2024 read #8: And What Can We Offer You Tonight by Premee Mohamed.

And What Can We Offer You Tonight by Premee Mohamed

78 pages

Published 2021

Read from January 15 to January 16

Rating: 5 out of 5

Even by the standards of Neon Hemlock Press, this is a slim novella. Brief as it is, though, What Can We Offer You stuns from the first page, from its first line, opening a torrent of grief and rage upon the ashes of everything we’ve lost (and continue to lose) to the insatiable, dehumanizing pit of capitalism.

In a floodwater future coming all too soon, when only the rich have anything and only their carnal appetites offer an opportunity for the necessities of life, courtesans compete to work in the prestigious Houses. But even in the House of Bicchieri, which serves the elite of the elite, courtesans are never fully safe. (Never mind that the courtesans are owned, that they must pay the House for their own food, for their own beds, for their showers. Never mind that the rich regard them as mere animals, much like they regard us in our own time.)

When Winfield is murdered by a client, it's a tragic but normal event; her friends hold a secret funeral for her, and life should go on. Instead, Winfield comes back to life, animated by vengeance, reanimated to hunt the monster, the ultrawealthy predator who killed her. Narrator Jewel is afraid of what this vengeance might mean, what it might bring, how it might destroy the House's slender illusions of survival and patronage.

Like the best science fiction, What Can We Offer You is, of course, about today, about the world our own capitalist monsters are building for themselves day by day, law by law, election by election:

In any other world we would call him a monster and do what you do to monsters, which is kill him; but because he is who he is, we protect and revere him, we fawn at his feet, we forgive him his rampaging and ravaging, we go so far as to maybe kill those who would kill him.

Mohamed's prose is sinuous, trembling on the verge of panic, navigating the edge of collapse with precision and clarity. It may be short, but this might be my favorite Neon Hemlock novella so far.