Liz Bourke Reviews The Last Hour Between Worlds by Melissa Caruso
The Last Hour Between Worlds, Melissa Caruso (Orbit 978-0-31630-347-7, $19.99, 432pp, tp) November 2024.
If I tell you that I love The Last Hour Between Worlds to pieces, that I read it when I was miserably sick and it took me entirely out of myself from the first page to the last, that’s probably not quite enough information to constitute a proper review. Melissa Caruso’s latest novel, her first departure from the setting of her previous trilogies, is a time-bending triumph, a compelling adventure that descends through ever-weirder layers of reality.
Kembral Thorne is a Hound, a member of a guild of investigators and guards that are perhaps best understood as an analogue for private investigators. She’s also a new single mother, and Dona Marjorie Swift’s year-turning party is her first break from her newborn in the two months since Kem gave birth, and she’s looking forward to the exciting prospect of speaking to other adults and having a couple of hours all for herself.
‘‘It’s easy to fall into the wrong world.’’ This is the line that opens The Last Hour Between Worlds. Kem lives in the Prime reality, of which all others are Echoes, growing more and more inimical the farther down you slip. As a Hound, Kem’s retrieved a lot of people (and even pets) from Echoes: Of all her colleagues, she’s the one who’s always succeeded in her retrievals, and the person who’s gone deepest into the Echoes. Kem’s been five layers down. Deeper than that, and little things like walls dripping blood or cobblestones made of biting mouths seem practically normal.
Unfortunately for Kem, ancient Echo lords – the Empyreans, born of the Moon and the Void – have turned Dona Marjorie’s party into the site of one of their competitions, with human lives for playing pieces. People are dying. Every time the clock strikes midnight, two things happen: The entire party drops down into a deeper Echo, and time resets so that the party – with everyone alive once more – starts over again. Kem’s the only one who can remember it happening. She’s the only one with a hope of keeping the party’s attendees alive past the end of the evening. And her only real ally – the only other person she gets to remember what’s happening, and who stays conscious for it – is her sometime personal and professional nemesis from the Cat guild, Rika Nonesuch. Who once, memorably, drugged the then-pregnant Kem and left her unconscious and covered in stinking rubbish in an alleyway, after a conversation in which Kem thought they might have been admitting to having feelings for each other. But Rika is keeping secrets even now, and they might have a bearing on the problem at hand.
Kem just wanted an evening out to relax. Events are the opposite of relaxing. More, this is the first time Kem has faced mortal peril since becoming a parent, and her instinctive reaction to throw herself into danger in order to protect other people is coming up hard against the realisation that this might not be exactly fair to the small baby she has waiting for her to come home.
As the whole party drops deeper and deeper into the Echoes – deeper than anyone from Prime has ever been and returned – the violence mounts, and Kem realises that the stakes are even higher than the lives of the partygoers themselves. Kem and Rika must face off against adversaries who have very nearly the power of gods – and succeed before the clock strikes midnight for the twelfth time.
This is a gorgeous, witty, fast-paced and atmospheric novel. Caruso gives Kem, with her first-person narrative, a wry and compelling voice with very relatable concerns, and her complicated, fraught, awkward, semi-adversarial relationship with Rika adds an extra layer of emotional complexity to Kem’s very trying evening.
As the parent of a two-and-a-half year old, I feel very close to the bodily indignities of new parenthood. I can count on the fingers of one hand (with fingers left over) the number of times I have seen a new mother as the active protagonist in an adventure story. Parenthood sometimes feels like an erasure of self: You can’t so much as eat out in a restaurant without arranging childcare or worrying that the staff will be weird about a one-year-old getting loud. The absence of parents – of complex, fully realised, mothers with children – in much of the fiction that I read only exaggerates this isolation. The Last Hour Between Worlds is a breath of fresh air in this regard.
It’s a very entertaining story, with a strikingly satisfying climax. I understand that Caruso will be following it up with a sequel, and I really can’t wait.
Liz Bourke is a cranky queer person who reads books. She holds a Ph.D in Classics from Trinity College, Dublin. Her first book, Sleeping With Monsters, a collection of reviews and criticism, is out now from Aqueduct Press. Find her at her blog, her Patreon, or Twitter. She supports the work of the Irish Refugee Council and the Abortion Rights Campaign.
This review and more like it in the July 2024 issue of Locus.
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