To Tune the Beast by Sun Hesper Jansen

Madison, Wisconsin. Ji Wai Books. 2024. 666 pages.

To Tune the Beast isn’t a debut speculative fiction novel. It’s a polemic. A gentle raging at what is not in balance set amidst a musical backdrop. On the surface, this is a well-executed story of reconciliation and growth from under oppression. A metaphor aptly applicable to anything human. In this mode of fantasy, the subject takes on an exaggerated urgency, compelling its people to build together, a way out.

Layers upon layers exist here. Where a character is finely forged, then becomes three-dimensional, it is not simply their safe fate we seek but to plumb their innermost desires. This is exactly how a character is written into reality, where readers inhabit them by proxy. Sun Hesper Jansen knows how to write for an audience, something essential when tackling speculative fiction. The challenge lies in writing succinctly enough to engage and compel without dumbing down an intelligent story, introducing the entirety of that fantasy, with all its accoutrements and details.

Where others fail is in their ambition to put everything out all at once, without due pace or audience consideration. It would be folly to imagine it’s ever easy to read an intelligent speculative fiction novel, but once committed, the writer’s gift is in drawing out sufficient enticement without spoiling too soon or smothering in lore. Such balance, an acrobat would balk at, hence why the genre of fantasy can suffer. To Tune the Beast strikes a chord in its determination to be readable, while ambitious, and there is absolutely nothing wrong with that.

The result is the first book in the Coruscar duology. And spoilers would destroy the intimate landscape that develops this finely woven story. Suffice to say, when we meet The Cores, mythic beasts with approachable, humorous, horrifying personalities, they are as real as their human tuners. It is the yield of a writer lushly familiar with their genre who can sidestep the strangeness of speculative fiction, coloring it vivid enough to be experienced as reality.

The level of care and planning in mapping Coruscar and her people is evident. Not least in the humor, plethora of destinations, internal conflicts, elaborate detailing of costume and personhood. You will smile, gnash your teeth, flinch, and feel guilty shame entering Hesper Jansen’s hybrid brain, where a unique countercurrent of modern and otherworldly harmonize around a deep love of music and its potential for everything.

Candice Louisa Daquin
Grasse, France