Harrow the Ninth

The Second Book’s Task

Series second books face an impossible brief. They must deliver on what the first book promised while developing the world and characters further; they must maintain the distinctive voice while evolving it; they must reward returning readers while not simply repeating. Most series second books succeed at some of these requirements and fail at others.

Harrow the Ninth does something different: it uses the second book’s position to execute a structural manoeuvre that recontextualises the first book completely, advances Harrow as a character in ways that Gideon’s narration couldn’t allow, and delivers formal innovation that the first book’s more conventional structure didn’t attempt.

It is also very difficult in its first half. This is not an accident.

The Fractured Narrator

The novel follows Harrowhark after the events of Gideon the Ninth — she has become a Lyctor, one of the Emperor’s immortal saint-soldiers, and she is now inhabiting the court of the First House (the empire’s seat of power) alongside other new and old Lyctors. Her mind is fragmenting in ways she cannot fully understand. The memories she should have are not the memories she does have. Reality keeps presenting her with inconsistencies.

Muir narrates Harrow’s sections in second person (“you do this, you see that”), which creates an unusual relationship between narrator and reader — you are Harrow, and you are also watching Harrow, and the disjunction between those positions is the formal expression of Harrow’s psychological situation.

The unreliable narration here is not the thriller variety (character is lying) or the straightforward variety (character is confused). It is something more technically interesting: the narrator’s psyche has actively restructured her memories to protect herself from something unbearable, and the novel is structured so that the reader gradually recognises what the restructuring has been hiding.

The Structural Twist

Without spoiling the specific revelation, Harrow the Ninth contains a structural twist that operates at the level of the first book rather than the second — it recontextualises not just events in this novel but events in Gideon the Ninth. On first read, the disorientation in the early chapters is confusing; on re-read, with knowledge of the twist, the early chapters read as extraordinarily precise.

This is the mark of a genuinely successful structural innovation: it changes what came before without making what came before feel retroactively cheated. The revised reading of Gideon the Ninth is better for having Harrow the Ninth’s context.

Harrow as Protagonist

Where Gideon’s voice was sardonic and outwardly directed, Harrow’s is inward and architectural — a person who has built elaborate internal structures to manage everything she feels. The second person narration mirrors this: Harrow is addressing herself in a way that keeps even her own consciousness at a careful distance.

What Harrow is suppressing, and why, and what it costs her, is the novel’s emotional subject. The horror and the fantasy mechanics are the vehicle; the grief and the love buried underneath them is the content.

The Court of the Emperor

The First House setting is richly imagined and provides the novel’s surface narrative: court politics among the Lyctors, the Emperor’s peculiar domestic arrangements, the threats that Harrow must navigate while her mind is compromised. This material is engaging on its own terms, and it develops the world of the Locked Tomb series with the specific detail that a second volume can afford.

Our rating: 4.4/5 — The most formally ambitious novel in the series. The structural twist is genuinely extraordinary, the unreliable narration is sophisticated, and the emotional core rewards the difficulty.