Adrienne Martini Reviews Those Beyond the Wall by Micaiah Johnson
Those Beyond the Wall, Micaiah Johnson (Del Rey 978-0-5934-9750-0, $28.99, 384pp, hc) March 2024.
Micaiah Johnson’s Those Beyond the Wall isn’t so much a sequel to 2020’s The Space Between Worlds as it is one that tracks parallel to it. The timeline has advanced slightly, but her created world looks different from this location. Rather than focus on the power dynamics in wealthy, walled Wiley City, we’re in Ashtown, where those same dynamics are negotiated with violence.
What kicks Mr. Scales’s story off is the gruesome murder of a dancer, who is essentially turned inside-out in front of a room full of paying customers. Mr. Scales – all of Ashtown’s enforcers are Mister, no matter what their gender identity is – is sent into Wiley City for answers. And those answers only lead to more questions. ‘‘I fix things, I guess. It’s what I do,’’ Mr. Scales says. Ultimately she does, but not in the way anyone would anticipate.
While Mr. Scales’s arc is tightly plotted and powerfully rendered, what stands out more is how Johnson plays with the idea of what we use stories for. Do we use them to find something true? Or heal something broken? And how can we do that while negotiating what we see in our actual lives when it comes to power and class? What do we do when the stories we know are proven to be built on lies?
In an opening note, Johnson acknowledges that it is a book born from rage. You can almost feel it pulsing out of the pages as you read. But it’s also a book about using that rage to get to something better. Those Beyond the Wall is a powerful book about power whose story is so engaging you don’t realize how much you’ve been affected until it’s over.
Adrienne Martini has been reading or writing about science fiction for decades and has had two non-fiction, non-genre books published by Simon and Schuster. She lives in Upstate New York with one husband, two kids, and one corgi. She also runs a lot.
This review and more like it in the May 2024 issue of Locus.
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