Helpmeet

Naben Ruthnum's Helpmeet is a short novella that hits extraordinarily hard, punching way above its brief page count. The story concerns an upper-class surgeon who is wasting away from a strange illness in fin di siecle New York; he's tended to by his lower-class wife who was a nurse when they met. Abandoned by society at large, they are hermetically sealed in a cocoon of muted grief. As his end  approaches, they flee to an abandoned orchard upstate for his final moments, but when death comes it arrives in an uncanny and unheralded form.

You know how the "Death" tarot card indicates both endings and transformations? That's the move here. Helpmeet is especially recommended if you like body horror; the husband's deterioration (and the metamorphosis inherent in his decay) is cataloged in excruciatingly visceral detail. Imagine if Henry James went on a Cronenberg-inspired tear and you've got the gist.

Helpmeet has some rich surprises in its narrative arc too, deftly avoiding obvious villainy for something far more interesting and textural. It’s rare to encounter a book that is is as gut-wrenching as it is ultimately affirming, but Helpmeet surprises with the way it balances human emotion with inhuman transformation.