The Spirit Bares Its Teeth

• Author: Andrew Joseph White
• Genre: Horror
• Publication Date: September 5, 2023
• Publisher: Peachtree Teen

Thank you to NetGalley and Peachtree Teen for providing me with an ARC of this book in exchange for an honest review.

CONTENT WARNING: transphobia, ableism, graphic violence, sexual assault, discussions of forced pregnancy and miscarriage, mentions of suicidal ideation, extensive medical gore

Mors vincit omnia. Death conquers all.

London, 1883. The Veil between the living and dead has thinned. Violet-eyed mediums commune with spirits under the watchful eye of the Royal Speaker Society, and sixteen-year-old Silas Bell would rather rip out his violet eyes than become an obedient Speaker wife. According to Mother, he’ll be married by the end of the year. It doesn’t matter that he’s needed a decade of tutors to hide his autism; that he practices surgery on slaughtered pigs; that he is a boy, not the girl the world insists on seeing.

After a failed attempt to escape an arranged marriage, Silas is diagnosed with Veil sickness—a mysterious disease sending violet-eyed women into madness—and shipped away to Braxton’s Sanitorium and Finishing School. The facility is cold, the instructors merciless, and the students either bloom into eligible wives or disappear. So when the ghosts of missing students start begging Silas for help, he decides to reach into Braxton’s innards and expose its rotten guts to the world—as long as the school doesn’t break him first.

After having read White’s first book, I had an inkling of what to expect from this one—a great story, fiercely angry characters, and a whole lot of gore. I was not let down. It’s a combination of horror, historical fiction, mystery, and romance, and somehow the mixture works beautifully.

Silas is 16 years old, and all he wants to do is be a surgeon. Which shouldn’t be an issue, expect that he’s got violet eyes and the rest of the world sees him as he appears on the outside—as a girl—and not how he actually is on the inside, a boy. In addition, he’s autistic, and has had extensive tutoring to hide any signs of it from the rest of the world, although he still struggles with certain things and resorts back to flapping his hands and other behaviors when he’s in stressful or upsetting situations. It’s hard not to empathize with Silas. He’s in an impossible situation, and it keeps going from bad to worse.

After a desperate attempt to avoid a forced marriage that he doesn’t want goes wrong, he finds himself forced into a finishing school for violet-eyed girls with Veil sickness. The girls at the school are trained to become magical Stepford wives, basically, and those who don’t cooperate disappear. 

I found it so interesting to read about the magic system in this story—women with violet-colored eyes can access the Veil, the border between the living and the dead, and function as mediums, but men want to control them. Veil sickness seems to be a way that the Speakers explain away any behavior among their women that doesn’t conform to their expectations. The other girls at the school were equally intriguing to me, and I enjoyed watching Silas get to know them and develop bonds with some of them.

The treatment of people who were viewed as “different” in these times was incredibly difficult and frustrating to read about. While this book is fiction, things like this aren’t hard to imagine happening in the not-so-distant past, and they did in fact occur. This story brims with rage and pain and frustration, and every single bit of each of these emotions is well-deserved. I was sucked into this story immediately, and it took up space in my head until I finished reading, even while I was on vacation, and it still resides in a corner of my brain. Andrew Joseph White has become one of my favorite new authors, and he’s definitely one to watch, as long as you can handle the gore, which features prominently in his books, the stories are outstanding.

People who have sat around with me while I’m reading, especially when there’s a surprising reveal, a shocking plot twist, or an unexpected event often look up in alarm when I gasp audibly. The gasp factor is directly related to the number of times I audibly gasp during a reading, and there isn’t an upper limit.

Gasp Factor: 18