This is the best thing I’ve read since The Fifth Season and I am so fired up about it. Like The Fifth Season, The Spear Cuts Through Water plays with point of view in a highly imaginative and satisfying way. Jimenez uses tense to signal when he has shifted from one time or perspective to another, allowing him to weave together disparate stories before deftly knotting all loose ends together at the conclusion. I love how tapestry and weaving is an explicit theme, especially when the spear is likened to a needle.

Jimenez consistently resists tropes in the telling of his story. I can’t tell you how many times I gasped at an unexpected plot turn, gripping the pages of my book as I eagerly read to see how things might play out. Villains are given especially inventive treatment: some are vanquished at unexpected times, others surprisingly invite our heartfelt sympathy. All of them are gruesome and horrifying in their own way.

By including the Inverted Theatre as an active part of his story, Jimenez signals that he values the role of an audience in the co-creation of art. In this fascinating discussion on the map included in the novel, he writes:

Much of the juice of a novel comes from the reader’s personal interaction with the text—the processing of the words on the page through their own ecosystem. Their associations and biases and triggers and desires. The way they are sitting. The quality of light from the window. Even the minutes they have left before they must leave for work. All of this, and more, act as the acids that digest a work of fiction.

The conclusion of the novel respects the role the audience plays in storytelling in a beautiful way. It is heartwarming and full of love. I’m so happy I got to be a shade in the Inverted Theatre and watch this play unfold.

Clark starts Boy Parts by playing a cruel trick: introducing her completely odious protagonist as intelligent, brash and darkly funny. This, along with the sympathy I felt for Irina Sturges due to the abuse she suffered, was the hook that dragged me through the rest of the novel.

After spending more time with Irina, I became frustrated by her inability to self-reflect. This was an intentional choice by Clark, reinforced by the many descriptions of mirrors in the novel, and later in the significant references to glass. Irina’s inability to look directly at her past deeds and her absolute refusal to obtain meaningful consent is protective. Though she is keenly attuned to the shortcomings of others, she is necessarily blind to the problematic way she creates art.

Clark uses ekphrasis to reflect on consent without the ethical issues Irina raises through her visual art. Clark’s layered approach to storytelling is delightful: Irina’s abuses (endured and inflicted) are revealed as she sequentially sorts through her photography archives. But even without any real victims created here, I was left asking whether shock value adds unearned validity to art. Do I admire this novel because of how transgressive it is, or is the gore a lazy shortcut?

The prose remains sharply funny throughout, and tension adds impetus to the novel’s pacing. Clark combines foreshadowing with unreliable narration to keep readers guessing (and second-guessing themselves). Though I wouldn’t call this novel enjoyable, I suspect this story (and the hateful protagonist) will stay buried in my skull for a long time.

If we were playing rock, paper, scissors, but it’s camera, toxic masculinity, skull - camera wins.

I had no idea this was Victorian “be gay do crime”! +1 ⭐️ for the amazing Hyde and seek pun.