There are two things horror writer Hailey Piper is particularly good at: building a world with such a steady, quiet pace you barely realize it’s happening, and scaling up the horror from the personal to the cosmic — sometimes over the length of the book, sometimes in the space of a few paragraphs.
I first noticed this in Piper’s excellent 2020 novel, The Worm and His Kings, which begins with a young trans girl searching for her missing friend in the tunnels beneath an uncaring city and ends with an escalation so breathlessly apocalyptic it came as a genuine shock to me — the best kind.
Queen of Teeth accomplishes much the same thing, though you can see the cataclysm approaching from a bit further off. Queen tells the story of Yaya, a young woman living in an alternate present where the United States has fractured, and a calculating pharmaceutical company (AlphaBeta Pharmaceuticals, or ABP) owns the rights to living people’s genetic data and, by extension, the people themselves. Yaya is a chimera, a person with a genetic code distinct from ordinary humans. The very existence of the chimeras is regulated, subject to mandatory medical appointments where they are tested and given shots, the contents of which are often undisclosed.
We are never told in so many words that this world is different from our own; there is no infodump or foreword explaining it. It’s dealt out in clever, potent drops — characters noting that David Fincher retired after directing Fight Club 2, for example, or the accepted ubiquity of “police tanks.” Or that wealthy pharmaceutical corporations can abduct human beings, perform hideous experiments on them, and buy their way out of atrocity with legal loopholes and enormous sums of money.
If you go into Queen of Teeth thinking it’s primarily a story about vagina dentata — a reasonable assumption, given both the title and Piper’s storytelling predilections — you’d be a little bit right. That’s where it starts, but, like the entity changing Yaya’s body from within, it will not be contained there. Yaya slowly discovers these teeth are more than just a physical change — they’re part of something living and thinking inside her, its consciousness developing as it grows. And to grow, it needs to be fed. Because Queen of Teeth starts out as body horror, you can likely guess what it needs to be fed in three guesses or fewer. I won’t spoil the details, but it’s possible after reading this book that you will never think about the words “peanut butter” the same way again.
As Yaya and Magenta (the name of this new entity) grow more intertwined, the landscape of Yaya’s interior life begins to shift. Magenta starts as a curious outsider, not malevolent but still dangerous, like a feral animal brought into the house without consideration for the consequences. Soon enough, however, Yaya and Magenta become less and less distinguishable as individual minds and begin transforming into something entirely new. Not surprisingly, ABP considers this new thing both highly dangerous and potentially profitable and comes to collect their property.
The other main character, Doc — a scientist working for ABP and Yaya’s sometimes friend and lover — does her best to try to guide Yaya through this change but is simply not up to the task. Doc is deeply conflicted; she wants to be loyal to her corporate masters and serve their ends, while at the same time, she’s haunted by a similar situation in her past that cost lives and left her with a heartbreaking sense of failure. Doc’s feelings for Yaya are more than professional interest and protective instinct, and as Yaya / Magenta grows more dangerous, the more conflicted and raw those feelings become.
This is a significant part of what makes Queen of Teeth work as well as it does. Doc and Yaya / Magenta must all navigate a slippery, uncharted landscape of their emotions, instincts, fears, and responsibilities. The result is a characterization as potent and unpredictable as the mysterious injections that set Yaya on this path. The emotions they experience are deep, cutting, and full of uncertainty, just as they are in real life. This compelling verisimilitude is never undermined by the increasingly alien and inscrutable thought process of Yaya / Magenta, because Piper is so skilled at getting you inside the monster’s mind. The prose draws you close and presses you into Magenta’s strange and brutal consciousness, and you understand it even as you know what’s happening is horrifying from a human perspective.
The final sequences contain that rapid escalation and apocalyptic energy I mentioned before: scenes that would be right at home in a big-budget monster movie if it were told from within the mind of the “monster” itself. (That label gets harder to apply as the story continues, because Yaya / Magenta eventually becomes more compelling than most of the humans she’s surrounded by.) The intensely emotional climax showcases one of Piper’s other major strengths: she loves the creatures she creates, even when (especially when) that love is messy, imperfect, and terrifying — and she wants you to love them that way too.