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A Wandering Metaphysical Mystery: Karen Lord’s Unraveling
Unraveling, the new novel from World Fantasy Award nominee Karen Lord, is on one level a mystery: a serial killer, Walther Grey, murdered people in a place known as the City, the later deaths escalating into mutilation, amputation, and strange, symbolic cruelties; before the book’s beginning, Grey was caught and convicted, partially with the help of forensic therapist Dr. Miranda Ecouvo, and the killings stopped.
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Ritualistic murder is a standby of mysteries and thrillers: killers enacting bloody rites to appease or perform for whatever kitchen deity they imagine controls their fates. Here, Lord turns the trope on its head and shakes all the change out of its pockets: it is her detectives who are otherworldly, playing out the tropes of the procedural in an otherscape of time and memory, the potential and the possible.
Miranda is walking home on unsteady feet when she is startled by the appearance of her own double, then plucked out of her life by one of the undying and shunted into the labyrinths of memory and nightmare. There, she learns all: at the behest of the angel Uriel, the angel of death, the god Chance and his brother the Trickster are tasked to find the killer behind the killer—the supernatural entity behind Grey’s monstrous actions. Grey was being directed; his murders have the feel of the otherworldly about them. Chance in turn asks Miranda, with her detective’s briefcase and her intimate knowledge of both killer and the killed, to find this shadowy figure. She is human; she can walk where he can’t. (In this, she is like Grey, a mortal being used by inhuman forces, doing what they cannot: the opposite side of the cosmic coin.)
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But although on some level it is a procedural, Unraveling does not present its characters, place, magic, or narrative with anything like the linearity of a solvable whodunnit. The story instead wends around itself like a labyrinth—or a spiderweb—catching and cocooning the reader and drawing us towards its center. The book is divided into three named sections: Nightmare, Memory, and Metanoia.
Nightmare and Memory are presented to Miranda by Chance in the guise of labyrinths: places she enters to see the shadows of things that have happened (or which might have happened). In these first two sections, Miranda visits the shadows of both the past and future, seeing what might have been or will be. (Remember: there is always a monster in a labyrinth.)
Siblings Chance and the Trickster join Miranda on her travels, as does their elder, Patience. We begin to see that, just as surely as they build mazes for Miranda to traverse, they too are being manipulated by Patience—and she, in turn, by other forces far more powerful.
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As she walks in the shadow of the City in search of the monster, Miranda sees the worldly parallels to her otherworldly peregrinations. There are the people who live at the center of the Center, and those trapped in its periphery by the stickiness of poverty and red tape. There are people who have meaningful choices, and those who do not.
The last section is called Metanoia—the transformative change of heart through repentance or spiritual conversion. At the end of the first two acts, after walking the labyrinths, Miranda must decide whether to return to the world. She has been transformed, but what precisely that transformation means is up to her.
Unraveling defies category; it’s a winsome and engaging mix of mystery and fantasy, horror and folklore. The narrative can be challenging: it is like a procedural, but for its emphasis on the metaphysical. It follows a three-act structure, but for its bending, non-linear sense of time. It is a story of supernatural powers, but for the intense humanity at its center. What a lovely, twisty story it is.