Misericorde: White Wool and Snow Review
This column is a reprint from Unwinnable Monthly #184. If you like what you see, grab the magazine for less than ten dollars, or subscribe and get all future magazines for half price.
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What’s left when we’ve moved on.
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I finished playing Misericorde Volume 2: White Wool and Snow in a snowstorm, whose aftermath is still on the ground as I begin to write this. It’s easy to forget the physical presence of snow until it’s here and it stays. The snow that still looks like snow on the surface has long since turned to hard ice.
When I was a teenager, I first heard the joke about an icicle being the perfect murder weapon. But a murder weapon that melts away, while a clever word game, is an unsatisfying conclusion for a reader trying to guess an ending.
Misericorde Volume 1 by XeeCee was a murder mystery framed around a medieval convent where only one nun is presumed innocent. Most of the novel is talking to people about where they were and what they were doing on the day the nun Catherine was murdered, learning about how the convent works in the process. It’s only in the final chapter that something supernatural definitively comes out. Supernatural explanations, like icicles, turn murder mysteries into “something else”. No one thinks “it was all a dream” or “a ghost did it” are satisfying conclusions. So, when Vol 1 introduced the Devil into the story, it left us with two questions: is there a natural explanation for the supernatural? And, if not, is this even a murder mystery anymore?
Volume 2 keeps the fabric of a murder mystery convincingly enough that you are still strung along by it as the main plot thread. But personal conflicts overtake the mystery, mainly between the nuns and the main character Hedwig, and later between the convent and visitors from outside. It was already clear there was something rotten going on in the convent in the first part, but I didn’t feel anything remotely as chilling there as I did in the second. Volume 2 still succeeds as a mystery because while it runs with the supernatural, its most disturbing parts are the actions of normal people, which are sometimes reactions to becoming aware of the supernatural and sometimes just plain human ego and depravity. No sanity under absolute reality.
(Here’s where the spoilers are going to start, by the way.)
Another way of putting this comparison is that Volume 1 is past-facing, where Volume 2 is future-facing. Volume 1’s question is “Who killed Catherine”? While Volume 2 is still obliged to answer that question, it raises several more. The first couple come from a surprise flash-forward to the 1980s, where a nun’s descendant returns to the abbey to try and get answers. We learn from a friend of hers that there was a fire in the abbey, and a “killer nun” who murdered her Sisters. How will the fire start? How will there be more murders? These are the questions that get attached to Hedwig’s investigation in the past.
The other thing is the mystery of the self. Hedwig learns more about the nuns of the abbey in this volume and starts making relationships with them. She says about halfway through that she’s so full of others’ sins and confessions “there was no room in my rowboat.”
Hedwig herself is a chaste character in part 1, analytical in matters of the soul. Part 2 changes that, but it doesn’t change her personality. She remains judgmental and very religious, even as she does things she thinks will send her to Hell. When she’s in the wrong, which is often, the narrator (Hedwig, from the future) will remark how stupid she is, or how sinful, or naive. I think Hedwig’s psychology is one of the most interesting parts of this volume. Her personality is authentic to someone halfway through having a change of heart, which of course can be retracted as well as it can be followed through on. Future Hedwig looks at her past self with shame and anger as well as pity. She’s obsessed.
Hedwig’s version of the Lovecraftian encounter with the unknowable is her growing openness to personal change. This is what makes her an interesting character and not an unbearable one. This is also where, for me, the greatest horror of this volume came through. Hedwig learns the other nuns have been betting on which of them can sleep with her first. This becomes part of her investigation, both into the murder and into her sexuality. The latter has a coda from the moment it emerges: everyone you thought was a friend wants something from you. You should probably figure out how you feel about that.
The volume makes something of the idea of “reactive presence,” with one character telling you that everyone in the convent has been making their own moves in response to your own. This is also true with the bet: these characters we met in part 1 are not just covertly sexual, they’re capable of putting up a front to both Hedwig and you for 200,000 words. This expected staple of a murder mystery – someone is lying – becomes twisted. Everyone is lying, and that’s before we even consider the mystery.
Misericorde Volume 1 was a genius setup for a murder mystery, from the perspective of an anchoress who because of her vows is the only one who couldn’t have committed a murder and, therefore, becomes a detective. It was elevated by the simplicity of this premise. Volume 2 has to resolve threads 1 only began to hint at. Having to reveal things to your audience sometimes destroys the impression of elegance. To be clear, this isn’t bad; things have to happen at some point. I mention this to say that Volume 1 and Volume 2 are different species. 1 is a mystery, 2 a psychodrama. 1 is PG13, 2 is barely R. I was pushed along by my enjoyment of the plot of 1, but I was compelled by 2.
I recommend both volumes of Misericorde and wait not-so-patiently for a third. I also feel pressure to offer praise for the representation the novel offers, as I did in my preview of the first volume, of the intellectual and sexual complexity present in medieval life. While I still think that’s true – Katherine, Flora, and especially Hedwig stand out – this volume’s achievement is being a portrait of people crashing against the limits of religion, sexuality and sanity. What happens when your worldview is cracked open? What will you do? It’s possible to make a lot of reductive statements about that – medieval people can be evil, nuns can be sexy – but overall what this volume requires is empathy for people reacting with extreme prejudice to hidden parts of themselves. Self-hatred exists non-linearly alongside friendship and self-acceptance, and progress on any of those fronts is not guaranteed. It’s a talent of Misericorde that it balances these feelings without coming across as lecturing or prescriptive, and that its characters can keep their strong identities at the same time as they’re becoming ever more alien to themselves.
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Emily Price is a freelance writer, digital editor, and PhD candidate in literature based in Brooklyn, New York. You can find her on Bluesky.
