A Map of Ladies Death

My husband and I had been at MoMA PS1 in 2021 once I noticed her: Niki de Saint Phalle’s interpretation of Death. It was one of many small fashions of her gargantuan Tarot Garden set up that resides simply exterior Rome. Here was Death: a skull-faced lady, voluptuous and gold-skinned, driving a horse product of the midnight sky. The pleasure of it, the lifetime of it, the bursting great thing about its colours and the dynamic nature of the posture, shocked me.

It jogged my memory of assembly the Death card in a Day of the Dead Tarot deck. All the figures of that deck had been represented by skeletons, apart from Death. She was, as an alternative, a pregnant lady.

In Nnedi Okorafor’s Who Fears Death, violence and beginning, dying and being pregnant, and above all transformation abound, with the ferocity and vivid shade of a Niki de Saint Phalle sculpture.

Okorafor’s protagonist, Onyesonwu Ubaid is an Ewu woman, a toddler of violence: notably, of the weaponized rape of a Nuru soldier of her Okeke mom. Onyesonwu—from whose identify, “Who Fears Death,” the e book takes its title—is a shape-changer (one in every of her shapes is that of a vulture), and a sorcerer who can manipulate matter and resurrect the useless. Upon the homicide of her lover and the conception of their little one, Onye works a terrific magic: killing all of the fertile males in its radius and impregnating all the ladies. For this (spoilers!), she is caught and stoned to dying.

Or is she? In re-writing the world, Onye additionally re-writes her personal dying, and as an alternative transforms right into a fire-spitting Kponyungo, a dragon-like creature of the desert. (Okorafor said in a tweet that she borrowed the Kponyungo’s form from a funeral masks.) Onye shouldn’t be, maybe, an apparent personification of Death, however she does appear—in Okorafor’s far-future, post-apocalyptic science fantasy—to embody lots of the contrasting complexities of the traditional fertility/dying goddesses discovered on the roots of many world religions.

One of probably the most recognizable, fashionable depictions of a feminine Death is Neil Gaiman’s Death of the Endless, a recurring character in his Sandman graphic novels. Her idiosyncratic look—goth-black garments, silver ankh, and marking close to her proper eye—makes her extremely simple for Sandman followers to cosplay (and subsequently embody) Death. In the just lately launched audiobook, Death is voiced with joie de vivre (and a scratchy, sisterly, reassuringly heat) by actor Kat Dennings. Elsewhere on Twitter, Neil Gaiman followers jogged my memory of his “Lady on the Grey,” the personification of Death within the Carnegie Medal and Newberry Award-winning The Graveyard Book.

In Rebecca Solnit’s City of Women from her atlas undertaking Infinite Cities, all stops of the New York City subway system are renamed for nice ladies in historical past. I really feel that ought to some future cartographer ever make a subway map of all of the female-presenting Death figures of the fantasy style, then Terry Pratchett’s character Susan Sto Helit from his Discworld sequence could be only one cease away from Neil Gaiman’s Death of the Endless—not too removed from Gilly the Perky Goth from Dork Tower! Miss Susan (“Susan Death”) is the adopted granddaughter of Death, who—a minimum of for the plot of Soul Music—takes up Death’s personal mantle. On our Map of Ladies Death, Death of the Endless and Susan Death could be two abutting neighborhoods, two goth-girl psychopomps laid out aspect by aspect: skinny, of pale facet, with a gravitas past their years.

The subsequent cease after Susan Death is likely to be Calliope Reaper-Jones, Amber Benson’s protagonist within the sequence of the identical identify, Death’s daughter, and CEO of Death, Inc., who wears energy fits and works arduous to stave off the zombie apocalypse. (And if she is Mister Death’s daughter, then the necromancer protagonist of my very own novel, Saint Death’s Daughter, is likely to be the subsequent cease on our imaginary chthonic subway line… Although Lanie Stones isn’t actually Death’s daughter, simply Her beloved acolyte.)

There are extra Ladies Death and Death-adjacent feminine figures in fantasy than I can identify, so I turned to social media. Friends jogged my memory to say Sabriel, Liriel, and Clariel, of Garth Nix’s Old Kingdom sequence, Nancy from Seanan McGuire’s Wayward Children sequence—notably Every Heart a Doorway, the place she arrives at college after spending a number of years within the Halls of the Dead, Queen Achren from Lloyd Alexander’s Chronicles of Prydain (one in every of my favourite childhood villains!), Lady Taranis from Susan Cooper’s Seaward, and Greer Gilman’s Annis from Moonwise.

Though there are many lethal females in fantasy movies and TV who’re, every of their means, Death-Bringers, there usually are not many who’re Death personified. Santa Muerte on Penny Dreadful: City of Angels; the Mago in Hotel del Luna; the Princess in Jean Cocteau’s Orphée.

But the 80’s offers us loads of wiggle room, if we’re wanting personify Death in a sure type of feminine kind. There’s the Widow of the Web in Krull, who controls the Crystal Spider along with her hourglass. There’s the Sorceress-Queen Bavmorda in Willow, along with her gaunt body, skeletal facet, priestess robes, and spiked iron crown, who guidelines over ruthless armies and terrifying dying canines, and has no compunction sacrificing infants. There’s Mombi in Return to Oz (performed by the identical actress, Jean Marsh, who performed Bavmorda), who takes heads for her assortment and wears them interchangeably relying on her temper. Let us not overlook the the Force-witch Charal within the Battle for Endor, who can shape-change right into a raven (I imply, iconic!), or Disney’s personal Maleficent (from the cartoon, I imply: pre-redemption), who takes her closing kind as a black dragon.

We could be remiss if we didn’t point out a number of of the extra eldritch feminine figures lurking in fable, fable, and concrete legend. While they don’t seem to be maybe strict personifications of Death, they nonetheless remind us of the tattered veil between our world and the Land of the Dead. There are those that lure passersby to their deaths by trickery or enchantment. There are those that are, themselves, useless—usually from violence or despair. There are those that seem at roadsides, or misplaced within the woods: mere hauntings, reminding us of our personal mortality.

Imagine stops on our subway map named: Rusalka, Pichal Peri, La Llorona, Lamia, Empusai, Succubi, La Dame Belle Sans Merci. And, lest you concern we’re operating out, we will at all times flip to the aforementioned Death Goddesses of faith and fable, who’ve their very own alphabetical itemizing on Wikipedia, from Akka to Tuonetar: a complete rabbit warren I’m at all times wanting to discover.

C.S.E. Cooney is the creator of World Fantasy Award-winning  Bone Swans: Stories and the Tor.com novella Desdemona and the Deep, amongst others. Find out extra at csecooney.com or on twitter @csecooney.

Saint Death’s Daughter by C.S.E. Coney is out now within the U.S.; you possibly can order a duplicate here.

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