The Kirkus Review
Using mystery and romance elements in a nonlinear narrative, SenLinYu’s debut is a doorstopper of a fantasy that follows a woman with missing memories as she navigates through a war-torn realm in search of herself.
Helena Marino is a talented young healer living in Paladia—the “Shining City”—who has been thrust into a brutal war against an all-powerful necromancer and his army of Undying, loyal henchmen with immortal bodies, and necrothralls, reanimated automatons. When Helena is awakened from stasis, a prisoner of the necromancer’s forces, she has no idea how long she has been incarcerated—or the status of the war. She soon finds herself a personal prisoner of Kaine Ferron, the High Necromancer’s “monster” psychopath who has sadistically killed hundreds for his master.
Ordered to recover Helena’s buried memories by any means necessary, the two polar opposites—Helena and Kaine, healer and killer—end up discovering much more as they begin to understand each other through shared trauma.
While necromancy is an oft-trod subject in fantasy novels, the author gives it a fresh feel—in large part because of their superb worldbuilding coupled with unforgettable imagery throughout: “[The necromancer] lay reclined upon a throne of bodies. Necrothralls, contorted and twisted together, their limbs transmuted and fused into a chair, moving in synchrony, rising and falling as they breathed in tandem, squeezing and releasing around him…[He] extended his decrepit right hand, overlarge with fingers jointed like spider legs.”
Another noteworthy element is the complex dynamic between Helena and Kaine. To say that these two characters shared the gamut of intense emotions would be a vast understatement. Readers will come for the fantasy and stay for the romance.
Although the melodrama sometimes is a bit much, the superb worldbuilding and intricate plotline make this a must-read.
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The Paste Magazine Review: Alchemised
Reviewed by Lacy Milas
A gargantuan doorstopper clocking in at over a thousand pages, Alchemised is not for the faint of heart. It’s a marathon of dark, disturbing, and often extremely upsetting imagery. The book comes with extensive content and trigger warnings, and let me be clear: they’re no joke. This is a story that’s virtually bursting with graphic depictions of torture, murder, sexual assault, suicidal ideation, self-harm, kidnapping, enslavement, psychological trauma, body horror, and an extreme amount of violence and character death. It’s a dark fantasy set in an uncomfortably dystopian setting, so prepare your expectations and heart accordingly.
Set in a world where alchemists can manipulate both metal and matter, the story follows Helena Marino, a healer in a seemingly unending and brutal war against the High Necromancer, whose immortal Undying are attempting to take over the kingdom of Paladia. Captured by enemy forces, Helena awakens to discover that she’s missing two years of her memories, her abilities have been suppressed, and the war she has given her life to has been lost. Her best friend, the prophesied leader Lucien Holdfast, is dead, and every other member of the resistance group known as the Eternal Flame along with him. Convinced her missing memories hold the key to the last remaining secrets of their movement, Helena is given to the mysterious High Reeve, who turns out to be a former Alchemy Institute classmate of hers named Kaine Ferron.
Transferred to his family’s crumbling estate, she’s held captive as her mind and body are violated, and she struggles to hold on to what little she can remember of her former self. Told in a striking nonlinear fashion, the story follows Helena’s initial struggles to regain her memories while contending with the horrors of her imprisonment, her fears about Ferron’s intentions, and the Undying breeding program being set up to repopulate the kingdom’s alchemists, The Handmaid’s Tale-style. In the wake of a shocking event, the story launches into an extensive flashback sequence that takes up the bulk of the novel and details the final years of the war, including everything from Helena’s off-the-books covert work for the Eternal Flame, the toll her healing takes on her, and her professional relationship with Kaine.
The narrative rhythms of the book will feel familiar to anyone who has spent any significant length of time reading in the fanfic world, giving it a fast-paced narrative and brisk feel despite its massive bulk. (I finished it in two days and felt like I was on the slower side of things.) Helena is given the sort of interiority and depth that will delight and horrify readers by turns (her repeated torture sessions are brutal, and we’ve got a front row seat to all of them). Kaine, for his part, is busy hiding his own set of secrets and traumas, including a nightmarish past and a personal quest for vengeance. The path of their relationship likely won’t surprise anyone, but SenLinYu still manages to make the push and pull between them compelling. (Though they do tend to have the same argument a few too many times.)
Unfortunately, however, many of the story’s secondary characters and relationships—virtually any that aren’t Helena and Kaine—are fairly thinly sketched at best, with many serving as little more than plot devices. For example, we don’t really see enough of Helena and Luc’s friendship before the war (or even during the early days of the conflict) to truly justify her singular devotion to him. There are moments where you may wonder why she’s so attached to this boy she barely hangs out with, and whose other friends don’t actually seem to like her all that much. On some level, the story seems to count on the fact that many readers will simply accept and assume the relationship, and it’s a bit lazy. (Don’t hate me, shippers, but I’d have happily traded some of the more repetitive Helena/Kaine scenes for more focus on the history of Paladia and the Holdfasts.)
But, if you’re reading this book, it’s largely because you’re fully committed—or want to be—to the relationship at its center. And if that’s what you’re here for, you’ll be very happy with Alchemised, which puts its leads through a veritable meat grinder of emotional angst, self-loathing, and intense yearning over the course of its pages. The story is told out of order, confident enough in the Helena and Kaine chemistry to trust that readers will still respond to it after several hundred pages of abuse and terror, and if there’s a word for slower than slow burn, well, this is it. Alchemised is, in its way, a love story, yes, but it is primarily a story of survival, of what we’re willing to sacrifice in the name of the people and things we care about, and what such impossible choices leave of us in their aftermath. This isn’t a romantic story by any stretch of the imagination, but its main characters go through such a crucible of pain and emotional agony that it’s hard not to root for them to find some sort of peace together.
The novel’s biggest flaw is found in its final third, which doesn’t (at least for me) address the fallout from the darkest aspects of its early chapters in nearly enough depth. It’s probably not a spoiler to say that Helena gets her memories back over the course of this book, which forces her to face the physical and mental violations she has had to endure at the hands of people she previously loved and trusted. The book—likely because it could have taken another thousand pages to parse the emotional complexity of these revelations—largely brushes past them, and while both Helena’s fractured psyche and a ticking clock escape plot help provide some cover for this choice, it feels a little too convenient, particularly since the story is so unwilling to let readers off the hook about the horror of what they’re seeing elsewhere.
Though most will likely pick up this book for the relationship at its center, Alchemised is strongest as an exploration of morality and corruption. There are no heroes in this book; the very idea of a history that one is meant to be on the right side of is malleable, and every character is compromised to some degree or other, both in terms of the acts they’re willing to commit and the ones they’re willing to look away from. All told, I’m very interested to see what this author does next—in a world without any preestablished guardrails.
The Fantasy Hive Interview with SenLinYu
Cat Treadwell, HOST:
Hi SenLinYu – welcome to The Fantasy Hive! It was a real pleasure to read Alchemised, which is a book with so much going on! Can I ask if it’s possible for you to sum the story up for those who haven’t read it yet?
Alchemised is a gothic war novel about a healer being kept prisoner in a deteriorating mansion while her captors try to discover what secrets her lost memories contain. It’s a nonlinear war story that focuses on parts of war that tend to be written out of the narrative.
The atmosphere of the book absolutely gripped me from the first page, with its almost gothic sense of dread, being trapped, losing oneself and slowly daring to hope (and love) against all odds. I’d love to know what inspired you to write such a deeply complex tale?
I find gothic literature to be deeply compelling. It’s the genre that I’m most intensely drawn to because of how consuming it is. I can be an over-thinker, so I’m always looking for stories that will rip me out of my mind and make me lose track of myself for a while.
When I began writing, the inspiration was born from this rather Toni Morrison-esque desire to write the kind of book I kept looking for but couldn’t find. There were certain formulas and conclusions I kept seeing in literature that I wanted to explore differently, themes that I felt stories kept leaning away from in order to have a cleaner narrative arc.
As much as I adore love stories, I tend to struggle with romance as a genre because it’s presented as a formula of idealised love, and as a reader I don’t tend to connect with idealised versions of things. Horror, however, is often an inversion of romance, it’s about the obsession of love, the absence of love, etc. and since gothic literature is both a horror and romance genre, it was the perfect space to write a love story that very intensely explores the pain and hurt of love, where love is a force of nature, but not one that’s inherently pure or good.
It’s a relatively familiar fantasy trope for the main character to start the book with amnesia, so the reader can discover what’s going on as the protagonist does. You take this in such a great direction, culminating in the restoration of memories as a time-jump so we actually get to see what happened, which makes for a much more intense experience. Did you ever consider telling the story in a linear manner, or was it always a journey of discovery for Helena?
From the very beginning I conceptualized the story structurally as a literary triptych. A triptych is an art format that has three parts or panels, and the center panel is the context for the first and third. So it was always imagined as being told out of order, however part of my concept for it was that it could be read multiple ways. Although I recommend the published order for the first read in order to fully experience the mystery element.
I was also very inspired by mystery novels. I think the suspense of mystery melds very well with a gothic atmosphere, but as a reader, I’d sometimes feel rather cheated by mysteries because the inciting event happens off-page, you don’t get to witness it; instead the story concludes with a character explaining everything for several pages. So Alchemised is a bit of me wanting to have my cake and eat it too, where you experience the mystery aspect of the story and then go back and actually experience what caused it too.
The setting of an unwinnable war was very poignant, and I saw parallels between events in the world today, mostly in terms of the terrible dehumanization. Having soldiers fighting after death, torture and forced eugenics definitely dives into deep waters, but you do so with as much sensitivity and concern as possible, escalating with brutal honesty that these villains are BAD. Did you get any pushback for including such potentially difficult topics?
I was very lucky to have editors that understood my vision for the story. I feel like war in storytelling can often be used to just create a sense of epic, or create spectacle, and as a result we can become inured to what it actually is. Especially because culturally, wartime history is often sanitized in order to create certain ideological narratives, or a sense of national identity or heroism that people can take pride in, so that people will volunteer to do it in the future. As a result in political conversations, instead of talking about the violence or horrific realities of war which are too awful to put on the air, pundits often talk about it in terms of monetary cost. All of that contributes to war as a reality losing its meaning.
So when I wrote Alchemised, I didn’t want to write the war as though it were merely a stage. I wrote it like it was the worst character in the entire book. Honestly, everything I depicted in Alchemised pales in comparison to the real world war crimes that come about from dehumanization; Alchemised is still a very softened depiction of it.
The book never shies away from difficult moments, but I was actually thankful that there are no chapter breaks or cutaways to avoid looking at the unpleasant. Was the decision to be explicit difficult, or simply as part of ramping up the awfulness of war?
It was very important to me to place the circumstances on the page, as inescapable to the reader as they are for Helena. Because of her role as a medic, her observations of things can be very clinical and unflinching as she has to make evaluations and proceed without letting her feelings interfere or affect her. Yet what she is witnessing is horrific, and rather than have that acknowledged, it’s brushed off and dismissed because care work isn’t heroic or valuable in the way combat is – care work is just what women are supposed to do. Helena’s choices are intrinsically tied to the hell that she’s trapped in, and so if the narrative flinched away from it, then those choices don’t make sense.
Another aspect of the story that I loved is how nobody in this book feels like a ‘lesser’ character, as everyone’s fights are very real to them as individuals (poor Ivy!). I think that’s an incredible achievement, reminding us that every life is valuable even amidst the turmoil of the plot. Did you have any favorite (or un-favorite!) characters as the book unfolded?
To be honest, I felt very sorry for almost all of the characters, with only a few exceptions. It was important to me to have them all be products of their circumstances. Not to justify their actions, but in order to ensure that there was a coherent motive behind the choices they made.
Love is a particularly recurring character motive throughout the story. There are several characters that are driven by their love for a specific person and the need they feel to protect them, and many of them allow their love to twist and destroy them. I didn’t want the theme of love to be as simple as ‘these characters were motivated by love, so they succeeded and/or survived,’ having that motive be shared by multiple characters but then setting them on a collision course really sharpened the tragedy.
It feels appropriate that I both loved and hated the relationship rollercoaster that is Helena and Kaine! They really do both go through so much, but I was honestly impressed that it never became repetitive or dull – I was always fully invested in their lives, and the conclusion was perfect. How far did you plan their path, and were there any points where they ‘took over’ to take things in their own direction?
I would say overall, I always knew exactly where their relationship was going, although there were some gaps in the early drafts when I was figuring out how to get them there. I wanted their relationship to be this need for one another that was forged in the text, rather than being lust-driven, or a rapid infatuation. Given the stakes of the story, the relationship had to be a mutual emotional seduction, one that trapped them in this self-consuming obsession with one another. They’re both characters who are ‘too rational’ for love, but they’re just so starved for someone that understands them.
SenLinYu grew up in the Pacific Northwest and studied classical liberal arts and culture. They started writing in the Notes app of their phone during their baby’s nap time. Their collected online works have garnered over twenty million individual downloads and have been translated into twenty-three languages. They live in Portland with their family. ALCHEMISED is their first novel.