That which is most alien and monstrous to us might actually have the most to teach us. This is part of the message at the heart of Charlie Jane Anders’s thought-provoking science fiction novel The City in the Middle of the Night, which came out in 2019. I don’t often review sci-fi on this blog, but when presented with a planet where half the world is eternally engulfed in darkest night and inhabited by giant tentacled monsters, I can’t deny how much science fiction often overlaps with horror. This novel in particular plays with how one situation can be experienced as horror by one person, but as something completely different from another perspective.
In the highly regulated and time-obsessed city of Xiosphant on the tenuously colonized planet January, Sophie is content to play at revolution beside her charismatic roommate Bianca. However, she soon learns that the stakes are much higher for someone born on the wrong side of town than for the young revolutionaries from wealthy families. A police raid on one of their meetings ends with Sophie being dragged beyond the city walls and cast out into the Night to die. When she is saved by one of the large, tentacled, Night-dwelling aliens known incongruously as crocodiles, Sophie realizes that there is more to the world than just the one city she has known all her life. Meanwhile, a hardened smuggler named Mouth arrives in Xiosphant willing to do whatever it takes to reclaim a relic of her past—even if that means betraying the trust of her newfound friends. But when things go wrong, Sophia, Bianca, Mouth, and the band of smugglers find themselves on the run, braving the desolate wastelands of this inhospitable planet in their quest for safety. As hints build up that the various man-made systems in place that make the few cities livable are losing their battle against an increasingly unstable climate, it seems like nowhere on this planet will be safe for long. Mouth looks for answers in the past, Bianca believes they just need to get the right people in power, but Sophie knows that humans won’t be able to solve this alien planet’s problems on their own.
The world-building in The City in the Middle of the Night lends itself equally to both science fiction and horror. In fact, one might even say that the difference between those two genres in this case is mostly a matter of attitude and interpretation. There is plenty to be frightened of on the planet January. As a tidally locked planet, with one side always facing toward the sun and one side always cast in darkness, the majority of the planet’s surface is rendered uninhabitable by severe extremes of climate. Humans can only live in the narrow band of twilight between Day and Night. Travel between the twilight cities is always a perilous journey that involves dodging deadly alien beasts and traversing the ominously named Sea of Murder. If you stray too far toward the Day, the ocean boils and any living creature would be instantly burned to ash. It is the cold and dark of the Night, however, that seems to hold the most horror for the humans—except for Sophie. At the beginning of the book, Sophie encounters a monster on the edge of Night in the most terrifying moment of her life. But when she reacts with curiosity rather than fear, the creature communicates with Sophie, revealing that it is actually a member of an intelligent species that has their own complex society. Sophie begins to see these seeming monsters as friends, and the Night as a place of hope and optimism. Perhaps by traveling to the remote city of the crocodiles and working together with them, she can finally find belonging and find a better way to live in harmony with this harsh planet.
The subjectivity of horror comes up at the end of the novel in an area that is always deeply, viscerally personal: body horror. Without spoiling too much, one of the characters goes through a physical transformation which many of the others react to with disgust and horror, but which she experiences as beautiful and freeing. Which brings us back to the question of genre. After all, extreme body modifications are often a fun and quirky part of sci-fi worlds, but extra appendages are generally regarded as a grotesque betrayal of the integrity of the sacred human body in horror fiction. It seems as though some of the characters in this story are living in a horror novel, but for others, approaching the same situations with a sense of wonder, curiosity, and optimism is what makes it feel more like science fiction.
If you want to explore this day-and-night planet for yourself, you can find The City in the Middle of the Night on shelves now at your favorite local retailer, or buy it online and support The Gothic Library in the process using this Bookshop.org affiliate link. If you’ve already read it, let me know your thoughts in the comments!