Welcome back to Reading the Weird, in which we get girl cooties all over weird fiction, cosmic horror, and Lovecraftiana—from its historical roots through its most recent branches. This week, we cover Chapters 20-22 of Lucy Snyder’s Sister, Maiden, Monster. The book was first published in 2023. Spoilers ahead! CW for cancer and extremely weird tumors.

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Mareva Buduci meets Erin Holdaway a few months before the PVG pandemic: She’s working in UCC network operations, Erin in tech support. Mar has called about a malfunctioning terminal, and she’s gobsmacked when Erin looks so much like her estranged sister Leila. The resemblance largely lies in Erin’s “gorgeous cornflower blue eyes.”

Mar was a “surprise baby,” born within a year of Leila. The sisters were inseparable through early childhood. At two, Mar was diagnosed with a rare genetic disease that caused her to grow benign tumors called teratomas. The first removed was interpreted by the doctors as fetus in fetu, a twin Mar had absorbed in the womb. Eight-year-old Mar’s curiosity about her surgical scars made her father point her to an article about the condition. Big mistake: She understood just enough to “get completely freaked out.” She began having nightmares about her ghost twin emerging at night to enviously attack Leila. Mar distanced herself—hurting Leila’s feelings seemed better than letting the ghost hurt her.

The night before surgery to remove a second growth, Mar overheard her mother regretting having Mar so soon after Leila. If that hadn’t happened, their second child would’ve been normal! She returned to bed and wept, while Leila tried to comfort her, perhaps for the last time. Later, Mar blamed the oncologist who misdiagnosed her first teratoma; actually, cell malfunction caused the tumors. She’d pushed Leila away unnecessarily, and once they were teenagers, Leila withdrew from Mar. At seventeen, Leila married a decade-older, toxically-controlling medical resident. By twenty-four, Leila had six children and had given up any plans for her own career. Mar suspected that her emotional withdrawal pushed Leila toward her husband.

Now Mar wonders if befriending Erin could replace her long-lost connection with Leila. She doesn’t want to come off as an “office stalker,” so she decides to “let things evolve naturally.”

* * *

The UCC Christmas party, two months pre-PVG: Mar meets Erin again. The two bond over a recently discovered “megacephalopod” that no one else is interested in. They have similar educational backgrounds in evolution, ecology, and environmental science and are total “bio-nerds.” Mar confides that she left grad school to have surgery, after which she had to get a “jobby-job” at UCC. Erin barely got her B.S. after her mother died. With grades too low to garner grad school funding, she also landed with UCC. She changes the subject to Mar’s surgery. Mar explains her condition and adds that she had a hysterectomy at twenty-one, when her uterus filled up with “hollow, bleeding orbs that the oncologist thought might be primitive eyeballs.” Her parents were disappointed at the loss of potential grandkids, despite Leila’s “bountiful brood.”

Conversation shifts to pets they’d like to have (cats), Erin’s boyfriend Gregory, and Mar’s possible asexuality. When they part, Mar hopes she’s found a geeky work friend among the UCC careerists and offspring-obsessers.

The pandemic quickly takes out three of Mar’s coworkers. She’s excited that Erin will be joining her department but, sadly, Erin returns from PVG sick leave much changed. She works well enough, but grows increasingly jumpy and paranoid. Mar hears her mutter about a “Betty” and feels a little jealous. Physically, Erin becomes emaciated, her eyes mottled with microhemorrhages. Worse, she’s sprouted a huge growth on her back.

* * *

The shift before “the incident,” Erin seems extremely anxious. Mar considers informing their supervisor but doesn’t want to get Erin in trouble. A new employee named Devin passes through en route to a training class. Erin stares at him strangely, then trails Devin from the room. Uneasy, Mar follows, but loses sight of them. She approaches a security station. The guard on duty suddenly sets off an emergency alarm. Mar and the other employees are hustled out to the parking lot. Hazmat-suited SWAT officers and paramedics swarm the building. A woman near Mar stares into the sky. Mar follows her gaze to a large, dark shape flying unsteadily. Eagle? Vulture? No, it has long thin arms, and instinct tells Mar it’s “an actual monstrosity and did not belong in the world.” She looks away from it, as do others.

After paramedics wheel out a filled body bag, the police herd Erin’s coworkers back inside. They won’t answer any questions, only saying a “trauma counselor” will be talking to everyone individually. Mar wonders if Erin was in the bag, or Devin. She’s thought she’d given up on Erin as a maybe-BFF, but evidently not.

Mar’s turn with the “trauma counselor” comes an hour later. Candy Kleypas is dressed in Homeland Security black. Her formal diction slips into country dialect as she skirts Mar’s questions and grills her about Erin’s recent behavior. When Mar suggests she talk to Erin’s doctor, Candy says Dr. Shapiro has gone missing. Does Mar know anything about her whereabouts?

Mar knows Homeland Security must be desperate and overwhelmed to ask her about Erin’s doctor. Candy switches to a spiel about how stress can make people see strange things. Mistake, say, large birds for something “unreal.” Candy follows up with barely veiled threats: someone seeing unreal things could land in quarantine or even lose their job. Mar despises such tactics, but mutters that she understands.

Nevertheless, Mar knows that she saw something non-avian and dangerous. Something Homeland Security must hide, lest the public panic. But she doesn’t know what she’s seen.

Weirdbuilding*: *Candy, trying to balance convincing Mar that she didn’t see anything with convincing Mar not to talk about what she didn’t see, compares Mar’s glimpse of Erin to Mothman or the Jersey Devil. So we can guess what part of the country she’s from.

Madness Takes Its Toll: Sometimes people under stress see strange things. They interpret some ordinary thing as looking wrong, just so their brains can pin the stress’s wrongness to something concrete. And if you insist that the wrong thing was real, well, we’ll just know that you’ve gone mad.

Ruthanna’s Commentary

We had a little blip in the space-time continuum two weeks ago, as a result of which I included some thoughts on Chapter 20 in a post that Anne only took through Chapter 19. So I’ve already shared my initial thoughts on meeting Her, realizing that Savannah killed Her estranged sister to get Her address, and suspecting that the elder gods have some nasty plans for Her tendency to grow weird cancerous masses. Wilbur Whately isn’t the half of it.

No one wants masses of bloody eyeballs growing in their uterus. Speaking as someone whose uterus was at one point very excited about fibroids, we’re talking about an organ that has enough trouble handling the production of small humans, and often comes up with ideas that we would rather it didn’t. Wombs do not need additional outside advice from apocalyptic deities.

Mar’s problem at the moment, though, is that her work-crush has gone from delightful geekfest conversations to PVG-strained depression to an Incident. DHS doesn’t want to answer questions about the Incident, and wants to heavily discourage witnesses from talking about it; they’re trying to discourage witnesses from *believing *what they’ve seen, but people tend to believe things that they’ve been intimidated into not talking about. Because it’s not that dangerous to talk about hallucinations, is it?

The hallucination thinks so. Pay it too much attention, and you might attract attention right back. Avert your gaze, feeble monkey. Is that what DHS thinks, too? That talking about what’s happening, acknowledging it aloud, will make it stronger? Because it seems to me that it’s getting plenty strong on its own, and that people are more effective at fighting enemies they can talk about. Maybe it’s just me.

Mar’s therefore stuck processing her own solo half-glimpse of Erin’s full Archivist form, and her own solo half-guesses about who has died, who has killed, and who might be in deep trouble.

Her larger problem, I think—everyone’s larger problem—is that humans are full of coping strategies for the weird and terrifying. It comes up in her conversation with Erin about the megacephalopod: making stupid jokes about scary things is a coping strategy. Trying to fit the scary thing into familiar scripts, that’s a coping strategy too. DHS’s messy response represents yet another coping strategy or three: denial, authoritarian control, violence. Humans are all-too-often short on coping strategies that actually improve catastrophic problems.

And then there’s that megacephalopod. There are a lot of things in the deep ocean, but still: twelve arms and four eyes? Cephalopod limbs get pretty wild, but that’s not a normal number. Are we sure that’s a cephalopod? Are we sure that’s from around here at all?

I might be tempted to a few Santa jokes myself, under the circumstances. Better watch out, indeed.

Anne’s Commentary

I found myself identifying strongly with Mareva in reference to the paucity of geeks at her work place. I was lucky in my first full-time job as a data entry operator for (of all things) the Department of State of Florida. During my earlier positions there, I was surrounded not by geeks, per se, but by characters of varying degrees of craziness and wisdom, frequently combined. In my last position, I worked in a data center largely populated by college-age or just graduated guys who could geek out with the best of them.

Question: Are simulated space battles executed from rolling office chairs not an absolutely foundational geek activity? Because there were a lot of those. Rubber bands were the weapons of choice. Also strategic collisions that sent the enemy caroming into stacks of corporate annual reports. Believe me: The corporate annual reports deserved it.

Good times. My subsequent job was less geek-rich, especially after the interns underwent some sinister assimilation into careerist conformity, my older peers into parenthood and related adult stuff. Not that there’s anything wrong with parenthood and adult stuff. I guess you could consider the discovery of a new cephalopod to be “adult stuff.” It’s just, as Erin and Mar demonstrate at the office Xmas party, most of their coworkers aren’t interested in cephalopods, even ones with twelve arms and four eyes and crimson hides, weighing in at nine hundred pounds.

Google tells me there are no twelve-armed cephalopods, but this novel’s time-setting is a little ahead of ours, and amazing if monstrous metamorphoses are happening in Mareva and Erin’s world. In fact, they’re happening in Mareva and Erin. Mareva has “a rare, previously undocumented genetic illness” that causes “chronic benign teratomas.” I was confused to read that one of Mareva’s teratomas occurred in her upper abdomen, another on the back of her upper arm; since teratomas are defined as germ cell tumors, wouldn’t these tumors be confined to the reproductive organs? A dive into the internet (which Snyder has frequently prompted), and once again, weird fiction has taught me something cool. Teratomas are often sited in the ovaries or testes, but during development, germ cells can wander off to other parts of the body and later give rise to extragonadal teratomas.

Normal germ cells will only develop into eggs or sperm. However, the germ cells that cause teratomas are pluripotent, meaning they can produce tissue from all the embryonic germ layers (ectoderm, mesoderm, endoderm). Hence the bones, teeth and hair discovered in Mareva’s first removed tumor. The rarest type of teratoma (fetiform) contains living tissue that can resemble a malformed fetus. That sounds like the one on Mareva’s arm that on MRI was “curled up like a strange embryo.” It’s possible that a surgeon could misdiagnose a fetiform tumor (or any tumor full of bones, teeth and hair) as a true parasitic twin, as Mareva’s surgeon apparently did. Not that this excuses his mistake in Mareva’s eyes. If her parents had known the truth of her condition, her father wouldn’t have sent her to an article about the fetus in fetu phenomenon—and why the hell he’d do that to an eight-year-old instead of explaining it face to face, after digesting the facts himself, then encouraging her to express her sense of the matter so he could steer her away from twinicidal guilt! Mareva should want to punch out Dad as well as the misdiagnosing doc.

Left to her own devices, Mareva devises a system for protecting her sister that can’t but remind me of Elsa isolating herself from Anna in Frozen. Anna even gets involved with a predatory male out of her loneliness, as Leila does with the “love-bombing” David. So far, Mareva hasn’t gotten a killer anthem to sing into the teeth of a mountain blizzard, but there are some chapters yet to go. I can hope she’ll develop her inborn condition into some kind of super power for birthing monsters, hence becoming a true Mother of Calamities. Maybe she’s one of those who has contracted PVG without showing any symptoms or testable immune reactions.

Add proneness to teratoma formation to the drastic mutations and metamorphoses the PVG virus can inspire, well. It hardly bears thinking about, but I am anyway, and this line from the epigraph to Part Three becomes more ominous:

“All nature, all formations, all creatures exist in and with one another, and they will be resolved again into their own roots.”

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Next week, we celebrate our 550th post with one of our traditional Weird Watches! Join us for “Aura” from Season 2 of American Horror Stories.