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Squamous Puzzles: Lucy Snyder’s Sister, Maiden, Monster (Part 7)
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Squamous Puzzles: Lucy Snyder’s Sister, Maiden, Monster (Part 7)
The gods are apparently pleased with Savannah’s murderous new lifestyle…
By Ruthanna Emrys, Anne M. Pillsworth
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Published on November 26, 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 18-20 of Lucy Snyder’s Sister, Maiden, Monster. The book was first published in 2023. Spoilers ahead! Content warnings for sexualized murder, cannibalism, emesis, and extended descriptions of bodily fluids.
Though Savannah has purged her stomach of Tesfaye’s brains, Tesfaye’s memories are now disorientingly mixed with her own. She’s not sure she knows herself anymore.
After wrapping the nurse’s mutilated body in a satin comforter, Savannah deposits her soiled clothes in a trash bag, showers, then selects some of Tesfaye’s clothing to wear. The borrowed items fit well, even the sneakers. Back in the slaughterhouse of a living room, she considers the Herculean task of cleaning up, but she’s too tired to bother. Besides, the cops are “about to be too busy to work this case in a timely fashion. If ever.”
Sipping Tesfaye’s Jamaican coffee, Savannah restarts the Dr. Kaz Chats episode that her victim was watching. A “nerdy woman in a black T-shirt” is explaining the recent uptick in false negative PVG tests. The tests aren’t defective. The problem’s the hugeness of the virus’s genome. Its genes resemble no known cell lineages. Scientists don’t know what most of them do. Maybe pandoraviruses are “a missing link between viruses and bacteria.” Most disturbing is how PVG can alter its surface antigens to get into a host cell; once inside, it can alter its surface antigens again so as to mimic an organelle, like a mitochondrion. Without viral antigens in the host’s body fluids, even PCR tests come back negative.
Kaz’s guest thinks the government’s withholding this information because the remaining way to detect infection is via spinal tap. People already averse to vaccinations are bound to “freak out” at something so painful, dangerous, and expensive. A “political hot potato for sure,” Kaz agrees.
Black T-shirt’s explanation covers part of Savannah’s situation. She knows only what she’s witnessed and what the gods show her: that misery and chaos are means to the gods’ ends, but not what their ends are. “Curiosity itches in [her] like a yeast infection.”
She exits without fussing over DNA evidence. Cops, from her professional experience, aren’t “deep thinkers.” And if a cop did knock on her door, it could be fun to try getting out of trouble despite all red flags, like Jeffrey Dahmer did. She’s certainly not going to “stop herself like Tesfaye’s ghost suggested. She needs to find out what happens next.
* * *
Murdered priest Michael, now archangelic, appears a week later to tell Savannah she’s been a “very good bad girl.” The gods are pleased and have for her a “cryptic little homework assignment” concerning the “future-precious She.” Stopping to purchase a gold crucifix and stock up on cash, Savannah drives southwest to a “flyspeck town” consisting of a rundown motel, a truck stop, a roadhouse, a dingy Baptist church and cemetery, and an abandoned Dairy Queen. She checks into the motel, puts on her crucifix, and heads into the Patriot Tavern, where the decor’s a “mix of neon beer signs, Second Amendment fan art, and Cracker Barrel wall kitsch.” Two “old white men” in biker vests and saggy jeans sit at the bar talking to the bartender, whose burn-scarred hand, arm and face suggest “an accident making home-made napalm.” “Scrubs” to a man. Savannah’s target is a woman around thirty, bespectacled and primly dressed, drinking coffee. She’s also a scrub, but her “bright-edged aura” tells Savannah that she might have become more under better circumstances. She wears an expensive diamond wedding ring. Savannah figures it for one of the goodies an “abusive, possessive” dick used to lure her into marriage.
This woman “stinks of existential tar.” Savannah invites herself over by feigning interest in the woman’s reading. She claims to work for an organization that helps women get out of bad relationships. This sparks the woman, Lee’s, interest. She confides that her husband doesn’t approve of caffeine or fiction, so Patriot Tavern’s her refuge. Kids? Yes, Lee nods wearily. She then agrees to go to “Vanna’s” motel room for a more private conversation.
There Savannah gets Lee tipsy and seduces her into bed for what Savannah intends to be the “best afternoon” of Lee’s life. Despite having six kids, Lee acts like a virgin to sexual bliss; Savannah’s efforts leave her exhausted and murmuring she thinks she’s in love. That declaration costs Savannah a pang. Lee deserves more than she’s gotten from life. Nevertheless, once the woman’s asleep, Savannah pulls a machete from her bag and decapitates her. As is now her norm, murder triggers a near-knockout orgasm. Recovered, she hacks open Lee’s skull and devours her brains.
With them, she ingests Lee’s memory of their tryst, but “untainted by her death.” Whenever she wants, Savannah can relive their “perfect erotic moments.” Much more important: She has gleaned the name, phone number, and address of “the future-precious She.” Once Savannah has done the rest of her “homework,” she’ll know the She better than the She may know herself.
Savannah can’t wait to get her hands on her.
What’s Cyclopean: “Curiosity itches in me like a yeast infection” may be the most vivid comparison I’ve read all year. Gah.
The Degenerate Dutch: Lee’s hiding out from her abusive fundie husband, in a bar that calls masks “face-diapers” and is full of smokers and “Second Amendment fan art.” What a hell of a choice the world has given her.
Weirdbuilding: What did cause that “massive die-off that humanity suffered seventy thousand years ago”? Is this, perhaps, not the first time we’ve been “harvested”?
Libronomicon: Lee’s last book is an Amish romance paperback. Her husband doesn’t approve of reading fiction at all, and definitely wouldn’t approve of this one.
Anne’s Commentary
I thought last week’s story, Caitlin Kiernan’s “Our Lady of Arsia Mons”, would hold the record for most time-eating rabbit holes for a while, but no. While the latest installment of Sister, Maiden, Monster had fewer rabbit holes, each suctioned me deeper and longer into the howling internet wilderness.
I thank Dr. Kaz’s guest, Black T-Shirt, for my first supertextual excursion. She had to discuss pandoraviruses, which already led me astray in an earlier chapter of Snyder’s novel. Tolkien assures us that not all those who wander are lost; of course, that means some of us do tend to hare after references until late into the night when we at last ask ourselves, “Selves, what were we looking for anyway?” Oh, right. Black T-Shirt says that the genes of the PVG pandoravirus “don’t resemble any known cell lineages.” A cell lineage is its developmental history from its parent cell to its final form. I’m not sure how that relates to the uniqueness of the PVG genome; maybe Black T-Shirt means lineage as in phylogeny, which concerns the evolutionary history and relationships among species. In a phylogenetic sense, she seems to be saying PVG isn’t related to any known Earth organism.
I remembered from my previous dive into the pandoravirus rabbit hole that its discoverers, Jean-Michel Claverie, Chantal Abergel, and colleagues, had suggested pandoraviruses were of extraterrestrial origin. Actually, in their July 19, 2013 SCIENCE article, the researchers make no such claim. Some media reports following their announcement jumped on the possibility of alien bugs, including National Geographic’s remark that “Perhaps most striking, 93 percent of pandoraviruses’ 2,500 genes cannot be traced back to any known lineage in nature. In other words, they are completely alien to us.” Ancient Origins headlines its report: “New Giant Virus Found on Earth May Have Ancient Extraterrestrial Orign [sic].” In Geoff Brumfiel’s July 18, 2013 NPR report, it’s suggested that “life could have even come from another planet, like Mars.” About which, Claverie said, “At this point we cannot actually disprove or disregard this type of extreme scenario,” but he adds, “We believe that those new Pandoraviruses have emerged from a new ancestral cellular type that no longer exists.” As to how cells could have turned to viruses, Abergel says that the evolutionary process could have been the ancestral cell’s strategy for surviving as more competitive cells emerged: “On Earth it was winners and it was losers, and the losers could have escaped death by going through parasitism and then infect the winner.”
The extinct cellular type feeds a controversial theory that there could have been a fourth domain of terrestrial life in addition to the recognized Archaea, Bacteria and Eukaryota.
Eugene V. Koonin disagrees. He believes that “These viruses, unusual as they might be, are still related to other smaller viruses.” In a October 23, 2013 report, he and fellow author Natalya Yutin present evidence that “Pandoraviruses are highly derived phycodnaviruses,” and that “giant viruses have independently evolved from smaller NCLDV [nucleocytoplasmic large DNA viruses) on at least two occasions.”
Black T-Shirt contends that the PVG pandoravirus can not only rearrange its surface antigens to get around immune responses, it can once inside a cell rearrange itself to look like a cell organelle. “Ohhh, that’s tricky!” is Dr. Kaz’s response. Right she is—never underestimate the trickiness of PVG. Whether it belongs to a family of giant viruses evolved from an extinct fourth cellular domain or whether it evolved from smaller viruses, the Great Big Truth is that all terrestrial life was created by alien settlers like the star-headed and leather-winged Elder Ones who settled on future Antarctica. We could think of their most infamous creation, the shoggoth, as a REALLY giant virus with REALLY variable “surface antigens.”
The Elder Ones are also known as Elder Things and Old Ones. The REALLY variable nomenclature of Mythosian creatures and deities was the second rabbit hole I fell into this week when I finally, fearfully, tackled just who Snyder means by the “old gods.” In the raging vortex that is Mythos commentary, many beings are sometimes called Old Gods: the Great Old Ones like Cthulhu, Hastur and Ithaqua and the Elder Gods of the expanded (Derlethian) Mythos, including the relatively benevolent deities opposed to the Outer Gods. Speaking of the Outer Gods (though one should not), they’re my pick for Snyder’s old gods. Azathoth, Yog-Sothoth, Shub-Niggurath and their messenger-soul Nyarlathotep are strongly associated with having their “thrones in the dark spaces between the stars” and being “masters of the voids of the cosmos,” which is how both Erin and Savannah perceive them.
At this point, Erin has metamorphosed into a winged monster and flown off to join other monster-minions in caves beyond the city. Savannah retains her human form, the better to walk among other humans as a “slayer of men.” She’s also tasked with gathering information for the old gods, with “angel” Michael as their spokesghost and bearer of commands.
What’s eating me (though I probably shouldn’t use the expression around the characters in this story): If the old gods want Savannah to act as personal medic to their Chosen She, couldn’t they just transfer the requisite knowledge from their Archives? Must she be sent on her own to crudely gobble medical procedures out of her neighbor’s skull? Must she glean the name, address and phone number of the Chosen She from her sister’s machete-exposed gray matter?
Don’t the old gods know how to use people-search apps?
Of course they do. But their intention is obviously to let Savannah prove herself her own bloody way while at the same time earning the violence-triggered jollies that addict her to their service.
I simply wish that instead of letting pass her fleeting gleams of compassion for the victim-discoverers, first responders and cleaning crews, Savannah would pick up after herself a little. She’s probably right that the world’s surging chaos means she doesn’t have to be neat. But, girl! Enough with the grossness already.
Ruthanna’s Commentary
So much of horror is about female rage. King’s early work, in particular, tends toward “What if girls had the power to make their rage dangerous?” Lovecraft tended toward “What if the people we’re oppressing had dangerous powers behind them?” When those on the other end of the pointy stick read this stuff, we might either throw it against the wall, or get power fantasies. Why not, we’ve earned them.
But power corrupts. And power provided by outside forces may be just another mask on exploitation. Or a way to manipulate us, using the worst handles of our own privilege.
Savannah is… failing to learn this lesson. Her well-earned fury—at abuse, patriarchy, Puritan prudery—is entirely justified. And yet, somehow, she keeps killing other victims of the same things that infuriate her. Like her father before her, she prefers weak, convenient targets. And the elder gods are perfectly happy to aim her at those targets, when it suits their purposes. Empowerment is offered only as pure nihilism. The end of the world is coming, and imagining resistance, or rebuilding something better, doesn’t seem to be on the table. Nor has it occurred to her to try, at however long odds, to put it there.
At the story level, then, there’s a double-layer of fury. There are all the current abuses of power, the oppression and exploitation and picking easy targets – and then there’s the way that some people, when given a taste of power, are perfectly happy to find more easy targets to oppress themselves. Why not, we’ve earned it.
Underlining this vicious circle, the shift from Part II to Part III jumps directly from Lee’s murder to the revelation of the information for which she was killed and brain-sucked: how to find her beloved, estranged sister. Mar pushed Leila/Lee away, as a child, afraid that her imagined ghostly twin might take vengeance on her living loved one. And then never confessed, embarrassed by her childhood logic. So Leila found comfort with a love-bombing, fundamentalist older man—though it wasn’t comforting for long. And Savannah—who could, frankly, have helped her get away, and maybe asked about her sister—instead gives her great nookie and then cuts off her head. (And sets aside the memory of the nookie for her own later reassurance.) The elder gods know how to find Lee in a specific anti-masker bar, but not how to find Mar without the intervening murder that would break her heart? I call bullshit.
Especially given the reason that Mar is their capital-S She. Cancer is sacred to the gods—all things considered, I suspect they are cancer. And Mar never had a tumorous twin. Spiritually, she’s not a Sister but a Mother: “Mater Calamitas,” not a difficult translation. She’s “prone to growing chronic benign teratomas.” Not, technically, cancer, but I’m not sure the benign/malign distinction matters to the elder gods—they can make anything malignant. And presumably, they have very specific plans for what she is to grow next. I’m guessing mythosian antichrist.
That was no good for Lavinia Whately, and I don’t expect it to be particularly good for Mar either.
Next week, ghosts don’t have your best interests at heart, either, in Sam J. Miller’s “Courtney Lovecraft’s Book of the Dead.”[end-mark]
The post Squamous Puzzles: Lucy Snyder’s <i>Sister, Maiden, Monster</i> (Part 7) appeared first on Reactor.
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