The Curator

 
 

The Curator

by Owen King

Scribner

2023

 

 

The Curator is a horror novel that initially masquerades as historical fantasy. Owen King provides us with a kaleidoscopic view of his world, showing rapidly shifting political events through the eyes of people on the ground. He has a large cast, but he returns to each of them enough, and has them run into each other enough, that the effect is a bit like a Dickens novel, or one of those hyperlink cinema movies where each of the lead characters has their own storyline but they all loosely intersect over the course of the film. King also gives us two different monsters, who represent failings of each side of the central conflict.
 

We open in an unnamed city, nicknamed 'Fairest,' where some almost fairytale narration informs us that there's recently been a revolution, and an alliance of workers, students, and homeguard soldiers have nearly bloodlessly routed the entire ruling class, who've all fled for safer environs. In the aftermath, the tripartite provisional government is busy seizing city property and private wealth alike, and redistributing it to the needy. 

 
Dora, a girl born rich, orphaned, and lately working as a maid in the university, manages to adopt the National Museum of the Worker and become the new curator of its wax figurines. Her goal is actually to learn more about her older brother, who died when they were children, but who volunteered at the Society for Psykical Research, and who told her he'd learned there were other worlds, and perhaps survival after death, right before the cholera got him. The Society is next-door to the Museum, but it burned down during the revolt.

 
That mix of the whimsical (the mannequin museum), the supernatural (we see a conjuring trick early on that proves something supernatural is afoot), and the deadly, prosaically serious (the vulnerability of the human body to mundane injury and death), is pretty consistent throughout, though the blend changes and gets darker the longer the book continues.

 
Although King's close third-person narration checks in on many characters, Dora is pretty central. She has a boyfriend who's a student and volunteer in the provisional government, a 'quick boy,' a teenage thief, has a crush on her and helps steal things around the city to refurbish the museum. There's a professional soldier with a grudge against her boyfriend who's decided to rape Dora in revenge, and in the unnamed but obviously America embassy next-door to the museum, a man working for the provisional government tortures servants of the rich to death for information every night, and he feels duty bound to kill his neighbor Dora too just as soon as he has an opening in his busy schedule. It's a volatile mix, certain to explode. Also Dora's search for information about her brother will eventually reveal the truth to her, as well as the basic mechanics of how the central supernatural conceit of the book works, and a form of exploitation that involves the direct transfer of the lives of the poor to the lifespans of the rich.

 
After the revolution, the city is closed but optimistic with anticipation. There's a blockade of royalist soldiers cutting off the main road in, but the home guard outnumber them, and will surely open the city soon, right? We see flashbacks of how the revolution started, endure the long interim period of waiting and dreams deferred that never seems to resolve, and then the sudden collapse of the provisional government as the royalists return in force at the end.

 
King balances the two sides of this conflict well. The city's poor and workers suffered pain, hunger, indignity, and early death under the old regime. The inequality was real and ugly, the urge to correct it, to share the work and rewards more equitably, was admirable. But the new government doesn't know what it's doing and can't do it well, and no amount of good intentions can make up for that. There's no work, food is dwindling, looting and black-marketeering are rampant, and people are going missing. 

 
The torturer is one of the two monsters I mentioned. He embodies the failures of the provisional government, the failure to know what all its members are doing, the failure to deliver the fairer world they promised. The second is a supernatural monster connected to the Society for Psykical Research, who represents the evil of exploitation. Both men fancy themselves hard workers who are doing good, and both are arguably the worst thing to ever happen to the organizations they joined, and definitely the worst things to happen to all the people who meet them, and die for it.

 

The Curator also features a magic doorway, meaningful triangle symbols, and an awful lot of cats, all of which make the cover. There's a whole subplot about a ghost ship collecting the spirits of the dead (mostly torture victims) who will come to the aid of the living in the final act. And in the end, in part through Dora's intervention, we finally do get to see what a fairer version of Fairest might look like.