 The Seventh Mansion is a glorious, poetic piece of writing that demands heavy engagement with its reader, both in terms of the unflinching look at the horrors and grotesqueries of human existence and in forcing the reader to think about the morality of their attitude to the world around them “How careful you have to be, with a body like this, or it will be destroyed. You can never forget, for even a second, what it is, what id needs. Do they all deserve it, every creature of the earth, to be touched like this, fucked, loved, adored, a stone, a sea, a fox, a tree. Can you see everything as a body that is crushed if not cared for, a body capable of ravishing and waiting to be ravished, gently, completely, by life itself.” “What’s it like. Never to belong to yourself. Maybe we all know. That’s why we kill ourselves. Poison the world you can’t have, that doesn’t want you, that knows. What a virus you are. On the face of the earth. Moore’s white truck a ghost in the night, glowing. He can still feel the teeth through the glove, the claws, if you free them then they are free to kill. Free to die another death.” Maryse Meijer has made a name for herself with the striking and original writing present in her two short story collections Heartbreaker (2016) and Rag (2019). Her debut novel, The Seventh Mansion (2020), more than delivers on the promise of those two collections and confirms her as a major voice that anyone with an interest in horror and unsettling literature would do well to pay attention to. Told in Meijer’s beautiful, impressionistic prose, The Seventh Mansion is a macabre coming of age story that wrestles with the singular intensity of youth, a meditation on the thin line between inspiration and madness, and a profound exploration of the challenges of living a moral life. It is at once beautifully uplifting and deeply uncomfortable, a truly haunting book. The Seventh Mansion tells the story of Xie, a teenager who has moved from California to a rural Southern town to live with his father Erik. Xie is a shy kid with a passionate interest in animal rights, and he gets kicked out of school when he and his only friends, Jo and Leni, attempt to free the minks from a local farm. As he becomes more and more alienated, he develops an increasingly deep relationship with the woods behind his house, and the spirit of martyred Catholic saint Pancratius, whose remains he steals from a church. As Xie develops his relationship with P., learns more about animal rights and environmental activism and the beliefs of the Catholic saints, and slowly begins to come out of his shell, the woods he so loves becomes threatened by loggers. Xie must decide on what the right course of action is, how he can respond to the destruction of the environment around him and make some kind of life for himself in the world he lives in. The Seventh Mansion is an astonishing piece of writing. The novel is told in close third person from Xie’s perspective, in moments of great intensity moving inwards via the second person. Meijer’s prose is impressionistic and gorgeous, a steam of consciousness flow stemmed by fragmented sentences that give it a feeling of breathlessness. She captures both the intensity, the alienation and the solipsism of youth perfectly. Meijer teases out the wonderous and sublime in both the mundanity of Xie’s life with his father and his tutor, the feeling of closing in horizons as more and more of Xie’s options collapse in on themselves. She also finds the sublime in the horrific and grotesque. Xie is ill at ease with the physicality of human existence and shies away from sexual relationships with men and women. But he finds the love and sexual release he craves in his intimate relation with P.’s spirit and his skeleton, in what are some truly bizarre and unsettling sex scenes. Yet through Meijer’s use of Xie’s close viewpoint, we are able to glimpse the transcendence he experiences in this grotesque union. Meijer’s swapping of the abject for the sublime and the sublime for the abject lead to some of the most disconcerting and powerful sequences in the book. At its heart, The Seventh Mansion is an exploration of humanity’s frequently destructive relationship with nature, and how people attempt to live lives that do not cause harm to other beings. Xie, Jo and Leni are all involved in animal rights and environmental activism. Meijer explores the different routes that lead people to activism, and how different priorities and lived experiences shape one’s relationship to how best to serve one’s beliefs. Jo, who is more outgoing and pugnacious than Xie, is frustrated by Xie’s withdrawn attitude, how this manifests in an attitude of superiority to others that is not tempered by an understanding of their circumstances. However, Xie’s attitude towards animal life and the environment stems from a desire to live without causing harm, something that the imbrication of violence and capitalism makes increasingly difficult. Xie’s life is about trying to navigate a space where one does not partake in the violence of the meat and dairy industry but also the violence of environmental destruction via pollution and destruction of natural habitats. It is this that draws Xie to Catholic sainthood. Saint Pancratius was beheaded at the age of 14 for refusing to sacrifice a deer to the Roman gods. Xie is attracted to this purity of vision and purpose, and this desire for transcendence. However he is ultimately driven away by Catholicism’s elevation of the soul of man as holy and the denigration of all that is animal and natural as sinful. He ultimately comes to associate his own reluctance to act with the inaction of the saints, and questions its validity: “She wanted them to experience the pleasure, the joy she thought was possible. Don’t you think that’s generous? Or good? Xie shakes his head. It just seems. Like a waste. Wait, being in love is a waste? If you think that’ the most important thing, like, that that’s the point of being alive, then… yeah. She thought the world was evil but she didn’t do anything to change it, it’s like she thought the best thing to do was just wait to die so she could be in heaven and everything would be perfect for her and fuck everything else, you know?” Xie is ultimately caught in the conflict, that he no longer finds inaction moral, but by taking action to prevent the destruction of the woods he winds up causing harm to other people. The Seventh Mansion wrestles with this dilemma, but ultimately offers up no easy solution. The Seventh Mansion is a glorious, poetic piece of writing that demands heavy engagement with its reader, both in terms of the unflinching look at the horrors and grotesqueries of human existence and in forcing the reader to think about the morality of their attitude to the world around them, their responsibilities to other people, to animals and to the environment. It is not a didactic work of art, but it is fiercely and passionately politically engaged. By refusing to ignore the complexities and subtleties of its moral implications, it is a brave and uncompromising book that takes the reader to some very uncomfortable places. It is a work I shall return to multiple times, that I expect to haunt me on future readings as much as it has on the first.  One of The Millions's Most Anticipated Books of the Second-Half of 2020, one of Library Journal's 35 Standout Summer/Fall 2020 Debut Novels, and one of Shondaland's 11 New Books That Will Change How You Think About the Climate Crisis From the author of the story collections Heartbreaker and Rag comes a powerful and propulsive debut novel that examines activism, love, and purpose When fifteen-year-old Xie moves from California to a rural Southern town to live with his father he makes just two friends, Jo and Leni, both budding environmental and animal activists. One night, the three friends decide to free captive mink from a local farm. But when Xie is the only one caught his small world gets smaller: Kicked out of high school, he becomes increasingly connected with nature, spending his time in the birch woods behind his house, attending extremist activist meetings, and serving as a custodian for what others ignore, abuse, and discard. Exploring the woods alone one night, Xie discovers the relic of a Catholic saint—the martyred Pancratius—in a nearby church. Regal and dressed in ornate armor, the skeleton captivates him. After weeks of visits, Xie steals the skeleton, hides it in his attic bedroom, and develops a complex and passionate relationship with the bones and spirit of the saint, whom he calls P. As Xie’s relationship deepens with P., so too does his relationship with the woods—private property that will soon be overrun with loggers. As Xie enacts a plan to save his beloved woods, he must also find a way to balance his conflicting—and increasingly extreme—ideals of purity, sacrifice, and responsibility in order to live in this world. Maryse Meijer's The Seventh Mansion is a deeply moving and profoundly original debut novel—both an urgent literary call to arms and an unforgettable coming-of-age story about finding love and selfhood in the face of mass extinction and environmental destruction.   the heart and soul of horror fiction review websitesComments are closed.
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