
Em X. Liu’s The Death I Gave Him has one hell of a hook: a “queer sci-fi locked room thriller, inspired by Shakespeare’s Hamlet”. Instantly intriguing, the novel does an excellent job of hooking its claws into you, starting from the perspective of Horatio, an AI situated in the lab of Dr. Graham Lichfield, which switches on one morning in 2047 to find its owner brutally murdered. His son and scientific colleague, Hayden, is horrified, especially when he discovers camera evidence has been erased. With the lab placed into lockdown, only four other suspects remain.
The Lichfields’ life’s work is the Sisyphus Formula: at present a miraculously regenerative concoction, and in the future a possible cure for death. Obtaining it also appears to be the killer’s motive. For Hayden, who suffers from a practically pathological fear of dying, catching the person responsible and seeing his father’s work to the end becomes a driving obsession bordering on insanity.
Liu’s biochemistry background could have made The Death I Gave Him a dry read, bogged down by terminology and theory. Instead, the science elements are written authoritatively without becoming too granular, allowing Liu’s beautifully gothic turns of phrase to shine through. It also lends itself well to the morbid, existential nature of Hamlet, as Hayden’s understanding of the decay of the body’s cells underlines a tortured soul and fracturing mind: “Something inside him is always dying”.
In bundling up Shakespeare’s ghosts, sci-fi’s post-humanism and the structure of a taut murder mystery, Liu has brought out the best of both worlds for a queasy, claustrophobic descent into murder and madness.
The Death I Gave Him, Em X. Liu (Rebellion)
Price: £12/£7.99 Ebook. Info: here
words HANNAH COLLINS