Last night I was playing music I used to associate with Christopher Ruocchio’s Sun Eater series, and my mind went… somewhere.
I remembered her.
Me.
The woman I was then. The reader.
I was fucking obsessed with this series.
I made reels about it. I had a music playlist for it. I thought about Hadrian Marlowe constantly. I was completely gone. I loved being inside his voice, his memory, his contradictions, the way he was always telling me a story (his story) while trying to understand the man he had become inside it.
Hadrian was one of the first narrators who made me realize how much I could love inhabiting another consciousness. I didn’t even have that language then. Don’t know if I’m really using it correctly now. I just knew I was completely gripped by the design of it.
So thinking this has to be the beginning, right? Ha. Funny that Sun Eater itself starts with an ending.
I also think I underestimated how much of that experience was about language. Vocabulary. The arrangement of words on the page. Ruocchio can fucking write. There were phrases and paragraphs I tabbed and tabbed. Philosophical passages I underlined. Sentences that could take such an enormous, sprawling story and make it beautifully intimate. And I was so attached. But not only attached to Hadrian’s consciousness; I was attached to the mind that had built the language through which I encountered him.
And underneath all of it was Hadrian’s humanity. God, the humanity. That was always the thing I kept coming back to. For all the scale of the series, for all the history, philosophy, violence, horror and cosmic machinery, there was this man trying to save humanity while being forced to confront almost everything that makes humanity difficult to love.
Then Kingdoms of Death happened.
Fuuuuck.
That book cracked something open in me: horror.
Not “I like scary books.” Not heebie-jeebie stuff. I discovered that I wanted literature that could make me feel deeply uncomfortable. That could trap me inside a psychological and bodily experience and make me stay there. Claustrophobia. Suffering. Pain inflicted on the body. Fear. Suffocating loneliness. The near unraveling of a mind. Someone’s world becoming unbearable and there being nowhere inside themselves to escape to.
I couldn’t stop reading it. I was sweating. Walking. Walking and talking to myself about what the actual fuck I was reading.
I didn’t come away from Kingdoms of Death simply thinking, I love horror now. I think I started to understand what horror could do as a way of studying a person. What happens to humanity when almost everything humane is stripped away? What’s even left? Who will Hadrian be after this?
And then, somehow, I launched into a bizarre and unexpected reading path that doesn’t seem to stop unfolding:
A lot of horror. Really fucking good horror.
Then, the lit happened:
No Longer Human.
The Trial.
Lolita.
The Collector.
The Piano Teacher.
The Vegetarian.
The Yellow Wallpaper.
The Blind Owl.
Agua Viva.
Notes on a Scandal.
The Book of Evidence.
Good grief I love that list.
So I look back at all of these and see something I couldn’t see at the time.
Hindsight. Ugh. If only. Argh… gotta keep it going forward…
I am or have been (or both) searching for a particular kind of reading experience for a long time.
I want to be completely inside another mind. Always. I don’t want to be in mine. It sucks there sometimes.
I want the consciousness, the language, the contradictions. I want the physical experience of being in someone else’s reality, especially when that reality is difficult or disturbing or completely unlike my own. I want to be made uncomfortable. I want to follow a thought somewhere I would and wouldn’t have gone myself.
And Sun Eater was already doing some version of this. Just at a massive cosmic scale.
So maybe Hadrian really was my first encounter with this particular kind of readerly obsession. A man telling his own story, living inside memory, reflection, contradiction, regret and history. A consciousness trying to make sense of itself, of the choices and decision, through the story it is telling.
I just loved it so much. I keep saying it but it’s true.
Point is, I think I want a little more of that woman back.
Not all of her. I’ve changed enormously, and I don’t want to go backward. But I miss some of her edge. Her confidence in speaking her mind. Her spirit. Her ability to get completely absorbed in something because she fucking loved it.
Maybe even some of her capacity for absorbing the tough stuff in life too. The armour. That centre of gravity she had… I admire it all.
I think Sun Eater belongs on a shelf here for those reasons. It belongs there as an origin story. A little artifact from an earlier version of my reading life that turns out to have been pointing toward the reader I am now and becoming.
And fuck me, I gotta reread this series.
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