P. Djèlí Clark’s The Dead Cat Tail Assassins packs a novel’s worth of worldbuilding and character into the shorter and more intense length of the novella format.
Eveen the Eviscerator is one of the Dead Cat Tail Assassins. She is, indeed, dead (or more precisely, undead). She is indeed an assassin, although she is human. (The Cat Tail is just a name, there are no cats harmed in the course of this book) She might be showy, she might be cocky, but already in her young career has earned an epithet (and just why she is the Eviscerator plays out through the novella). And she is proud of who and what she is. She does as she is told, she kills who she is contracted to kill. Sure, she doesn’t remember her past life, but everyone’s got problems, right?
But when she is told to perform a contract that she cannot possibly fulfill…The titular The Dead Cat Tail Assassins tells that story.
Describing plot beat by beat in a novella like this is difficult, if not outright spoilery. And this is a novella that given its nature, lives and breathes and dies on information control. And if I told you that the plot of this novella involves time travel paradoxes, multiversal concepts, and shenanigans, you might forgive me for not explicitly mapping out beat by beat what happens, even in the first few pages. Discovering the plot and how Clark puts it together is part of the joy of this sort of narrative. Unlike a recent book I read which absolutely hid the fact that it was a time travel narrative (and so led to expectations clashing in my reading), this novella doesn’t waste any time in setting up the initial paradoxical problem.
The Dead Cat Tail Assassins moves quickly to put Eveen into her quandary, worldbuilding on the fly and with verve, and then it takes its idea and premise even more complicated than you originally thought. However, Clark, with the speed and style of his writing, plays fair in allowing an alert reader to guess, even before Eveen realizes what’s going on.
And that is what I want to cover first, then. The economy and speed of the prose and the writing style make this an enormously fast paced and page-turning read. I thought it was shorter, I checked and saw that the book clocks in at 208 pages, but it sure felt it was a lot shorter in terms of the time it took me to read it. And within that 208 pages, we get what feels like a short novel compressed into a novella. Eveen’s whole story and her deal, the twisty plot I mentioned above, and a whole lot of worldbuilding. This is a novella to gulp down and enjoy and wonder just how it is that Clark managed to put so much in such a limited space. This is a trick he’s done before, notably in The Haunting of Tram Car 015. There, at least, he had a real world model to base his alternate history on, 19th century Egypt, rather than creating a whole world sui generis. Here, he is building a world, a society and a character from the ground up. Less polished writers might have or could have gone to a full novel length to get Eveen across with the economy of prose that Clark does.
Besides the speed and verve of Clark’s prose, there is plenty more to recommend this, as I said, like Eveen herself. Yes, she’s dead. Yes, she is an Assassin. Yes, she thinks she is that good and yes, she has earned that title of Eviscerator. But as fierce and potent she is as an assassin, however dead, she is a complicated and well drawn out character. We get to see things entirely from her mind and her point of view, in an intimate style that really puts us in her shoes. Luckily, she is a character with a lot to love, and with some sometimes very endearing traits. She forgets to blink, now and again, for example. She still loves eating, And yet, she is also a hero to a whole quarter of the city for her past actions. But given that she lost most of her memories when she was made undead and into an assassin, there are real gaps in her knowledge and understanding. But that doesn’t stop her from doing her job (even if she is in over her head sometimes). And given her character arc and her ultimate antagonist, she is definitely the working class heroine we can use today.
Finally, let me say a few more words about the worldbuilding in the novella. Tal Abisi is a wondrous and rich entrepot of a city, a port with souks and princes, powerful clergy, deadly assassins and gods. Clark brings the city to vivid and rich life. There is also a whole section of the city that is bleeding through and failing in basic reality, the Shimmer. The Shimmer feels like a cross between the zone of Area X and the Sea of Chaos from Brust’s Dragaera books. It is NOT a place lightly to go into. Of course, in the course of the novella, Eveen will have to go there.
If I had to give comps for what Tal Abisi is like, it would be Dragaera meets Gujaareh meets Dhamsawwaat. And maybe a touch of places like Iraz as well. And for reasons that will only make sense when you meet the characters and the plot, the movie Sin City, as well. But beyond worldbuilding of place, we get schools of magic, multiple (and excellent displayed and portrayed) deities, plots and intrigue and a real sense of place as to what Tal Abisi is like. Clark uses all the senses, language and dialect, food and culture to bring the city to complete life.
Clark also has some fun with some parallels to our contemporary world in creating his secondary world. There are in fact edgelords and neck-beards in Tal Abisi, but who and what they are, and what they have to do with the plot, I leave the reader to discover. I have noticed in Clark’s work a willingness to be playful and push those sorts of buttons. And in general, I get the sense Clark had FUN writing about Eveen and her adventures in Tal Abisi. This is not a story with high philosophy, this is a secondary world fantasy novella that wants to, and for me successfully does, entertain the reader.
In all, The Dead Cat Tail Assassins is a lean and mean novella that goes down like liquid fire and leaps through the reader’s mind like dancing across rooftops in Tal Abisi. Although he has written fantasy set in a completely secondary world before (Abeni’s Song, a middle grade work), The Dead Cat Tail Assassins feels like another “arrow in the quiver” of the kinds of fantasy that Clark can, and does, write with passion and strength.
Clark, P. Djèlí The Dead Cat Tail Assassins [Tordotcom, 2024]
