Iron Kissed
Patricia Briggs
** spoiler alert **
Mercy tangles with the Fay
The first three novels in Patricia Briggs‘s Mercy Thompson series introduce the thee main races of preternatural creatures that inhabit the MercyVerse: Werewolves, Vampires, and Fay. This doesn’t exhaust the list. Mercy herself is something different: a Walker, a shapeshifter who can take the form of a coyote. However, Wolves, Vamps, and Fay are the large majority of weird peoples. There are enough of them that they each have internal politics.
Someone has been murdering the inhabitants of the Fay reservation. Marcy’s mentor Zee, himself Fay, brings Mercy to visit the reservation and sniff around in her coyote form. The Fay are not very scent-oriented, and he hopes that Mercy’s coyote nose will be able to pick up clues the Fay themselves have missed. This works, but it works too well. Mercy learns things that the Fay don’t want anyone to know. She does, however, identify the murderer.
The Fay killer was human and belonged to an organization called Citizens for a Bright Future, which turns out to be a sort of anti-Fay Ku Klux Klan. I say the killer was human, because he is killed soon after Mercy identifies him. The police finger Zee as their first suspect. They arrest and imprison him.
Mercy of course continues to investigate in order to save Zee, and her investigation leads her to Bright Future.
I’m not a big fan of Content Warnings, but subsequent events warrant one. Almost the final scene of the novel is a brutal rape of Mercy by one of the Bright Future members, This was a very hard scene to read, and hard to listen to. Briggs is not gentle in describing the rape. It ends with Mercy beating her rapist’s brains out with a crowbar. (Mercy endorses this as therapeutic.)
I felt, in a way, that the pain of this scene was what made it permissible. If you’re going to write a story in which rape is an essential part of the plot, it should hurt to read it. Skipping lightly over the rape would cheapen it. Also, I didn’t know this the first time I read Iron Kissed, but I now know that the trauma of the rape is going to stick with Mercy for the rest of her life. “Rape survivor” is a permanent part of Mercy’s character.
Since I’m doing spoilers, I will mention that the novel ends with Mercy’s more innocent romantic questions being resolved. She consents to the happy relationship (and eventually marriage) that will carry her through the rest of the series. Mercy gets her Happy Ever After. That’s the reader’s reward for enduring the rape scene.
We end Iron Kissed positioned for the rest of the series. Mercy now has a home. She has friends and enemies among the Wolves, Vampires, and Fay. She is still in danger from them, to the point where, when I first read Iron Kissed, I wondered how Briggs was going to have her survive. Of course, you know she is going to: she is the hero of a 14-novel series. But her position is precarious enough that I felt genuinely frightened for her the first time I read Iron Kissed.