sydney khoo was the recipient of the Penguin Random House Australia’s Write It fellowship. Today I’m bringing you their new novel The Spider and Her Demons.
The Spider and Her Demons
High School can be hard at the best of times but somehow Zhi juggles study, tutoring and working in her Aunt’s dumpling shop.
Zhi’s Aunt Mei has sacrificed a lot so that Zhi can attend a private school and all she asks in return is that Zhi maintain an 85 point grade average and hide the fact she has fangs, spinnerets and four prehensile limbs that emerge from her back!
This story is wild!
We dive headfirst into the world of Zhi as she navigates being a teenager with more than the regular amount of challenge to her life.
The world building here is terrific. Zhi attends a (fictional) Sydney private school, whilst working in a dumpling shop in Chinatown. Everything is laid out for local readers to orient themselves to this world, which makes it particularly effective when it all goes sideways.
On the one hand there is the regular amount of teenage angst and we ride alongside Zhi as she and her friends are just normally being normal. On the other we are treated to Zhi’s anxiety as she revels in this normalcy, even as she feels it can’t last. The aforementioned spider biology is a cause for constant stress and Zhi knows she has to be less than normal, she has to be practically invisible.
The Spider and Her Demons takes the reader into the world of Zhi’s hyper consciousness of her body. We are shown that who she is is both exceptional and terrifyingly normal. Zhi’s daily routine to style her hair so that it hides her spider eyes is not so far any teenagers styling their way into some semblance of what they hope their peers will deem acceptable.
The difference Zhi struggles to accept in herself is only highlighted by the constant gossip surrounding the most popular girl in school, Dior Panne-Nix. While Zhi just wants to be like everyone else she must also confront that she doesn’t even exist in Dior’s orbit.
Of course all this is primed for chaos as Zhi’s secret is threatened one fateful night and she finds herself thrown into the path of Dior!
The Spider and Her Demons works both as a fantastical new world to discover and as a character driven exploration of individuals just trying to make it through their days.
sydney khoo writes her protagonist with power and doubt and so what might otherwise fall into superhero fare becomes a journey of personal discovery.
Right now it’s probably important to note everything I’m not saying about The Spider and Her Demons. This book is brand new so I’m not going to go about blabbing all the best bits for a bit of analysis.
Suffice to say that Zhi’s spider form is just the beginning of a vast world that is hurtling towards Zhi. In short measure getting a pass mark is a thing of the past and even survival looks like the wrong question as a whole world unfolds before us.
I’m a big fan of genre and the fantastic and The Spider and Her Demons gives us these in spades. It also takes the outcast hero out of the comfortable worlds of Marvel and DC and shows us how this works at the intersection of multiple identities.
I can’t talk around the spoilers any longer so let me just recommend you go and check out sydney khoo’s The Spider and Her Demons so we can all revel in it together.
Bonus - There’s a full conversation with sydney on the Final Draft podcast…
