Coming to terms

In her debut novel Honey, British writer Imani Thompson takes on the ivory tower of academia, and the mediocre white men and alpha males of the manosphere, with a dose of “good for her” rage.

Yrsa, a Caribbean-descended Briton, is working on a PhD at Cambridge University. She is critiquing the critical framework of Afropessimism, which argues that anti-Blackness is so ingrained in the modern world that there is essentially no way to move past it — and that the only means for liberation for people of colour is violence.

Clearly a brilliant academic, Yrsa nevertheless finds herself stuck, unable to advance her thesis methodology while also receiving a complaint from a white student that she is too harsh.

At the same time, Yrsa learns her best friend Nina has not only been having an affair with her supervisor, Dr. Richardson, but that he has broken it off and stolen Nina’s research, claiming that publishing her name alongside his will open him up to unacceptable risk. Nina is devastated and unsure what to do, while Yrsa seethes with rage.

Soon after, Yrsa sees Dr. Richardson outside on the university campus. Fairly casually, she knocks a bee into his can of lemonade, thinking at least watching him get stung will be some kind of comeuppance.

But Richardson is deathly allergic to bees, and he dies in front of her. No one suspects Yrsa’s part in the death — and she finds the experience absolutely thrilling.

Then Yrsa reconnects with an old fling, Hugh, and learns that he used her for a sex scoring game he played with his friends (Black Girl Magic, 20 points) and dispatches him as well. As though she’s uncovered a new talent and purpose, she begins sussing out other men like Richardson and Hugh; the mediocre but successful, habitual users of women — alpha male influencers.

The first half of the novel falls pretty nicely into dark satire with touches of violence, borrowing from two prominent subgenres: dark academia and “good for her” horror. Honey is far from the only novel to examine academia as a place built on and espousing ideals of inclusion and higher learning but which clings viciously to existing power structures that further exploit many of the social ills it aims to expose. And readers are likely to connect with Yrsa’s frustration with the success of the bad men around her, as well as the lack of real-world progress of the academic ideas she studies.

Where even her supervisor notes that Yrsa’s academic work seems to have found no way out of the same loop she is critiquing, in the real world she takes action. “Hugh rendered her into an object; a commodity with per­ceived value; powerless. And she rendered him, dead. It’s theory in action. A new methodology,” Thompson writes.

Yrsa not only moves her academic ideas into a real-world scenario, she rationalizes her own behaviour into that framework. The reader, too, feels some of Yrsa’s vindication.

But as the novel progresses, flaws in Yrsa’s reasoning begin to show, even as her murderous impulse escalates. Earlier traumas begin to surface, and Yrsa’s comfort with dispatching bad actors takes on a different meaning.

While some reviews have found the ending divisive, for this reviewer the last chapter was Honey’s most chilling — what Yrsa is truly capable of, and what she is able to rationalize to herself, is put on full display.

While there are no shortage of dark academia stories out there, especially in the current horror boom, Honey is a standout debut, one that takes some genuine risks and leaves the reader to grapple with the moral implication of cheering Yrsa on.

Keith Cadieux is a Winnipeg writer and editor. His latest story collection Donner Parties and Other Anti-Social Gatherings is out now from At Bay Press. He also co-edited the horror anthology What Draws Us Near, published by Little Ghosts Books.