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Review: The Rust Maidens

Gwendolyn Kiste
250 pages
Trepidatio Publishing (2018)

Read this if you like: Atmospheric horror, Rust Belt narratives, sympathetic monsters

tl;dr summary: The girls of Denton Street rusted in the summer of 1980 and survivor Phoebe Shaw is back 30 years later to find out why.

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Industrial ruins have an energy that screams for horror stories. They’re haunted in a different way than abandoned homes. When you look at a dead factory or mill or plant, you know that, most likely, the hopes and dreams and way of life of an entire town died with it.

The steel mill in The Rust Maidens is still in the act of dying in 1980, the timeline where the bulk of the book takes place, and that adds to its symbolic power. The mill is gravity; it holds the neighborhood together but that same pull makes it difficult to escape. Alongside this is the inherent tension in all industrial neighborhoods: that they thing they all rely on is also poisoning their world. In 1980 Cleveland, the Cuyahoga River is so polluted it’s flammable, and the decay and pollution seeping from the mill has affected the residents of Denton Street in less visible but equally damaging ways, even before its kids start leaking dirty water and rusting from the inside out.

The Rust Maidens is a grotesquely imaginative play on these themes. There are layers of metaphor to unravel in the mysterious ailment afflicting the rust maidens. In one sense, it can be seen as a “sins of the father” style moral plague—the parents failed to build a better world and their daughters suffer the consequences. In another sense it’s a manifestation of being trapped in a place, the rust maidens’ futures unfairly truncated in the same way many young peoples’ are by similar circumstances, an embodiment of how certain upbringings “seep into your bones” and tether you to a place.

Yet this ailment is not entirely presented as an evil, incurable disease. Those afflicted undergo a process of transformation, shedding their human forms in stages in a process that mimics the cocoons narrator Phoebe nurtures as a hobby. The girls’ new connection to their surroundings shifts the power balance, and what seems to frighten the parents most is not that their daughters might die, but that they’re becoming something they can neither understand nor control. The adults in the novel rarely show the rust maidens compassion, or ask them what they want or how they’re feeling; the girls are blamed for not just their own suffering but that of the entire neighborhood, adding another layer of meaning: that of the outcast as scapegoat.

I don’t want to go too deep into symbols and meaning because I feel one of the joys of reading this book is that it leaves a lot of space for interpretation and contemplation. Kiste makes smart use of a first-person teenage protagonist to side-step explanations of what caused the transformations and why. If anybody does know, they’re not telling Phoebe. The rust maidens are less the subject of the story than they are its catalyst, and while they could be called monsters, they’re not villains. The parents of Denton Street as a collective function as Phoebe’s main opposing force for most of the narrative. Kiste’s descriptions of the parent meetings are some of the most ominous passages in the book, and the way adult characters shift being individuals and members of the collective creates a useful tension. In a sense, the adults on Denton Street have already undergone their own transformations, engaged in their own quieter fights of identity that mirrors the more sudden and gruesome transformation of the rust maidens.

From a writing standpoint, what stood out to me the most in The Rust Maidens was its smart use of perspective and time. There is very little retrospective commentary from Phoebe during the 1980 chapters—a few foreshadowing sentences here and there, but for the most part those chapters read as though the narrator isn’t far removed from the events. As a reader, knowing it’s been almost 30 years, this near-immediacy adds to the feel that Phoebe’s haunted. While there’s a bit more reflection in the 2009 chapters, though, almost nothing is revealed of the intervening years, and most of what we do learn is what Phoebe hasn’t done: she didn’t go to Case Western, she doesn’t live in Cleveland, she hasn’t been home for 28 Christmases. This bothered me, at first, but by the end of the book I realized it was both right and necessary. Ignoring those intervening years reinforces the feeling that Phoebe’s life has been on pause and she’s been stuck in her own way since that summer. She wasn’t physically on Denton Street but she never managed to escape it.  

I’m not sure if there’s such a thing as “Rust Belt Gothic” but that’s the best term that came to mind when I was trying to think of how to describe this kind of horror. There are also aspects of it that read like a modern urban fairy tale, the dark kind where people lose limbs and the princess doesn’t always get saved. But there’s also hope and beauty in the world of the rust maidens, and that balances against the dark and monstrous to make it a very satisfying read.

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