The Library at Mount Char by Scott Hawkins

Recently I had a pretty delightful conversation that started from the question “What’s your lesbian necromancer science-fantasy book?” This referred, of course, to Tamsyn Muir’s first novel Gideon the Ninth, which I had just finished describing to my interlocutors with hand-waving enthusiasm, but also metonymically to the general class of “things one can’t help but employ gesticulation when discussing.” Less verbosely: what are you into?

You will never know the contents of that conversation, unless you were there (hi!), because it’s not my information to share. I mention it for two reasons: (1) because I heartily recommend “What are you into?” as a conversation starter, and (2) because I am extremely into Gideon the Ninth and the Locked Tomb series in general. And I mention that in the context of The Library at Mount Char, which is the first book I read for Seattle Public Library’s 2025 Adult Book Bingo, because some friends recommended it to me as an if-you-liked-this-you-might-like-that stopgap while I (and a million other sickos, aforementioned friends included) wait for the fourth and presumably final Locked Tomb novel.

I actually didn’t pick this book up intending to populate a Book Bingo square with it, but after reading it, the idea of describing it as a “found family” book was too hilarious to resist. And in the interest of avoiding egregious spoilers I will only say that it’s not wrong.

But anyway, since I read The Library at Mount Char based on Locked-Tomb-related recommendations, I’m going to go ahead and do a compare-and-contrast in list format.

• Gideon the Ninth has a large cast of characters each of whom has a certain specific skillset. This is also true of The Library at Mount Char; in fact the partitioning of knowledge is sharper and more explicit, as well as being enforced by extreme violence.
• Like the Locked Tomb series, particularly Harrow the Ninth, Mount Char hangs a lot of its characterization off how fucked up people can get if they live for an unfathomably long amount of time.
• The Locked Tomb and Mount Char both counterbalance gruesome physical and emotional trauma against irreverent dialog. The Locked Tomb worked better for me: I thought the jokes were funnier and the violence less gratuitous. But Mount Char struck the balance well enough to keep me reading.
• My favorite way to describe the narrative gimmick employed in each of the Locked Tomb’s books (so far) is that “the point-of-view character is the one who knows the least about what’s going on.” Mount Char does not do this. In fact one of the PoV characters is probably the one who knows the most about what’s going on. But they’re not going to tell you, the reader, about it. Between that and the heavy in medias res—heavy in the sense that there are a lot of res to be in medias of—Mount Char does evoke kind of a similar experience of pleasant befuddlement. And it does do a stellar job of expositing a lot of plot elements via showing, not telling, in the first 60 pages or so.
• The Locked Tomb has interesting and complex things to say about a wide variety of profoundly dysfunctional interpersonal relationships, as well as “bigger” issues like colonialism and religion. Mount Char has the dysfunctional relationships but for the most part they lack TLT’s complexity and subtlety, and the philosophical stuff is outside its remit. This is fine. It’s a single smaller book and its scope is appropriate for that. But it has less capacity than TLT for you to get totally engrossed in it.
• The Locked Tomb books are very queer, both in the sense that many of its characters are queer and in the sense that its themes and even plot devices are shot through with various colors of queerness and gender-fuckery. Mount Char is, I would say, not queer at all. If TLT’s queerness is part of what drew you to it, you will probably be disappointed by Mount Char.
• Mount Char has a satisfying, tidy ending. I very much doubt this will be true of The Locked Tomb.

All in all I think The Locked Tomb is not an inapt comparison for The Library at Mount Char, but I would suggest a couple that I think are more appropriate. In its progressively bewildering expansions in conceptual scope I would liken it to qntm’s books like Fine Structure and Ra. In its clashes between real-life deities and normal-ass people (and, to a lesser extent, the same intentional tonal dissonance that got it likened to Gideon the Ninth) it reminds me of nothing so much as the works of Neil Gaiman, cursed be his name. Gaiman might have turned out to be a piece of shit, but it doesn’t retroactively render his work without merit. The Library at Mount Char is a worthy descendant of that work.