray-headed protrusion about the size of a golf ball.” Mar worries. Erin may be a monster now, but she still sometimes reveals the old Erin. Erin summons Mar to a toolshed rendezvous. Savannah’s asleep with baby dodecapod Gregory curled around her. Mar feels guilty about her unmotherly repulsion. Surely the helpless creature deserves better than Savannah. Erin, she sees with horror, has clawed off her temple growth, exposing her brain. A gray umbilical cord trails from the wound to a jellylike blob cradled in her taloned hand. She growls that she can’t “ascend” with the “memories” this “cerebryo” holds, and she forces Mar to swallow it. Two images flash through Mar’s mind: a coffee can holding an antique key and a hidden keyhole in a basement wall. Erin instructs her to use the key when “the stars are right.” What’s behind the wall will enable Mar to choose her future, though neither choice will be “benign.” Next morning Mar wakes to Savannah cursing out “Michael” for not warning her that the “Cleaving” was imminent. Now she can’t get a proper supply of scalpels and sutures. What’s the Cleaving? Better Mar doesn’t know the details. Just stay inside today, especially after sundown. From her room, Mar watches Savannah haul cutlery and tarps into the barn. Her labors done, Savannah collapses with Gregory. From the barn come Archivist screams, “at once dreadful and thrilling.” Mar finds the monsters “rutting into each other… and slashing themselves open with knives.” Erin leads the “grisly congregation” in a litany about “existing in and with one another,” and rising to the “Mother of All” by escaping “the forms of this world.” As the Archivists staple and stitch each other together, Mar realizes what the Cleaving is. From Erin’s memories, she now knows Dr. Shapiro’s whereabouts, but also knows she can’t escape the manor yet. On the sixth morning after the Cleaving, tremors shake Mar awake. A gigantic sky-hole opens over the city, a portal to a huge ringed planet. A massive space ship emerges. With Erin screaming that it’s time to “join our masters in the star shadows,” the fused Archivists fly to the ship. Savannah sighs that one day she’ll get her own wings. Mar asks if all the humans are dead. Savannah doesn’t know. Regardless, it’s just Mar and Savannah and Gregory now—at least until Mar has more squiddos. * * * With the Archivists gone, Erin’s memories “blossom” in Mar’s mind. She sneaks into the manor basement, finds the antique key and a keyhole hidden behind a switchplate. The key triggers a wall to slide back, revealing a wood-paneled study like what “a wealthy, educated gentleman of yesteryear” would have built. From the LED lights in the gas fixtures and some modern books among the aged esoteric tomes, she figures Mayne updated the place. There’s also a vinyl record on top of a turntable. On its cover is a strange yellow symbol and the title Into the Hands of the Living God. A “dreadful urge” makes her play the record. Atonal music sounds from a solo violin, and Mar lapses into vision. She’s standing above a wave-swept lake. Overhead shine three moons, twin suns, and three black stars. The starlight drives her to “transcendent darkness.” Footsteps approach. Through tears she sees a figure dressed in yellow robes. His face is “blank, pale,” but he says he wears no mask. He’s come to show Mar her future. At his touch, she’s transported a millennium forward. The Mayne manor’s gone; in its place is a “shuddering amorphous mass of gray-white flesh,” over which crawl monsters that pull “squirming larvae” from its numberless birthing sacs. The blob’s only feature is a vast maw lined with humanish teeth, which the monsters constantly feed. It’s what Mar will become, the yellow-clad stranger says: Earth’s “new fertility deity. All powerful yet helpless. Wise yet mindless. Revered and yet an abomination.” Mar begs the stranger to kill her, but even he can’t overcome the immortality imposed by his “adversaries.” But he offers a choice. If she accepts the gift he’ll leave for her, she’ll have no more offspring. She’ll prevent the repopulation of Earth and be free to live out her immortality as she chooses, in a world “silent but for the wind in the trees and the waves crashing upon the empty shores, just as [he wishes] it to be.” Waking in the study, Mar finds a ring carved from human bone and inlaid with the Yellow Sign. When she puts it on, it sinks spikes into her bone, becoming immovable. At once she feels her embryo cysts subsiding. “Hallelujah,” she whispers. Savannah’s “scared and furious.” She can’t pull the ring off, but a meat cleaver should do the job. Mar punches Savannah unconscious, strength enhanced by the ring. But she can’t murder her jailer. Instead she hurries to pack. Leaving, she sees Gregory sleeping in his aquarium-crib. She has three choices. She can leave him with Savannah. She can euthanize him (but how?). Or— Mar steels herself to pick up Gregory. His red skin is covered with velvety silver fuzz. He’s warm and just slightly squishy. A little fishy-smelling. But his eyes are blue, like Leila’s. Though her “rat brain” tells her she knows nothing about babies, human or alien, her “superstitious mind” tells her to have faith—she’ll figure this out. She asks Gregory if he wants to come look for Dr. Shapiro. He yawns and garbles: “Agafa!” She’ll take that as a yes. What’s Cyclopean: “Cleaving” is an autoantonym: it means both cutting apart and binding together. Boy howdy, does it ever mean both of those things this week. Libronomicon: Mark Mayne’s secret office has been repurposed, but still contains High Performance Habits and High Growth Habits. Neither of those seems particularly useful at this stage of world history, unless you use very different definitions of “high,” “performance,” and “growth.” Of course, Mareva doesn’t open them, so maybe they are about reshaping your body to ascend into the stars, and/or to grow eldritch infants. Weirdbuilding: Wave hello to Erich Zann and the King in Yellow. Madness Takes Its Toll: “On drugs” is not really necessary at this point to explain Savannah’s mania. Or her suggestion to Mareva that “psychologically, ignorance is your friend”. Anne’s Commentary In the “Acknowledgements” for Sister, Maiden, Monster, Lucy Snyder thanks Maurice Broaddus and Jerry Gordon for soliciting “Magdala Amygdala” for their Dark Faith: Invocations anthology. She adds a special thank you to Broaddus for sending her favorite editorial acceptance ever: “Lucy, what the fuck is wrong with you? Good grief that story was messed up. Thanks. I think.” About the novel that grew out of “Magdala Amygdala” and Savannah’s origin story, “My Knowing Glance,” I’d like to echo Broaddus’s sentiments. I’m sure that he doesn’t really assume dark fiction writers must be deranged. I’m sure he didn’t really think “Magdala Amygdala” was “messed up,” except in a good way. As Stephen King wrote in Danse Macabre, messing around in the darkest recesses of one’s own—and one’s reader’s—mind is legitimate practice: “I recognize terror as the finest emotion and so I will try to terrorize the reader. But if I find that I cannot terrify, I will try to horrify, and if I find that I cannot horrify, I’ll go for the gross-out. I’m not proud.” Snyder does plenty of terrifying and horrifying in Sister, Maiden, Monster, but I’ve got to say it’s in the sheer volume, inventiveness and outright unabashedness of her body horror that the novel excels. “Body horror” is the polite term for “gross-out,” right? And it encompasses sexual horror as well as guts-and-gore and miscellaneous biological ickinesses? Or put sexual horror in its own category, if you prefer, in which case S, M, M excels in both categories, and also in the subcategory of reproductive horror. Gregory’s birth may outdo the C-section via vampire teeth in Breaking Dawn. But in a good way: it’s kind of neat that the Mother of Calamities can do her own c-sections. At least until she evolves into an amorphous gray mass without any limbs to wield scalpel-claws. Fortunately, by that time she’ll have birthed enough squiddos to serve as midwives, “pulling squirming larvae from fleshy sacs that rupture like boils.” No, nuh-uh, I cannot—this is Dr. Pimple Popper on a cosmic scale. In her final form, I just realized, Mar must look like a protoshoggoth in labor. Or even like Azathoth Itself, given the King in Yellow’s description of this final metamorphosis as a terrible deification in which Mar would become a “living god,” but also “All-powerful yet helpless. Wise yet mindless. Revered and yet an abomination.” Given the looseness of abomination nomenclature in the Cthulhu Mythos, it’s difficult to exactly categorize the entities using Snyder’s PVG virus to transform Earth into their latest breeding colony. Erin and Savannah refer to the deities they see in their visions as the “old gods” and describe them as “whispering to me from their thrones in the dark spaces between the stars.” My first impression is that their “old gods” are the primal and ultimate entities more “properly” referred to as the Outer Gods: Azathoth, Yog-Sothoth, Shub-Niggurath and Nyarlathotep are those best “known” to humans, though “unknowable.” In a letter to James F. Morton, Lovecraft wrote that “Great Old One” Cthulhu is the offspring of Nug, who is the offspring of Yog-Sothoth and Shub-Niggurath. The prominence of cephalopod-like creatures among Mar’s present and future offspring suggests that it may be Cthulhu and his minions who are taking over Earth. This makes Mythosian sense given Derleth’s claim that Cthulhu and Hastur are half-brothers embroiled in eternal rivalry. One of Hastur’s principal manifestations is the King in Yellow, whose sigil is the Yellow Sign. Erin first sees the Yellow Sign in the hospital where she’s recovering from her initial bout with PVG; it’s set into the pavement of a courtyard. Staring at the weird symbol, Erin’s transported in vision to the Mayne manor, which she senses is a “keep fit for a king. Or a living god.” As Erin’s transforming into a winged Archivist, she again hears the “old gods” whispering, but she also hears a “faint, insistent whisper in the castle manor.” Somehow she knows her new masters wouldn’t approve of her listening to the second whisperer, but she cherishes it as her “special secret.” What’s in the manor basement is a hidden study where Mar will find a vinyl album emblazoned with the Yellow Sign and titled Into the Hands of the Living God. Listening to the record delivers Mar to a lake under twin suns, triplet moons, and black stars: Carcosa and Hali, where the King in Yellow will offer her an alternative to eternal squiddo production. Mar only discovers the hidden study through the memories which Erin literally feeds her before the Cleaving. Erin has to get rid of these memories in order to ascend, because they are associated with her secret alliance to the King, aka Cthulhu’s fraternal enemy Hastur, and it’s to the Team Cthulhu spaceship that the Archivists will joyfully flock. So the King in Yellow must have been plotting all along to sabotage Cthulhu’s Earth takeover by luring Mar, Cthulhu’s Mater Calamitas, to Team Hastur! Whew. The tortuous plot makes sense at last, or at least this is the sense I make of it. It’s a narrative road it has been well-worth following despite (or sorta because of) the frequent gooey patches! Ruthanna’s Commentary This has been a wild book. I have to confess, “birth control provided by the King in Yellow” was not on my bingo card. I’m glad they have Plan B in lost Carcosa. Even if they have it mostly because they prefer lifeless orbs to elder god remodeling styles. Planetary cancer or lunar desert? You decide! It’s not actually as bad as lunar desert, though. Humans have gotten purged, but as far as I can tell there was no universal slaughter of cows, platypuses, or pine trees. And the ocean is already full of mutated dodecapods. So with things not being overrun by cancer babies (doo de doo dah doo doo de doo, dah doo), there’s a solid foundation for ecosystem preservation and regrowth. Unless the King in Yellow has further plans, always possible. Erin dreamed of a god-king palace in the hills. Mayne Mansion doesn’t quite measure up – no god-kings here, as of the book’s end. So is Savannah going to set herself up as a death goddess? Or will it become a Carcosan monument? Given the secret interdimensional musical passage in the basement, I’m betting the latter. The door is open. Things can pass through in both directions. I’m betting the next thing through, when she wakes up, will be Savannah—and if she doesn’t get swatted for threatening the King, what will her gift look like? Ohhhhhh. Were the Carcosans also guiding the feds, suggesting sigils and processes most unhelpful for the elder gods’ long-term plans? That would explain a lot. We originally picked this book because I wanted something with all the angry queer girl cooties ever. Snyder has delivered in spades. Coming down to the end, I’m fascinated by our trinity of angry queer girls: Erin: lesbian (her sexually unexciting “fiancé” turns out to be an unfortunately-repressed egg; her passion is for Betty), angry about the kyriarchy and how she’s been pushed into a generic story about what you’re supposed to want. Archivist, accepts her eldritch “gifts” but doesn’t let the gods entirely override her human values or desires. Ultimate fate: cuts out her human values and gives them to Mareva, “cleaves” with Betty, ascends to join the biblically accurate abomination. Savannah: bi, angry about the kyriarchy and abuse. Culler and bodyguard, accepts her destiny and gives up her pre-existing morals (which she did seem to have, briefly) in favor of homicidal hedonism. Ultimate fate: uncertain. Maybe Carcosan gifts, maybe punishment for failing her mission, maybe ascension and new worlds where she can play slasher. Or maybe she’ll wander the barren earth, looking for things to kill so she can get one more orgasm. Mareva: ace, angry about how kyriarchy and abuse have fucked over her family in particular, and about the expectation that women (she and her sister in particular) should reduce themselves to brood mares just because gods say so. Intended to be the mindless magna mater, but holds onto her morals. Refuses her shitty destiny with Erin’s help. Ultimate fate: Immortal and unkillable, wandering what remains of Earth with baby Gregory, looking for food and shelter and survivors. I’m rooting for Mareva, and maybe even Gregory, and against all the super-kyriarchical powers trying to remake Earth in their preferred images. And for more messed-up stories from Snyder. Next week, we travel under other dangerous skies, populated by other leather-winged monsters, in Caitlin Kiernan’s “A Travelogue for Oneironautics.” You can find it in her Bright Dead Star collection. Then in two weeks, join us for our new longread: Stephen Graham Jones’ Buffalo Hunter Hunter![end-mark] Buy the Book Buffalo Hunter Hunter Stephen Graham Jones Buy Book Buffalo Hunter Hunter Stephen Graham Jones Buy this book from: AmazonBarnes and NobleiBooksIndieBoundTarget The post Plan B From Outer Space: Lucy Snyder’s <i>Sister, Maiden, Monster</i> (Part 11) appeared first on Reactor.