Review: The Love Song of Numo and Hammerfist, by Maddox Hahn

Russ Allbery eagle at eyrie.org
Sun Mar 24 19:23:30 PDT 2019


The Love Song of Numo and Hammerfist
by Maddox Hahn

Publisher: Maddox Hahn
Copyright: 2018
ISBN:      1-73206-630-2
Format:    Kindle
Pages:     329

Numo is a drake, a type of homunculus created by alchemy from a
mandrake root. He is, to be more precise, a stoker: a slave whose
purpose is to stoke the hypocaust of his owning family. Numo's life is
wood and fires and the colors of flames, not running messages to the
arena for his master. (That may be part of the message his master was
sending.) Falling desperately in love at first sight with an infandus
fighting in the arena is definitely not part of his normal job.

Hammerfist is an infandus, the other type of homunculus. They aren't
made from mandrake root. They're made from humans who have been
sentenced to transmogrification. Hammerfist has had a long and
successful career in the arena, but she's starting to suffer from the
fall, which means she's remembering that she used to be human. This
leads to inevitable cognitive decline and eventually death. In
Hammerfist's case, it also leads to plotting revolution against the
alchemists who make homunculi and use them as slaves.

Numo is not the type to plot revolution. His slave lobe is entirely
intact, which means the idea of disobeying his owners is hard to even
understand. But he is desperately in love with Hammerfist (even though
he doesn't understand what love is), and a revolution would make her
happy, so he'll gamely give it a try.

Numo is not a very good revolutionary, but the alchemists are also not
very bright, and have more enemies than just the homunculi. And Numo is
remarkably persistent and stubborn once he wraps his head around an
idea.

Okay, first, when I say that you need a high tolerance for body horror
to enjoy this book, I am Seriously Not Kidding. I don't think I have
ever read a book with a higher density of maiming, mutilation, torture,
mind control, vivisection, and horrific biological experiments. I spent
most of this book wincing, and more than a few parts were more graphic
than I wanted to read. Hahn's style is light and bubbly and
irrepressible and doesn't dwell on the horror, which helps, but if you
have a strong visual imagination and body integrity violations bother
you, this may not be the book for you.

That said, although this book is about horrible things, this is not a
horror novel. It's a fantasy about politics and revolution, about
figuring out how to go forward after horrible things happen to you,
about taking dramatic steps to take control of your own life, about the
courage to choose truth over a familiar lie, and about how sympathy and
connection and decency may be more important than love. It's also a
book full of gruesome things described in prose like this:

  Her eyes were as red as bellowed embers. Her blood-spattered mane
  stood up a foot or more from her head and neck, cresting between her
  shoulders like a glorious wave of shimmering heat. Her slobbering
  mouth was an orangey oven of the purest fire, a font of wondrousness
  gaping open down to the little iron plate stamped above her
  pendulous bosoms.

and emotions described like this:

  And he'd had enough. Numo was taut as a wire, worn as a cliff face,
  tired as a beermonger on the solstice. One more gust of wind and
  he'd snap like a shoddy laundry pole.

This is the book for simile and metaphor lovers. Hahn achieves a rhythm
with off-beat metaphor and Numo's oddly-polite mental voice that I
found mesmerizing and weirdly cheery.

Except for Numo and Hammerfist, nearly everyone in this book is awful,
even if they don't seem so at first. (And Hammerfist is often so
wrapped up in depression and self-loathing to be kind of awful
herself.) Next to the body horror, that was the aspect of this story I
struggled with the most. But Numo's stubborn determination and
persistent decency pulled me through, helped by the rare oasis of a
supporting character I really liked. Bollix is wonderful (although I'm
rather grumpy about how her story turns out). Sangja isn't exactly
wonderful — he can be as awful to others as most of the people in this
story — but for me he was one of the most sympathetic characters and
the one I found myself rooting for.

(I'm going to be coy about Sangja's nature and role, since I think it's
a spoiler, but I greatly appreciated the way Hahn portrayed Sangja in
this book. He is so perfectly and exactly fits the implications of his
nature in this world, and the story is entirely matter-of-fact about
it.)

Hahn said somewhere on-line (which I cannot now find and therefore
cannot get exactly right) that part of the motivation for this story
was the way the beast becomes human at the end of Beauty and the Beast
stories, against all of our experience in the real world. Harm and
change isn't magically undone; it's something that you still have to
live with past the end of the story. This is, therefore, not a purely
positive good-triumphs type of story, but I found the ending touching
and oddly satisfying (although I wish the cost hadn't been so high).

I am, in general, dubious of the more extravagant claims about the
power of self-publishing to bypass gatekeepers, mostly because I think
traditional publishing gatekeepers do a valuable job for the reader.
This book is one of the more convincing exceptions I've seen. It's a
bit of a sprawling mess in places and it doesn't pull together the
traditional quest line, which combined with the body horror outside the
horror genre makes it hard for me to imagine a place for it in a
traditional publishing line-up. But it's highly original, weirdly
delightful, and so very much itself that I'm glad I read it even if I
had to wince through it.

This is, to be honest, not really my thing, and I'm not sure I'd read
another book just like it. But I think some people with more interest
in body horror than I do are going to love this book, and I'm not at
all unhappy I read it. If you want your devoted, odd, and angstful
complex love story mixed with horrific images, gallows humor, and
unexpected similes, well, there aren't a lot of books out there that
meet that description. This is one. Give it a try.

Rating: 6 out of 10

Reviewed: 2019-03-24

-- 
Russ Allbery (eagle at eyrie.org)              <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>


More information about the book-reviews mailing list