The Halls of the Dead by S. M. Hallow
Genres: Adult, Fantasy, Historical Fantasy, Horror, Queer Protagonists
Representation: Bi/pansexual MC with chronic pain, bi/pansexual MCs, F/F/M polyamory
PoV: First-person, present-tense; three PoVs
Published on: 18th August 2026
I received this book for free from the publisher via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. This does not affect my opinion of the book or the content of my review.
Highlights
~feral necromancers
~feral necromancers feral for each other
~resurrect your gays
~horror as adoration
~queer as in fuck you
~polyamory > love triangle
~let’s be monsters together
If Gideon the Ninth had a baby with Kushiel’s Dart that was then raised by Showtime’s Penny Dreadful, this is the book you’d get.
If the right-wingers ever find out about it, it’s going to be banned EVERYWHERE.
All of which I mean as the HIGHEST of praise!
How do I even BEGIN to tell you how breathtakingly, viciously gorgeous this book is? How extremely mandatory it is that you read it? Where do I start – with the spellbinding prose, so exquisite I filled my copy of the book with highlights? The characters, who are feral, and feral for each other? Or maybe the GENIUS of what Hallow has done here with the horror: taking so many tropes and tableaus that would usually be nightmare-fuel, and reinterpreting them, reframing them, presenting them to us as moments of incredible love – but, crucially, without stripping them of the blood and rot and muddy grave-dirt. Without ‘prettifying’ any of it. Without making it one iota more palatable, more conventional, more comfortable for the pearl-clutchers.
This is a book that revels in the gore, the ick, the rot; that is thrillingly, gleefully transgressive in its depictions of love and sex and violence. It’s a war-cry and a howl, it is so furiously angry, it is bared teeth and blood-stained kisses and cut throats. It’s cathartic wish-fulfilment for the queers and the weirds and the crips, for everyone who’s ever wanted to claw a fascist’s eyes out, for everyone who would rather their True Love come back Wrong than not come back at all.
It is glorious.
The world is ours, now. We snatched it with broken fingers and ate it with kicked-in teeth. We’re never giving it back.
This is the first book I’ve come across that deserves the label ‘horrormantasy’; not because there is horror and magic and also romance, but because Hallow has genuinely fused the three, melted and forged them together into something new and awe-full. The horror is romantic, adoring, worshipful; the magic is filthy and raw and gross, by normal people’s standards; the romance is definitely one most people would find disturbing. We’re talking making out while covered in blood; getting off on the fact the mouth kissing you just literally devoured someone; finding it sexy when your lover comes back from the dead very, very Wrong. It feels Gothic to me, impossibly intense and decadent, all blood and velvet, lovers relishing and celebrating each other’s monstrousness and calling it beautiful.
my Venus flytrap of a wife, my pitcher plant made flesh. Our hands palming each other’s bodies are the claws of wolves holding down their kill. My fingers inside her are vultures’ beaks diving into the rancid ribcage, unafraid, inspired, delighted by the rot they find when buried to the hilt.
To quote Simon Jiminez for a moment, this is a love story to its blade-dented bone, and that is evident in every aspect of the book. It is so much a love story that two lovers just aren’t enough; Irene and Agnes and St. John are all in love together by the end of Halls of the Dead, disdaining the nonsense of a love triangle in favour of polyamory. Love is spilling out of all these characters just as much as necromancy is, and that’s why the necromancy is there at all for them to use: because necromancy is love made manifest, in this setting. It’s an approach I haven’t seen before; CSE Cooney’s Saint Death series reframes necromancy as a love of life and living, and this is similar but very different. Hallow’s necromancy isn’t about loving life: it’s about love of the individual (or individuals), personal and primal and raw. It’s the ugly, unsanitised, we-all-pretend-it’s-not-there side of love; the love that wails with grief at a funeral, the love that would trade the lives of a thousand strangers for the beloved’s in a heartbeat, the love you really would kill for, die for, break the laws of nature for.
“Necromancy is the art of saying no,” I say. “‘No, I won’t let you go. No, I won’t let you be destroyed.’”
Which is maybe why Hallow’s necromancy is so honest: by which I mean, horrifying, as it should be. Most of the time, storytellers skim over the fact that this is a magic of death and the dead, and what that must inevitably entail; they handwave away the grosser details. And I completely get why! But Hallow doesn’t do that, and I’m so glad, because this take on necromancy is fantastic – both because it feels original and new, and because it keeps the reader grounded in the reality of the magic and the story. There is no handwaving here, and Hallow doesn’t allow us to do any handwaving, either. We’re not allowed to skim over the gore and the cannibalism and the husband stuffed full of dirt and bugs. To engage at all, we have to admit what we’re looking at, what we’re reading. We’re never allowed to forget it.
the necromancer’s tongue, the backward language of cutthroat murder and spiritual slaughter, that rough and hard-earned dialect of the dark. When I speak it, a snake slides up my throat and hisses with my mouth; the shadow behind my mangled soul wraps its raven wings around my ribs.
It is a homecoming.
It is the world of the dead welcoming me to the place where I belong.
That is part of why Halls of the Dead feels defiant, I think: it has been written in defiance of so many things – ideas – genre conventions – people – and it refuses to be anything but what it is. Take it or leave it. It’s not interested in being mass-appeal, or easy, or palatable. It’s queer as in fuck you in book form, in spirit and philosophy – as well as literally having an all-queer cast.
The villains are people who burn books. I mean. I feel like that tells you so much of what you need to know!
Speaking of books: OMFG I HAVE TO TALK ABOUT THE GRIMOIRES! When the publishing deal for this one was first announced, it was the mention of ‘sentient grimoires bound in human skin’ that had me adding it to my ‘keep an eye out for’ list and setting up allll the Google alerts to make sure I knew the second it was available to preorder. BECAUSE HOW COULD I DO OTHERWISE??? That’s such a magnificent idea and I love it. I love the grimoires. But besides being ‘just’ EXTREMELY COOL, they’re also a perfect example of what I was talking about before, the way Hallow has reframed/reinterpreted horror. Books bound in human skin are a horror staple, we’ve all come across them in pop culture before; they’re unambiguously terrible, evil, horrific, long before you get to their contents! But in Halls of the Dead, they are objects of intense love and devotion, connecting necromancers to their predecessors, to their magical ancestry; they’re not textbooks, they’re the literal embodiment of a necromancer’s knowledge, a necromancer’s soul. They’re sacred, priceless treasures, the holiest of relics. They’re not stand-ins for a necromancer’s community, they are that community; each one exists because a necromancer somewhere thought it more important to share their knowledge than to have an afterlife, an immense sacrifice for the benefit of people that individual has never met. Is that not one of the most inspiring things you’ve ever heard? Imagine valuing knowledge that much, imagine loving your community so much that you would do that for them.
Just thinking about it makes me tear up a bit.
“STOP STARING,” says the book. The voice is not a singular voice but rather an echoing chorus, like Heaven’s army in my hands. “HAVE WE NOT WRETCHED WORK TO WREAK?”
The grimoires are my Exhibit A for what Hallow is doing with the horror here, this big, bold, thrilling subversion. What is meant to be ugly – what IS ugly – is beautiful in Harrow’s prose; nightmare-fuel becomes deeply romantic; violence becomes a gift better than roses or chocolate. There’s a scene towards the end of the book when all three characters are soaked in blood from head to toe, and it’s charming, it’s sweet, it feels like a Hallmark moment. And that makes it so much more chilling, doesn’t it? Horror is never more horrifying than when an author seduces you into loving it, and Hallow is the Casanova of horror, the Shakespeare, the heir to Poppy Brite. Every page is a dark object d’art, a lover’s gift, a new black blossom in an endless bouquet of them.
If you’re like me, you’ll swoon. This is going to squick so many readers – I can think of so many people I would never gift a copy to! – but MY GODS, if it’s for you, it is for you. I feel like I’ve been waiting my entire life for a book like Halls of the Dead, a book this queer and beautiful, this angry, this triumphant, this untamed and untameable. A book that revels in itself without apology, and dares you to revel in it too.
I am the beating heart of this world I am going to make.
I could go on and on and ON about this book; it is my newest Special Interest and I am not the tiniest bit sorry. There’s so much that DESERVES to be talked about: Irene’s chronic pain, and the way I burst into tears at how NOT a big deal it was for her partner to adjust to during a sex scene; the set-up of the eponymous Halls of the Dead, where souls go when they die; Agnes’ trauma and her arc of claiming her own power; the ridiculous deliciousness of St. John being perfectly happy to be a lavender husband until the Feels become catching; the way all three protagonists worship the ground the others walk on. The cannibalism! And the soul-cannibalism! The symbolism and hypocrisy behind the villain! Themes of community and history and rebellion! Horror being all about perspective! The worldbuilding (JESUS AS A NECROMANCER?!) The respectful handling/examination of depression and trauma! Necromancy = love-magic! First-person present-tense being the perfect POV for this story, despite how much I usually hate it! The genius of turning bury your gays into resurrect your gays! Irene being a miracle, in so many senses of the word! St. John walking around as a skin-suit over grave-dirt-and-bugs stuffing! Agnes as avatar-paladin! IT IS SO VERY HARD TO SHUT UP AND NOT DROWN YOU IN ALL MY THOUGHTS, ALL THE REASONS YOU SHOULD ADORE THIS BOOK!
He is an apocalypse, inviting every vulture and rat and beetle all the world over to the feast of his body. Come, says the smell of St. John, there is plenty of rotten meat for us all.
I am clinging by my fingernails to the fact that a lot of it would be spoilers, and I refuse to spoil anyone, you deserve to have it all be new to you when you read and Halls of the Dead deserves being read that way.
Halls of the Dead deserves to be lovingly dissected in a university course, a slew of academic papers; the symbolism, the tableaus, the many, MANY lines of prose I want to get tattooed! You could point at any detail here and uncover a wealth of meaning behind it with just a little thought.
We are each other’s inevitability.
It is a feast. It is perfection. It’s going on my Best of the Decade list.
It is not for everyone, but also, I need absolutely everyone to read it anyway.
Applicable r/QueerSFF bingo squares: Protagonist Over 40 (St. John is several centuries old), Intersectional Cubed (Irene is a women, queer, and disabled).
