New Arrival: Rust Maidens by Gwendolyn Kiste

There are a lot of stories involving characters looking back, particularly when they were younger, when they had years of living ahead of them as well as miles of potential. Some would say there is an inherent sweetness involved in looking back at who you were when you had fewer responsibilities and way more opportunities to daydream. However, horror is all about peeling back the sunlit façade and revealing its festering, squirming underside. Sometimes, on closer inspection, those memories of childhood, of coming of age become tainted, particularly when a traumatic event or entity (a shapeshifting clown monster, for example), is introduced. Offering two narratives, looking back on the past while setting the tale in the present offers the protagonist perspective, even explaining many of the protagonist’s actions in the present. Gwendolyn Kiste does the same thing with the protagonist in her novel The Rust Maidens, a girl named Phoebe Shaw, but Kiste does more than simply keep the focus on one protagonist, the girl she was and the woman she’s become. Kiste also shows a city’s, perhaps even a world’s, transformation.

The story takes place in two eras, the early 1980’s where Phoebe has just graduated high school with her best friend Jacqueline and an older Phoebe who comes home to a neighborhood that is collapsing before her eyes. As she looks at the ruins of what her Cleveland neighborhood Denton Street has become, she remembers how things changed for her and how things changed for Jacqueline and four other girls the local news called the Rust Maidens. These girls grow wounds on their bodies that don’t bleed but leak water, their bones beneath look metallic, and their nails have the look of broken glass, as though each girl is literally becoming the decay around them. Kiste definitely gets to play up the body horror in these transformations, but she really gets emotional mileage out of people’s reactions to the Rust Maidens, treating them like either sideshow attractions or as an overall blight on their community. Phoebe begins her life as a high school graduate thinking about leaving, and now she must do some real growing up to try and help her best friend and what she’s become.

Phoebe is a sympathetic character because of her strong moral center despite her often rash decisions, and she particularly contrasts herself with her parents, who seem to be acting for what they perceive as the good of the community. Having the older Phoebe look back on her younger days shows how that youthful idealism she felt has been irrevocably tarnished by simply existing after this experience. Even after all that, however, there is still a core of Phoebe that wants to do right by the Rust Maidens and who must pay penance. The movement back and forth between the two narratives flows very well and readers will want to follow along to see how both narratives, past and present, end.

Another main character that deserves mention is Denton Street itself, both the past and the present incarnation. Closely tied communities where decisions are made through de facto committees have given way to isolation and many of the landmarks Phoebe remembers are derelict, decayed, and waiting for the wrecking ball, which makes sense that the Rust Maidens began here. Reflecting society today, where manufacturing jobs dwindle and once-thriving towns are left to collapse, the city itself is its own character than can only disappoint the men and women that give their lives and livelihoods to factory work only for these factories to abandon them. It is in this city, which has become a beautiful ruin, that Phoebe tries to discover what she lost.