Helpmeet

By Naben Ruthnum

It's 1900, and Louise Wilk is taking her dying husband from Manhattan to the upstate orchard estate where he grew up. Dr. Edward Wilk is wasting away from a mysterious affliction acquired in a strange encounter: but Louise soon realizes that her husband's worsening condition may not be a disease at all, but a transformative phase of existence that will draw her in as much more than a witness.

“Through hauntingly concise prose, Helpmeet both acutely disturbs and captivates. This outstanding novella is a morbidly engrossing exploration of moral and physical decay and the shifting boundaries of love and devotion. The tight, incisive narrative is a chilling dive into mysterious forces that transcend the basic binary of good and evil, and the inherent depravity that humans themselves can’t comprehend until it’s too late.”
—Waubgeshig Rice, Author of Moon of the Crusted Snow

“Naben Ruthnum’s Helpmeet is a remarkable throwback. The style, the precise prose, the lush imagery, the dreadful sense of wheels turning just past the reader's sightline—I devoured it in a few delighted hours and it took me back to my teenage years, to afternoons squirreled away in the corner of my local library reading Clark Ashton Smith, Robert Chambers, Algernon Blackwood and the other great elder wordsmiths I cut my horror teeth on.”
—Craig Davidson, Author of The Saturday Night Ghost Club

“At the bitter end of the 19th century, a loyal wife cares tenderly for her dissolute husband as he nears his death from a mysterious, gruesomely corrosive disease. Helpmeet by Naben Ruthnum is a sumptuous excursion into surreal body horror and an unsparing exploration of the extreme frontiers of connubial devotion. Ruthnum delivers a uniquely unsettling Gothic love story—and it is first and foremost a love story—evoking the grisly Edwardian tales of W.W. Jacobs, William Hope Hodgson and Algernon Blackwood, while drawing in such modern masters as Barker, Del Toro and Cronenberg. Brief enough to be read in an evening, it holds certain images so grotesque that they will linger in your dreams for weeks.”
—David Demchuk, Award-winning author of The Bone Mother, and RED X

“An everyday tragedy spirals into a medical mystery and then into something much darker and more disquieting, executed in prose that glitters like candlelight on an open wound. I loved this intensely claustrophobic study of a complicated marriage twisting itself into something monstrous.”
—Premee Mohamed, Author of the Beneath the Rising Trilogy

“In a wholly unique spot between the New York society novels of Henry James and Edith Wharton and the best body horror of David Cronenberg lurks the strange, disturbing and ultimately transcendent novella Helpmeet. Naben Ruthnum’s pitch-perfect pastiche is as all-consuming as the disease at its heart, a fever dream of a story as original, elegantly written and chilling as anything I’ve read in recent memory.”
—Pasha Malla, Author of Fugue States, and Kill the Mall

“Naben Ruthnum’s succinctly brilliant Helpmeet finds the thin line between intimacy and body horror, and blurs it to create a unique love story that is as moving as it is disturbing.”
—Indrapramit Das, Author of The Devourers

• Language: English
• Publisher: Undertow Publications
• Release date: May 24, 2022
• ISBN: 9781005729073

Naben Ruthnum

Naben Ruthnum is the author of A Hero of Our Time, and Curry: Eating, Reading, and Race. He lives in Toronto and also writes thrillers as Nathan Ripley.

Book preview

1

When their knock summoned a hired caretaker, and when this caretaker told them he did not know if the Wilks would return, they would say Louise Wilk had removed her husband. That when Edward was too weak to oppose her, when his voice had rotted away, Louise took Edward away from his people. His creditors would claim the remaining furniture, and Louise would return to the gutters she emerged from, never to lie in feather beds again, but for now she could take her husband away and there was nothing the law or decent people could do about it.

These decent people would come for their knock on the door and their chat with the caretaker well after it was known that Edward Wilk had left Manhattan and would never return. The knock was how the story must begin, to properly be a story.

Though she imagined these conversations in detail as she watched Edward sleep, they didn’t trouble Louise. None of this would happen until she was away from New York, when she could be alone with Edward as the inevitable happened. And truly, Edward had no people to be removed from—their marriage had effected a severance two years ago, a total halt to social calls. The visits that Louise had recently been refusing, from his cousins and colleagues and friends of distant years, weren’t requests for a last audience with her husband, but for a keepsake encounter with the death of a man they had cast off years ago. Louise would be spoken of as the planner, as the abductor, but it was Edward who had been most eager to leave—to leave for the country, to die in a specific house that wasn’t this one.

I was born there, and you’ve never even seen it, Louise. You should. It isn’t romantic or even very nice, but I would like to be there with you. He’d sent her to his desk for a photograph of the home and orchards surrounding it, and for the address of the man who had tended to the property for the last dozen years. The porch of the small house was heaped with crates, and these crates overflowed with apples. There were no people in the photo, except for a shape behind an open window. A small shape, a child or a woman. Louise didn’t want to ask, in case Edward didn’t remember. He would be frustrated that he couldn’t see to help her.

It is very beautiful, Edward. And even romantic. It could be a drawing in a magazine story. Is this where you’ve been—where you were shipping pieces, your desk, the pianoforte, months ago?

Everything I couldn’t bear to lose is there, and some new furnishings as well, Edward said. She watched his forehead, the strong, low, black hairline, its point like a sharpened flint. Louise wasn’t repulsed by what the illness had taken from his face, but she allowed herself to stare, on occasion, at this unchanged part above it when they spoke.

We’ll go if you wish. But can you manage the trip?

I couldn’t without you, but I’m not without you. We can manage it. But it must be soon. There’s either soon or too late, Louise.

 Louise had placed the photograph in Edward’s hands, because he wanted it there, and he held it by the edges. His fingers, the long fingers of the surgeon he was or the musician he sometimes pretended to be in bars and brothels and around card tables, seemed to have grown as Edward shrunk, lengthening by a phantom joint as his palms lost their muscle. She took the photo away when he fell asleep. The dents the stiff backing had made in his flesh remained for hours.

The house had been largely unheated for weeks, which made it convenient that almost all the sleeping, eating, and tending in the home took place in the parlour, with the great stone fireplace that Louise would miss. The bill hadn’t been paid for some months, and she supposed it never would be, unless the steam company’s man hooked one of the canvases from the wall and got a fair price for it. Edward hadn’t sent any of the paintings upstate with the furniture, which Louise had found odd at the time. It was as though he had prefigured his loss of sight, and didn’t want to be surrounded by objects he had collected to look at.

The rest of the house, always too large, now surrounded the one room where they lived like a shadow territory, a region of shapes and coldness that had nothing to do with the new phase of Louise’s life with Edward.

It was just past midnight on the first of November, 1900, which Edward had explained to Louise was the last year of the old century, not the first year of the new one. The explanations—there had been several before he fell ill, when he still had breath for trivialities—made sense, but Louise didn’t think they were correct in any sense that mattered to people, to actual people. The next year wouldn’t feel new in the way this past one had, not to her. But it would feel different, as she would enter it alone.

Louise had settled Edward in the chaise longue he now preferred to any bed. His back and head were sunk into a soft pillow. His legs were naked,

Reviews for Helpmeet

[hna1130 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

The writing in this is stunning. I mean, just beautiful.

[RanceGarrison · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

A very quick and enjoyable read, this story is more of a twisted gothic love story than a horror story but there is quite a bit of gore and body horror. Highly recommended if you like your horror with a dose of poetic imagery.

[ella talbot · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

The writing was weird in this book; it took me a little to get used to it, but once I did, I liked it more than I had. I liked the way the story was heading, BUT I feel very... mid... about the twist. But I'm glad there's an understandable ending that's well thought out, because the rest of the book really isn't. Though, I was engaged and read it all in one sitting. 3.5/5

[April · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

I was pleasantly surprised by this little book! A great one sitting read with lots of atmosphere