The second novel in The Monstermorphosis, an adult science fiction series by Norwegian writer Suzanne Berget, No Good Night for Gentle Beasts was released October 1st. It’s set in a megacity run by seven corporations in the near future, where people are kept in lifelong debt for the implants in their heads and people who get in the way have a habit of ending up as test subjects. The first book, Let Slip the Beasts, reviewed here, was a strong debut, and this one builds on everything that made it work.
Three years on, Kallie lives in hiding as a fixer for a criminal network called the Syndicate, away from the corporation that made her. Her apartment has no interior walls and contains nothing she could not abandon in ten seconds. She tests poisons on herself in her spare time to map her own limits. Then she makes one mistake, a foolish phone call home, and a recognition algorithm catches her mother saying her name out loud. The hunt starts again, and when the trap laid for her fails, the company lets loose a creature engineered specifically to beat her, with venom that shuts down the healing she has always relied on.
Hunting the creature in turn gives her two unlikely allies: a teenage hacker buried in debt to the Syndicate, and a morgue lab technician with no visible sense of self-preservation. It also leads her to a reunion with two men from her past, and to the realisation that saving them means walking back into the hands of the people who built her. Middle volumes in trilogies often feel like treading water until the finale. This one does not.
On content, this is rougher going than book one, and just as dark if not darker. There is content such as dismemberment, acid burns, body horror, drug self-experimentation, suicidal ideation, at least one explicit sex scene, and a constant undertow of self-disgust. The jokes and the friendships keep it from tipping into misery, but anyone who found the first book heavy should know this one pushes further. You could start here, since Kallie explains her origins out loud fairly early, but it’s probably not the best idea. Still, it feels like a natural continuation of the first book.
While the first book was built around a question, this one is built around the consequences. Kallie’s origins are settled early, and knowing them changes nothing practical: she still cannot heal her own brain, still wakes every two hours, still swallows drugs and poisons in her own bathroom to find out what her body will survive. A major theme here is loneliness, which feels relatable even in the craziness of the dystopian world the book depicts.
Besides the aforementioned, two major conflicts drive the book. The first is external: Kallie wants to turn the Syndicate against VyroGen, the company that made her, and that plan collapses when her handler is compromised. The second is internal and more interesting. Ash, her dead sister, appears constantly, a hallucination produced by brain damage her healing cannot repair, and she is impossible to argue with, because she knows everything Kallie has done and reminds her of all of it. She also offers help when Kallie is losing, and her price is never anything but another death. Kallie maintains she is not a monster, they are. Nobody in the book is quite willing to confirm that, least of all Ash, and the uncertainty is what keeps the pages turning.
The writing style is once again one of the strongest aspects of the book. Berget keeps the camera inside Kallie’s head throughout, and the prose moves the way her attention does, clipped in a fight and more reflective when she is alone. The fights read as resource management rather than choreography: Kallie trades one ability for another, pays for it afterwards in exhaustion and hunger, and carries the damage forward. The jokes still land, and they never undercut the horror sitting beside them, which is vividly depicted through immersive prose:
Angry buzzing dragged her from the roiling sea, carried her away from her conversations with the gods of pleasure. Her sluggish gaze fixed on the burner, which blinked and vibrated to get her attention. The name on the display jolted her awake. Control called.
The world-building is also a strong point, and this is definitely a sci-fi dystopia you would not want to end up in, but one that is horribly believable even in its absurdity. Terms like identelet, indenture and the Green Zone just turn up and largely have to be worked out from context if you haven’t read the first book.
The details that stuck with me are small: a man frozen mid-seizure in an alley because he missed an implant payment, a debt that grows with every charge for rent, tools, water, even the oxygen you breathe, a cat carrier being the only thing worth packing. The author spends as much time on what people eat and how they heat their rooms as on the towers overhead, and the small stuff is what sells it.
Without spoilers, I would just say the ending leans on what comes next. The final pages settle one thing and then deliberately open several more, which is standard for a middle volume but did leave me feeling that a chunk of the payoff has been deferred to a book that does not exist yet. Some may also feel that Kallie’s self-loathing becomes repetitive, or struggle a bit with the pacing of the back half. None of it bothered me enough to dent the rating, but it is all worth flagging.
All in all, this is the rare middle volume that earns its place rather than parking the story until the finale. It is harsher, sadder and better written than the debut, the new characters are good company, and the plot is gripping. If you liked the first one, this is a clear step up. If it left you cold, this will not convert you. Book three, the already announced Monstermorphosis Final Stage, is on my list.
You can get your copy of No Good Night for Gentle Beasts here!
