[book post] The Echo Wife by Sarah Gailey

[queenlua]

The jacket copy for this book makes it sound pretty damn compelling:

Martine is a genetically cloned replica made from Evelyn Caldwell's award-winning research. She's patient and gentle and obedient. She's everything Evelyn swore she'd never be.

And she's having an affair with Evelyn's husband[, Nathan].

Now, the cheating bastard is dead, and both Caldwell wives have a mess to clean up.

Good thing Evelyn Caldwell is used to getting her hands dirty.

Too bad it, uh, almost entirely whiffs the execution!

The setup for the inciting incident is like so:

* Evelyn is a fuckoff hot-shit #girlboss bioscience researcher who's done a bunch of pivotal work in the area of human cloning.

* Her husband Nathan is also a bioscience researcher, but he's more feelsy/needy.

* In particular, he'd kinda like to have a kid sometime, and Evelyn definitely does NOT want that.

* So, Nathan decides to secretly buy a second house, makes a clone of Evelyn, names the clone Martine, and knocks Martine up.

* Evelyn finds out; Nathan moves out; they divorce.

* Later, Martine and Evelyn meet in a cafe; Evelyn is tetchy and bitchy and asks Martine, "what are you even for?" And this question rattles Martine so much that, when she goes home, she asks Nathan what would happen if she didn't want this kid after all, actually—

* And then Nathan declares that she's defective and tries to kill her—

* So then Martine stabs and kills him in self-defense.

* And, not knowing literally anyone else, Martine calls Evelyn to ask for help.

So far so good, but from this point onward, the continuity and/or logic and/or idiot ball errors kept piling up:

* Evelyn and Martine decide to bury the body in the backyard. Which seems a little, uh, yikes-risky (it's unclear on whether there's neighbors who might see? but Evelyn and Martine don't seem to wait until nightfall or anything like that? also the narration seems to imply digging a grave as a lone person is a breezy 1-3 hour task when that is ABSOLUTELY NOT THE CASE??), but I can allow some illogic/panic in the heat of the moment...

* But then Evelyn just... leaves? without her and Martine agreeing on a plan? So there's two weeks where Martine just tells everyone who calls that Nathan's sick, or on a trip to the mountains, and like... man you'd think they'd agree to some kind of story! for consistency's sake yaknow! You obviously can't have a disappearance overlooked forever?

* Anyway, after those two weeks, they decide they need to make a clone of Nathan. Fine, sure. A fun enough premise.

* In the course of the cloning work, we're treated to some pretty good narrative creepiness when we learn that, in the course of her research, Evelyn has done some pretty fucked-up shit to clones. That, in order to shape them toward particular ends, she must "condition" them (break bones, cut them open to make scars, and other forms of violence). And, once a clone has served their purpose, the "specimen" is "neutralized." Clones aren't people, Evelyn sternly tells us.

It's a cool effect... but doesn't seem to hold up to even the minutest amount of scrutiny. Like, I remember the huge moral panic when Dolly the sheep was cloned when I was really little, and that was a fucking sheep. If cloning technology developed to the point where we could clone full-ass humans, with the same age/memories the original had at the time the DNA sample was obtained, like, of course there would be laws around that kind of thing! We have laws for fucking stem cells! Even if we allow there's some kind of radical shift in public opinion that makes it where "oh murdering human clones is 100% fine and 100% mundane and they're 100% not people," I feel like you have to mention that? e.g. just some random sentence that says "after the Clones Are Not People Act of 2040 was passed, discussion of the matter was all but verboten" or whatever.

(More on this later.)

* The book's REALLY inconsistent and vague on what sort of memories and skills clones retain from their original bodies, versus which ones are lost. For instance, when Evelyn asks Martine if she can read, Martine snippily replies of course she can; that's the first thing Nathan taught her. But, later on, when they make a clone-Nathan and send him straight back to his job as a tenured biosciences professor, it... seems to work fine? no one notices any problems? what?

* So when clone!Nathan awakens and asks where his wife is, and then the chapter ends, I thought that was just... them ending the chapter on a "yay the cloning was successful" kind of note?

Except it was NOT meant to read that way; the next chapter opens with Evelyn and Martine freaking out because oh fuck he's asking for his wife, how could we have overlooked this, ah what the fuck is one of us going to have to act like we're his wife and play it cool? And uhh... guys, you literally had full control over all the memories this guy had? I understand you're trying to play it off as a "oh geez" kind of fuckup by lampshading it this way, but the process of making a clone takes months. You had ample time to fucking think this one through, come on.

* Near the end of the book, once Martine has birthed her child and is living with clone!Nathan, Martine discovers twelve other clones of herself, all corpses, buried in the backyard. She and Evelyn deduce that these twelve other women were all "failed" earlier Martines, who were each killed by Nathan when they were found unsuitable in some way.

(which does beg the question of how the fuck did they dig a whole entire grave in that very same backyard for original!Nathan without stumbling on one of these twelve other corpses, how fucking big is this backyard supposed to be, god i know it's a small thing but THESE INCONSISTENCIES JUST KEPT PILING UP...,,,)

Evelyn is, inexplicably, horrified by this. Remember how we were treated, much earlier in the narrative, to Evelyn's unflinching self-justification for why killing clones isn't like killing a person, really?

She hasn't, uh, exactly done a ton of introspection on the flaws in that position. There's no kind of "wow I have been doing the same shitty thing Nathan was doing" kind of revelation. Instead we learn that, see, when Nathan kills clones it's different:

[The clones] weren't women. They weren't people. They weren't me.

They were specimens, subjects, bodies, corpses, cadavers, failures, data points. They were biowaste.

But to Nathan, they had been women.

He hadn't created them with a single function in mind. They weren't there to absorb bullets, grow organs, host experimental therapies. They were supposed to be wives. He had created them to live alongside him. Incomplete lives, maybe, but he probably hadn't seen it that way. He'd bought a house, and clothes, and rose bushes for the garden. He'd been trying to make a home and a life with each one of the clones he built, just like he'd tried to make a home and a life with me.

There wasn't a notebook with my name on it. But the reality was that Nathan hadn't thought of me as a different kind of thing than the specimens he buried in his backyard. To him, we were all iterations of the same experiment. We were all vehicles to carry his dreams.

There hadn't been twelve attempts prior to Martine. There had had been thirteen.

I was his first failure.

Like, this passage is clearly meant to have a mic-drop-like quality but, I dunno, I couldn't help but get pissed at Evelyn somehow making this about her?

Like, Evelyn was not created in a lab! In all the flashbacks we get of Evelyn and Nathan's relationship, it's honestly usually Evelyn who comes out looking worse—she resents all his bids for attention as him being "needy," and she not only does she not want a kid (which is fine), but shuts him down so hard and fast whenever he mentions wanting one that it, uh, really makes you wonder if she gives a shit about his feelings whatsoever (which is less fine). He's not manipulative or abusive toward her in return. I'd read their thing as a case of unfortunate incompatibility—if one partner wants a kid and the other doesn't, that's just an impasse, right—and of course him making a bunch of clones to replace her is fucked, but we haven't seen her acting awful toward Evelyn in any way, beyond the act of cheating. Seems like a bit of stolen valor, yaknow.

And it's not like Evelyn has much of a revelation later. In the final chapter, when we learn that Evelyn, Martine, and the baby are all living together in the countryside, Evelyn tells us:

I don't intend to keep [Martine] hidden away, the way Nathan did. I just don't have a plan yet for how to let her out into the world, for how to give her the freedoms she wants without endangering all of us. I'll get it figured out, though, in time. I just need to focus on my research right now. She understands.

It's hard not to read this and think that the logic as inherently self-serving. We're vaguely told that clones legally aren't people and that Martine's existence isn't recorded anywhere, but the worldbuilding is so half-assed we don't have any clear idea of what that means, exactly.

What's more clearly spelled out is that, if Martine's existence becomes public, Evelyn's research funding will be in danger because there will be an ethics inquiry of some kind (clones aren't supposed to be able to get pregnant for some reason?). When Evelyn elects to help Martine bury the body, that's pretty much the only reason driving her.

So, gee, how convenient for her that she can continue to keep Martine's existence quiet, but it's fine because she'll "get it figured out" eventually? and meanwhile continue to dodge any comeuppance or consequences for her actions?

The implications of this are vastly more monstrous than I think Gailey actually realizes.

It all wound up giving me the same kind of heebie-jeebies that that damn Becky Chambers book did. It's the same fundamentally fickle way in which people are classed as either Elect or Damned. Ugh. Ugh!

Anyway.

The book is vague about all this shit because at the end of the day Gailey does not want to write a science-fiction novel. Gailey wants to write a sort of wee-woo metaphor for "what if your life was totally different and/or the circumstances you were raised under were totally different." (The narrative's at its strongest whenever we flash back to Evelyn's childhood, where we see the ways in which her doormat mother and her cruel father shaped the person she's become.)

And there's abundant precedent for good scifi-as-metaphor, scifi-as-thought-experiment, scifi-that-is-deliberately-handwaving-the-actual-science. But (but!!!), you can't do this wibbly-wobbly halfway thing. You can't gesture vaguely at stuff like "legally clones aren't people" and not actually examine the obvious implications of that premise. You don't have to mire yourself in the science-y gobbledegook, it doesn't have to be the focus of your story, but you do have to know the answers and be consistent about it. (Nancy Kress's Beggars in Spain, for an off-the-top-of-my-head example, clearly mostly wants to examine the relationship between two sisters, but all the science and societal stuff is deftly and confidently and concisely addressed.) Or you just never mention any of that stuff because of the questions it invites. In-between is the danger zone!

I mean, did this bug anyone else? I felt like I was going crazy skimming the Goodreads reviews for this thing; couldn't seem to find anyone QUITE as vexed as I was.

Anyway, here's a bunch of other inconsistencies that drove me crazy but didn't fit neatly in the regaling-the-plot outline above:

* Very early in the book, Evelyn laments that she's stuck with her husband's last name forever, even post-divorce, because they got married so early that all her published work, including her doctoral dissertation, was done under his last name. Later on, we get a lengthy description of her first post-doctoral-thesis job... a year before she met Nathan. That's... not possible? pick one?? (This may seem like a nitpick but it did genuinely throw me. Evelyn's marriage to Nathan was not happy; we get multiple flashbacks to it; and it does color my perception of all those interactions whether she was "cluelessly-madly-in-love-22-year-old" versus "a goddamn PhD who's likely 28-30 and already seen a lot of shit in her line of work." And if the author can't keep that story straight, it doesn't make me super-confident that they have a strong idea what exactly that relationship was like...!)

* Evelyn makes multiple references to how Nathan was too "weak" for industry and cowarded out to academia, and then we find out what he "cowarded" out to was... a tenured professorship? Uh, I don't know... anyone who looks on tenured academia as "lesser than" industry? (More often the opposite, actually?) I couldn't tell if this was meant to just show how much contempt Evelyn had for literally everything Nathan did, or if the author just didn't understand prestige hierarchies in science, or if I was missing something with prestige hierarchies in science (I asked a couple scientist-friends and they were all equally puzzled fwiw).

* Also Evelyn runs her extremely fancy award-winning research lab with... exactly one assistant? lmao

anyway i'm gonna undermine all my credibility by pointing out this book sort of set itself up to answer the "would you fuck your clone" question & it does have some lowkey vibes between Martine and Evelyn & honestly if the book's answer had been "yes absolutely" I would've been like "this book was bad but there was surprising and fun yuri in the end, would read." but it didn't. so: 0/10 on execution, 0/10 on selfcest, all adds up to a would not recommend lol

in conclusion i do not recommend The Echo Wife by Sarah Gailey

Comments

[ambyr]

I have passionately hated everything I’ve read by Gailey and nothing about descriptions of this book made me think I’d feel any differently about it, so I skipped it. But I enjoyed your second-hand irritation!

[queenlua]

I only realized after finishing this book that I'd read exactly one other thing by Gailey, the short story "STET". Which I hated :D;;;; this certainly did not make me curious for any other Gailey fiction, haha

[sushiflop]

STET left me so cold besides mild feelings of "cool format trick," I love hate reviews, can I ask what you hated? :D

Also this books sounds like it falls deep, deep into the pitfall of a very protagonist centered morality without realizing that's what it's doing... I absolutely despise that trope and this execution of it sounds pretty infuriating.

[queenlua]

oh gosh, it's been so long since i read STET, and that was (tragically) before i was in the habit of typing up hater-ly thoughts after i read shit...

my primary beef was that it felt very, uh, Twitter Argumentation? in that i felt like the story wanted us to side with the article-writer, because she was the Most Outraged, and had been Wronged, and therefore it's not only proper but right for her to write this textbook chapter in this maximally-skewed, snarky fashion, and the people trying to edit her are, like, The System keeping her from speaking truth to power, man.

i... would be pretty hostile to this premise no matter what. all the meme-discussion of "the trolley problem" that was in vogue at the time was deeply stupid, and while there is

like—okay, i just popped it open and reread it, and what the fuck is this:

You’re smart enough to need to spend hundreds of dollars on a textbook that’s drier than a Toyota executive’s apology. You want to do this shit for a living, probably. You don’t care about Ursula or me or telescopes or any of it, and you don’t care about a woodpecker, you just want to see what you can make go and how fast you can do it. She just wanted to look at the fucking sky. Can a woodpecker look at the sky and wonder what’s past the clouds? That’s what you need a textbook about, you idiot, that’s what you need to be learning about. None of the rest of it matters. None of it matters at all if you don’t know that Carter’s Woodpecker doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter. It never mattered.

that's not a fucking argument. that's a bizarrely mean-spirited assumption about whoever's reading this AI textbook (maybe the reader wants to pass laws to regulate or prohibit AI and wants to understand the topic? maybe they think there's a way to engineer these cars to be safer? safer than human-driven cars, at least? maybe they would like an independent, evenhanded accounting of the subject material so they can make up their own goddamn mind about how to feel about AI? yelling at them isn't going to do a goddamn lick of good; it's just going to make them wonder what unhinged person wrote this chapter and go buy a textbook that isn't trying to bowl them over with pathos and guilt them into having the same PoV as the author without being allowed to consider the facts on their own at all whatsoever. it's fucking stupid anti-intellectual twitterbrained logic, as though taking time to consider the facts is somehow incompatible with being stirred to action by injustice and grief, as though truth and knowledge is not an ally to any rightly-conceived justice.

i'm sorry her kid died; that sucks. she clearly deserves some form of comfort and justice. an unhinged screed in a textbook that's obviously going to get edited out isn't going to give her any of that.

AUGH.

okay that's like the main thrust of my distaste for the story. it also, much like The Echo Wife, just has a bunch of inconsistencies that don't hold up under the barest scrutiny and make the whole thing way more confusing than it needs to be?

off-the-top-of-my-head list:

* i don't actually believe a car-driving algorithm would value a woodpecker's life over a kid's actually. and if it did i assume they'd change the fucking program and acknowledge it as a huge fuckup and try to make restitution to the mom

* why is the author, in particular, writing this textbook chapter? she mentions learning how to read the AI code for the car during bereavement leave, which implies she didn't... know how to read that kind of thing before? also, if it's such a personal raw subject, couldn't she, y'know. request to write some other chapter. or something. maybe she's an AI researcher, but in that case i'd expect her to have more specific disagreements—professional outrage, hold something against the Toyota programmers in particular, instead of this screed against the entire concept of AI (most AI researchers, shocker, don't hate literally all AI in all contexts).

* why didn't the editor go to the kid's funeral? i think we're supposed to assume "oh the editor feels guilty because they feel complicit" but... why would they feel that? they're a random fucking editor for a textbook company; they probably edit a lot of fucking textbooks; there's no reason to think any of their specific textbooks caused the death of the kid; and even if they did, wouldn't that make them... more likely... to come to the funeral? out of guilt?

anyway. bad story. can't believe it got a hugo nomination

(the formatting was neat! too bad it was the only thing going for it :D;;;)

((also, "protagonist centered morality"—WHAT a good phrase, that's exactly it, and i am keeping that phrase in my back pocket now!))

[sushiflop]

I loved this review. I loved it. Before I read this review I was like a fish suffocating, flopping on land. After I read this review I was a fish in the water, comfortable and content.

in that i felt like the story wanted us to side with the article-writer, because she was the Most Outraged, and had been Wronged, and therefore it's not only proper but right for her to write this textbook chapter in this maximally-skewed, snarky fashion, and the people trying to edit her are, like, The System keeping her from speaking truth to power, man.

God this really did put it into words didn't it! I am not going to lie, one of the things I remember about STET is that I was a little indignant because actually, while I am sorry about this author's kid, I do think that woodpeckers still matter and agree that the narrator was not in the right place to be writing a textbook lmao

Anyway yeah. STET was all emotional appeal, as I recall, and very little actual logical underpinning to drive the emotions home. Sort of like eating a cake that's all frosting and no cake... I love frosting very much but it's more delicious with some pastry under it.

Protagonist-centered morality is one of my most hated tropes. Glad to have furnished you with the phrase!

[queenlua]

and i am glad to have furnished you with water in which to swim, haha!

[hamsterwoman]

Ahaha, was coming here to say pretty much exactly this :P Including enjoying the rant!

In my case, "everything I've read by Gailey" that I passionately hated is River of Teeth and "STET". It's been 5+ years and I'm still mad about both of them. ETA: Oh, right, and Upright Women Wanted. Which was less than 5 years ago and I'm less mad at it since I managed to forget it, but which I still strongly disliked.

[chocochipbiscuit]

Just jumping in to go OH THANK FUCK IT’S NOT JUST ME. Upright Women Wanted was of those concepts that sounds really interesting in theory but just got whiffed on the execution. (I still kind of want to try River of Teeth but that'll definitely be a library borrow rather than purchase.)

[hamsterwoman]

I'm sorry to say that IMO River of Teeth has the same failure mode of a cool concept in theory that was completely ruined for me by the execution. If you're curious, my write-up of River of Teeth is here, and there's a non-spoilery bit at the top before I get into spoilers. (But in fairness, I do also know people who loved this book, so YMMV!)

[rionaleonhart]

I'm sorry you had a bad time with this book, but I had a great time reading your complaints about it, so at least something good came out of it! (...for me.) I love Evelyn going 'killing clones is totally fine WAIT NO NOT WHEN YOU DO IT.'

[queenlua]

i am indeed glad my irritation could be someone else's joy!!! :D

[kradeelav]

that's pretty bad when karen traviss of SW:EU fame handled clones/legal rights thereof better :D;

with ya on how selfcest would have made this salvageable LOL. i think i see the twitter vibes in here as well which is mildly humorous.

[queenlua]

torn between "i could go write the selfcest i want to see in the world, ao3 is NOT delivering" and "if i think about this book any longer than i have to i will start tearing random objects apart" hahaha

[hamsterwoman]

It all wound up giving me the same kind of heebie-jeebies that that damn Becky Chambers book did. It's the same fundamentally fickle way in which people are classed as either Elect or Damned. Ugh. Ugh!

Yeah -- I definitely find this to be a "feature" of Gailey's writing, which bugs me a lot. It also bugs me in Becky Chambers, but sometimes she has enough other things going on (neat worldbuilding, fun characters) that I enjoy the book overall. That's never happened with Gailey, though... Admittedly, it also did not happen with Chambers' last book I read, which makes me sad that I think she's getting worse about this instead of better. Alas.

[queenlua]

Admittedly, it also did not happen with Chambers' last book I read, which makes me sad that I think she's getting worse about this instead of better

oh NOOOoooo.... so sad when authors do Less Of The Thing That Makes Them Good and more of the Bad Stuff, alas indeed!

[necrophilia]

Reading this made me miss Orphan Black.

[queenlua]

i have never heard of this show, should i watch this show

[necrophilia]

It's really solid! Sci-fi mystery with some gritty elements, doesn't overstay its welcome. If you've ever want to see one extremely talented woman carry sixteen different characters on her back and not be an SNL cast member, it's the show to go to.

[ioplokon]

YES

[queenlua]

A COMPELLING ARGUMENT. onto the list it goes!

[ioplokon]

Also Evelyn runs her extremely fancy award-winning research lab with... exactly one assistant? lmao
Tbf much easier to do unethical research with only 1 assistant (fewer witnesses)!

Evelyn makes multiple references to how Nathan was too "weak" for industry and cowarded out to academia, and then we find out what he "cowarded" out to was... a tenured professorship?
Yeah, definitely seems misguided. I guess probably the idea is that industry is more cutthroat which, lol, and further, lmao.

she not only does she not want a kid (which is fine), but shuts him down so hard and fast whenever he mentions wanting one
Idk, I do kind of think this is the most ethical way to go about it if your partner wants a kid and you don't. Not that you need to be a jerk about it, but you probably should be unambiguous. It's kind of a time-sensitive thing so like, better for them to leave the relationship than for them to hang around hoping you'll change your mind? Which is the other thing... genuinely, why would he not just have a normal affair and secret family, the good old-fashioned way? The cloning thing adds so many complications...

If cloning technology developed to the point where we could clone full-ass humans, with the same age/memories the original had at the time the DNA sample was obtained, like, of course there would be laws around that kind of thing!
Yes, and it's especially weird that the clones look human. On the practical side, our shape is kind of generalist & so not really "the best" at any one thing. But also, I imagine it would make it easier to justify mistreating clones if they looked different. It probably would have been a better story if Evelyn were fine with, for example, creating the Tleilax tanks, but not something that looks and sounds like a human (or if the story were more upfront with the fact that she only cares because this clone looks like her).

Martine discovers twelve other clones of herself, all corpses, buried in the backyard.
Now I'm thinking how this could have been restructured to be more explicitly a riff on the Bluebeard story. I think if Gailey wanted to tell a story of "what if your circumstances were different", it may have been better to tell it from Martine's point of view as she realizes everything she was denied in order to make her who she is... From Evelyn's, the most salient thing is the monstrousness of instrumentalizing people & it's hard to get to anything beyond that (& also, maybe you shouldn't?)

[queenlua]

Idk, I do kind of think this is the most ethical way to go about it if your partner wants a kid and you don't.

Yeah, ambiguity is no good, but when Nathan mentions the kid thing Evelyn says, "Just because you're bored with my career doesn't mean I'm giving up mine," and ends the discussion there, which... lmao that just seems such a mean-spirited way to put it, and when she does find out about Martine's pregnancy, she acts SHOCKED because "I knew I didn't want a kid; I thought Nathan agreed" and it's like lmao no you didn't girl! I mean, I GET it, it's honestly pretty well done from an understandable-human-psychology perspective—"I'm going to shut down this line of discussion immediately whenever it comes up, and thus pretend to myself that we agreed on this, because having an honest conversation and facing the fact we have incompatible desires is too scary" is a very real thing that happens! But it does make it a little harder for me to see Nathan as a dick on that specific basis, haha.

(and yeah agreed a normie affair would've been much easier...)

It probably would have been a better story if Evelyn were fine with, for example, creating the Tleilax tanks, but not something that looks and sounds like a human (or if the story were more upfront with the fact that she only cares because this clone looks like her).

Yeah, there's some very vague allusions to potential defense industry contracts, but the only specific example we get for industrial use of clones is "what if I need to create a body double for the president so the assassin's bullet takes out that guy instead of the president." Which is sort of a fun idea-space to play around with, but does smash face-first into the "isn't that basically creating a human" problem, since I'm not sure how you'd make a clone that acts convincingly-presidential-enough without giving them some level of sentience, and now you're clearly in "ethical can of worms" territory. (Agreed it would've worked MUCH better if it was all tank-y supersoldiers or something; then Nathan's creation would've had some of the intended horror.)

Now I'm thinking how this could have been restructured to be more explicitly a riff on the Bluebeard story

Honestly, this would've been such a cool angle for it to take. It didn't come across above because I was being a lil ranty (:P), but Martine was a surprise standout character for me in the book. Like, dispositionally, I myself am probably closer to an Evelyn-type than a Martine-type... but Martine ends up being intensely interesting and likable. She's distressed to learn she might have been "programmed" in some sense to want a kid, but after she faces that possibility (and ends up having to murder Nathan for daring to even ask the question), she's consistently and doggedly on the side of Yes, I Want This Kid, I Am Learning A Lot Of Things About The World All At Once And It's Pretty Scary And I Don't Know Everything But I Know I Want This. She's pragmatic & clever in the face of a lot of dangerous, precarious situations; you're really rooting for her the whole while. (And I did like that Gailey clearly wanted to present both Evelyn and Martine's life-path-choices as equally good and worthy of respect... just didn't love the overlooked ethical implications of Evelyn's choices during the course of the novel haha.)

[lassarina]

I agree completely with your last paragraph.

Also agree about being unambiguous about having kids.

[lassarina]

This is emphatically not the kind of book I would read in general but also holy shit what bad execution. (Every time Gailey's name comes up I become less impressed in general, too.)

[queenlua]

it is ABSOLUTELY the kind of book i would read, if the execution were good...! but, alas alack.

[silveredeye]

This sounds like it would be a pretty cool book if Gailey realized the Implications of how they're depicting Evelyn and leaned into them (of course it's different when someone is killing clones of me; of course Martine is fine being my secret wife in the attic for the next couple of decades; of course Nathan is terrible for wanting things, which is totally different from me wanting things...), but from your review it seems they don't.

The only Gailey work I read was STET and I was extremely unimpressed with that, too.

[queenlua]

yeah, me + someone on tumblr were reading some excerpts from the last chapter today, and... man, if it was an INTENTIONAL creepy-horror oh-no-evelyn-what-have-you-done thing, it could've been REALLY COOL... but, based on the tone of everything else, that just doesn't seem to be what Gailey was going for?

alas alack indeed...

[superborb]

I came away from the review with the same impression! Fewer hinges on the author's part or leaning into the horror, either way, the toxic selfcest wife in the attic would be More Fun.

[helicoprion]

Well now I'm thinking about that toxic-yuri selfcest story I stopped writing because it felt too didactic/allegorical... ...it still would have been better than this! Honestly a lil offended people get away with books as bad as this one sounds!

[queenlua]

the only reason to read bad books is "goddamnit i could do better than this"... unfortunately this is a pretty good reason...!

[airlock384]

god the frustration every step of the way there is palpable. I think I'd be thinking about the 12 corpses in the backyard thing for days instead of reading on. because it's like -- logistics aside, how do you skip out on the opportunity to do a scene where our protagonists find the bodies when they're burying one themselves? to see their actions mirrored in those of their nemesis for a moment? I think the only way you do is you're completely writing this pants-style and maybe that's not your strength if it results in Backyard Boneyard

(anyway your credibility is safe, this would have been 100% cooler as yuri selfcest. I mean, yuri makes everything at least 50% better, but besides that -- this would have been a yuri selfcest where the starting incident is that the protagonist's other-self murdered her husband. that's straight-up metal. better you get rid of the self-defense angle at that point even)

[airlock384]

actually, scratch that -- the more I think about it, the more I'd get rid of the self-defense angle even if this were not in fact selfcest yuri. I mean, my head is flux with allegories just thinking of other things that result in Martine murdering Nathan.

the existential horror of being created just for putting out babies compels her to take revenge against her creator? patriarchy allegory!
or, y'know, if Nathan's Designer Version Evelyn comes not only with a willingness for babymaking but also none of her thorny personality -- well, much as Evelyn seemed like an insufferable wife, it's giving r/relationships guy who falls in love with a cool girl and then gets really mad that she continues to be cool in a relationship. and I'm just saying, it'd take less than mortal peril to make me want to kill one of these dudes-

[queenlua]

god you're so right... SO many more interesting ways to get nathan killed, SO many more interesting ways to tie this plot together...!