Ethan's Writing Nook
Lina Rather’s novella, A SEASON OF MONSTROUS CONCEPTIONS, is a story of an epidemic (more on this word in a moment) of fae/uncanny-affected births in late 1600s London. It interrogates themes of gender roles, the nature of what it is like to born different in some way, and about the interplay between forces that are revolutionary and poorly understood dueling for supremacy in a world desperate to apply some manner of order to events that appear chaotic and uncontrollable.
Our protagonist, Sarah, is a young widowed apprentice midwife whose husband drowned under mysterious circumstances. Furthermore, she has a connection to these uncanny births–she was born with a tail… a tail that was amputated. Therefore, we see this world through the eyes of someone who can pass as an unaffected human, and who sees those born affected not as monsters but as something else.
Sarah, by strange twists of fate, finds herself working with a pregnant gentlelady with a husband who is a man of means and of reason and science (such as it was at the time). And her connection to this pregnancy as well as her own uncanny nature places her squarely at the heart of a struggle between science and reason and an embrace of the primal weird of the uncanny.
Ethan's Writing Nook