Premee Mohamed is an eldritch scientist beetle who writes speculative fiction. I first encountered her on the pages of Analog (Sep-Oct 2018), in Shepherd Moon, one of the many stories about commercial spaceflight that were published there that year. It touched me emotionally, so I sought the author on Twitter, to find out more about her, and when and where she'll be publishing more work. I discovered an entertaining and insightful science and fiction personality, who belongs on your feed. I am joking about the beetle, but I'm not always sure she is!
Her Beneath the Rising came out earlier this year. Like most good cosmic horror, it isn't just about Horrible Things Man Was Not Meant to Know and What Goes Wrong When Man Seeks Them Out Anyway, but about people, how they live their lives, and what they do to each other. Well, it's also not about "Man" - Mohamed's Herbert West is a woman, a teenage girl, in fact - Joanna "Johnny" Chambers, a child prodigy with rich white parents, and best/only friend of the protagonist, Nicholas "Nick" Prasad, who is supporting his poor Indo-Guyanese family on retail wages. This friendship, crossing class, ethnic, gender, and professional lines, is what holds the narrative together. As they learn more about the threat that Johnny has awakened, and race to stop it before it destroys the world, Nick and the reader also learn more about this relationship, as circumstances test it, and its past is slowly revealed.
Having read a lot of Clark Ashton Smith's fiction lately, it's refreshing to experience some cosmic horror that isn't revealed to be race realist as soon as the narrative crosses the ocean to Africa. Instead, we see a protagonist who transitions from a feeling of otherness resulting from being a visible minority in Canada, to a feeling of otherness due to being in an unfamiliar country, when he and Johnny cross over to Morocco, where it is she who is singled out as a foreigner just by the way she looks, even though she is the one who is fluent in the language and culture. These evolving terrestrial feelings of strain and dread complement the more cosmic, Lovecraftian tropes that appear throughout, all the way to a very emotional conclusion.
I enjoyed Beneath the Rising very much, and recommend that you get it. A sequel, A Broken Darkness, comes out next year, and is available for preorder.
