Liz Bourke Reviews These Deathless Shores by P.H. Low

These Deathless Shores, P.H. Low (Orbit 978-0-31656-920-0, $19.99, 464pp, tp) July 2024.

I’m not quite sure what I make of These Deathless Shores, the debut novel from Malaysian American author P.H. Low. Low, whose short fiction and poetry have garnered them recognition, has written a novel that takes as its central concern the problem of J.M. Barrie’s Peter Pan and the island (‘‘Neverland’’) outside the reach of the ordinary world where children never grow up.

I say the problem because it is: The island of Neverland is populated by Lost Boys and pirates. Pirates are adults, and the enemy. Lost Boys never grow up. And girls, of course, are supposed to be caretakers, shielded from external violence. Low offers a more brutal, Lord-of-the-Flies-esque vision of Neverland in the Island that approaches its own kind of sentience, a world where Lost Boys never grow up because if they don’t leave of their own accord, Peter kills them; where the ‘‘pirates’’ are a combination of Lost Boy survivors and adult castaways washed ashore; and where Peter, always laughing, is as cruel as a cat among its prey and encourages cruelty in his followers; and where the fairy ‘‘Dust’’ that lets the boys fly and heal wounds is both addictive and rendered out of human bone.

Peter Pan (either as the stage play, the novel Peter and Wendy, or any of the screen adaptations) is not foundational literature for me, though I have vague memories of several versions. As a consequence, I’m sure I’m missing quite a lot of how Low is playing with the originals, and how they’re commenting on the idea of adaptation in the process. But while that may add richness and depth to the reading experience, These Deathless Shores works in its own right.

Jordan was once a Lost Boy, convinced that she’d never grow up. Hiding her femaleness from Peter, as well as disguising her absent arm, gave her a ferocious addiction to Dust. Violently exiled from the Island after her menses began, rejected by her parents on her return, she’s now twenty-two, addicted to a poor substitute for Dust, and scratching out a living in the underground world of illegal fighting rings and petty criminality.

Baron was her best friend as a child, her fellow Lost Boy, her twin and her mirror. He returned from the Island with her, and has grown into an outwardly more successful adult – by hiding his overpowering anxiety and his suicidality, and squashing himself in order to fit. He doesn’t feel like he belongs anywhere, except with Jordan.

When Jordan decides to return to the Island, either to steal Peter’s source of Dust in order to live without dying of her addiction or to exact bloody revenge – she is feral and furious, desperate and incandescent from a childhood betrayed – Baron goes with her. As does Tier, an aimless pilot who is a disappointment to his powerful, wealthy father. On the Island, they reckon with their most essential selves: as Jordan uses her aptitude for and enjoyment of violence to ascend to leadership over the pirates, as Tier shows to others the kindness he was never shown himself, and as Baron figures out whether he wants to live, with or without Jordan (and whether or not he can), Low offers startling sympathy towards the cruelties and the solipsisms of children, ‘‘lost’’ in more than one sense.

Jordan, Baron, Tier – and Chey, Jordan’s sister and betrayer, now the central ‘‘Mother’’ figure to the Lost Boys, stunting her own growth through starvation in order to never grow up – are all still themselves children, not yet grown into self-knowledge or self-acceptance.

These Deathless Shores is a furious novel, angry at the ignorance of childhood and the death of innocence of adulthood in equal measure, bitterly enraged by cruelty (self-directed and aimed outwards), taking savage aim at the idea that you should stunt any part of yourself in order to be safe, in order to fit in, in order to ward off the cruelty and judgement of those with power over you. In the background hovers the thread (and threat) of violent industrial colonialism. It’s fierce and compelling and thrashes through its adolescence of the soul with ferocious verve and atmospheric prose.

I’m twenty years on from my own adolescence. Which leaves the urgent fury of These Deathless Shores feeling rather more wistfully nostalgic to me than, perhaps, its author may intend.

It’s a very accomplished debut. I’m looking forward with interest to seeing what Low does next.

This review and more like it in the July 2024 issue of Locus.

While you are here, please take a moment to support Locus with a one-time or recurring donation. We rely on reader donations to keep the magazine and site going, and would like to keep the site paywall free, but WE NEED YOUR FINANCIAL SUPPORT to continue quality coverage of the science fiction and fantasy field.

©Locus Magazine. Copyrighted material may not be republished without permission of LSFF.