Cozy Carnage

The Adventures of Horus & Motherfucker: A review

Content warning: I don’t usually do these, but I know there are people out there who read substacks on the work wi-fi, or get robots to read posts aloud to them or something. Those people, and also those who are not into graphically violent fantasy fiction, should know that this review contains descriptions of graphic violence and includes the word “dickmonster” 12 times.

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Nepenthes mirabilis

Nothing turns me off a book faster than the promise that it will be cozy. This is a marketing term that denotes a work with…

…well. I was going to say low stakes, but that isn’t it. I read a cozy novel for a book club recently and it started out with a murder. By the end of the book the fate of a planet hung in the balance. You can have Marvel-movie universe-destroying stakes in a cozy novel, if that’s what you’re into.

Nor is cozy fiction necessarily low conflict. Characters in cozy books are free to engage in punch-ups and dangle off of cliffsides. Like this book club novel I read—a guy gets chained to a radiator and interrogated in that book. There’s a climactic knife fight. Our heroes have to escape from a spaceship explosion. Still, I ground through the whole thing like a kid who can’t leave the table until she’s finished her broccoli, so bored I turned to loathing just to feel something.

To me, the word “cozy” on the back of the book says: Don’t worry. We understand narrative tension can be stressful for someone like you. Therefore we assure you that the people you like will make it to the end of this book, and the people you don’t like will not. It will be obvious which characters you’re supposed to like and which ones you aren’t. Everybody good will be relatable. You are in this book, beloved buyer, and you are good.

I detest this. I feel insulted when an author assumes my fragility. I hate being marketed to on the basis of relatability. No coincidence that so much fiction aimed at women is marketed for coziness—somehow it became the case in the past few years that any woman being less than fully understandable and fully understood, within and without the fiction, is oppressive, and therefore disallowed.

All this to say: E Rathke’s new sword-and-sorcery novel, The Adventures of Horus & Motherfucker, made me understand what people like in cozy fiction, and that is an unambiguous compliment.¹

I was alone at home for most of Christmas Eve. Luxurious and rare these days—a stretch of three hours with no house chores in it, no social obligations, no errands. Outside it was dark and cold and spitting rain at a halfhearted angle. Midmorning I put on my warmest sweater, made myself a cup of herbal tea, curled up on the chaise in the study, threw the blanket over my legs, and turned on the reading lamp.

I read the early scene in which Horus and Motherfucker, filthy and diseased ex-slaves, murder an entire family on the road. It’s gruesome, I’ll just tell you. It is gratuitously gruesome. Jesus Christ, I thought, taking a sip of Evening in Missoula (chamomile, rosehips, papaya leaf, peppermint). She just hacked that woman’s legs off!

A chapter or two later, Motherfucker, who is coming into her own as a kind of psychotic theologian, decides that her failure to cannibalize the woman whose legs she hacked off is causing a god she just made up to send bad weather. At that point I began to understand what I was dealing with, what the remaining trajectory of this book was going to be. I will not say it was predictable, because, uh, it was not predictable. But predictability is not what makes cozy fiction cozy.

This year I read Kentaro Miura’s horror-fantasy manga Berserk, which has its big bloody fingerprints all over Horus and Motherfucker’s world. Miura drew and published Berserk for almost thirty years, and while his art and his narrative sensibilities evolved and matured, he never got over his joy at drawing a full-page spread of a giant man-eating monster made out of pulsating genitalia. There were appalling dickmonsters in Berserk vol. 1 in 1989, and there were appalling dickmonsters in the last omnibus published before Miura’s untimely death in 2021. He didn’t finish Berserk—there were more dickmonsters waiting in the wings, I’m sure.²

What happens is that when you’ve seen your thousandth dickmonster over the course of hundreds of chapters, they lose their immediate power to appall you. You find yourself reading around the dickmonsters, because that’s where the story is. Ah, here goes our beloved cast of ragtag heroes, fighting an appalling dickmonster—oh, this is a seafaring dickmonster. Wonderful. Anyway, how will this fight complicate our heroes’ path to their goal, which lies on the other side of the Dickmonster Sea? Will we see an earlier shift in a character relationship expressed in this fight? Will we learn something new about the mysterious forces inflicting a plague of dickmonsters on the world? Will someone we thought was bad turn out to have a heroic streak, or someone we thought was good fail to rise to the occasion? Will someone we’ve come to care about get hurt?

The story would not be the story without the appalling dickmonsters. One reads on neither in spite of them, nor because of them. But over time the reader learns the shape of what can happen around the dickmonsters, the particular shades of expectation and subversion that attend their appearance in the text. The feeling one experiences seeing the first one explode onto the page, flailing obscenely, fades; after a while the eye skims over the geysers of blood bursting from the ends of hundreds of severed penis-appendages, moves past the spectacle and finds the emotional moment underlying the spectacle.

When crazy-eyed Motherfucker says to Horus, “Maybe now we’re being punished for not eating her,” I had an inkling, not of what bad things were going to happen, but of where the real story would be. It was not for me to approve or disapprove of Motherfucker, to hope that she would not do something so horrible, that Horus or God or somebody’s mom would stop her. Motherfucker had told me something important about the bounds of her moral world, and the outer limits of what I could expect from her. Now I could rest easy in the knowledge that things would get worse, as Motherfucker had prophesied.

Rathke is both generous with his worldbuilding details and generous in his assurances that you do not need to worry about them. There’s some kind of big international fantasy drama happening somewhere in this world, well outside the limits of Horus and Motherfucker’s understanding. It doesn’t matter, except to draw a bolder dividing line between them and the reality of their situation. “Reality” is like any other character in the book—it meets our heroines on the road, and the reader sits back and waits to see whether or not Horus and Motherfucker are in a killing mood that day. It doesn’t matter the same way it doesn’t matter whether Horus and Motherfucker see each other as parent and child, or sisters, or something stranger and less cleanly defined. It’s fine for the question to come under narrative consideration, but it would be ridiculous to expect an answer.

So, free from obligation, I settled in for shit to get real fucked up, real fast, and I grinned like a loon when it did. I threw myself into caring about this story like I was in the crowd at a wrestling show: Ready to love whatever happened as long as it went big, ready to cheer for any absurd twist as long as a character I loved wanted me to cheer. This book has a big heart, for all the bodily fluids. I enjoyed the Berserk-esque dickmonster fights, I laughed aloud at the sheer gratuity of the carnage in places, but Rathke splashes these things onto the page and then guides the eye expertly past them to the emotional moment beneath. The gore and peril were great, but my greatest delight was in Horus and Motherfucker sitting beside the fire together at the end of a hard day on the road, bitching at each other, gnawing on fingerbones, hashing out the contours of Motherfucker’s insane theology. Sometimes holding each other.

To the cozy fiction readers: I get it now. I’m sorry I didn’t understand. My definition of “coziness” was too limited; my assumptions about its appeal were unkind. The three hours I spent curled up under a blanket with Horus and Motherfucker were my Hallmark movie, my therapeutic fanfiction. It turns out it’s a wonderful thing sometimes, to settle in with a story that lays its cards on the table for you.

I loved the time I spent in Horus and Motherfucker’s disgusting little world. I will revisit these horrendous girls in the future when the established order of real things sits a little too heavy on me, when I feel too much the pressure to be fully understandable and fully understood. Rathke says in his afterword he plans to write more about them, and I hope he does – when the next Kickstarter goes up I’ll be there with bells on. Or a bracelet made out of human teeth. Whichever.

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“You got a life, Horus. You’re alive. Your life can be anything now. There’s no pit or masters or anything to fear.”

Horus shrugged, “But that’s the thing. I got all that. I got the whole life waiting for me. And that’s it. Just life. Ain’t no purpose or meaning for me except to live my life. Every day is a new day and a new chance to not be tested on what my life is meant to be. My life’s just meant to be this.” She threw her arm around Motherfucker’s shoulder. “And you.”

1. Publication of the book was funded through Kickstarter. You can probably follow the author to find out about when and where it might be made more widely available.

2. As the poet said: “I can’t give everything away.” Rest in peace, Miura-sensei.