Entangled

They escaped the hospital; they beat the game, so why are they still stuck playing?

Levi remembers the game environment dissolving into bright light, and waking up on a bed. There were people talking… but that doesn’t make sense. He should be alone in his apartment, sitting at his desk, on a livestream.

Wait. Is the stream still live? What are the viewers able to see? How long has it been? There isn’t much time to ponder these questions, though. Not when Levi and Asher are research scientist characters on a vessel, somewhere in deep space, and the alarm is blaring.

Bio-mechanical alien creatures with satellite shaped heads are hunting them. There’s a new environment to map and sci-fi genre rules to adapt to. The NPCs have the same names and personalities as before, but different roles and functions on the space station. They also seem more aware. Their eyes linger on the bruises Asher causes, and they attempt to separate the toxic couple.

Levi’s insistence on solving the game and returning to his life seems to have set something off in Asher; he’s become more aggressive and controlling than ever before, and Levi is getting tired of it. Asher’s love has bled into an obsessive and insatiable need that refuses to be quelled. Every bruise, every noise, and every breath that Levi takes belongs to Asher now. He is determined to keep Levi in the game—for himself—as long as possible, and he will use force to fulfill this goal.

Levi wants to beat this new game and escape back to reality, but Asher wants to bunker down where no one can find them and have sex—I mean, protect Levi. You know, with his penis.

How do you survive a horror game when the biggest threat is on your team?

Book two is the game you put down at 2 AM because you don’t actually want to walk past the bathroom mirror anymore. It’s SOMA. It’s Silent Hill 2. It’s Mouthwashing. It’s the kind of horror where there’s no monster in the room and that is somehow worse, because then what is making the room feel like that.

Fear is a game

Tate is an incredible writer.

Entangled features dynamic characters, uniquely immersive environments, genre switching atmospheric tension, stomach churning gore, and substantial emotional upheaval. Writing style, dialogue, character creation; I have no complaints. Entangled exceeded my expectations entirely.

Once again, content warnings are included at the beginning of the book and feature a detailed breakdown about what to expect from the novel, where to reach support near you, and Tate’s genuine reminder to look after yourself first:

Nothing I have written is worth pushing yourself through a panic attack for…

This content warning is wholly necessary, and deeply appreciated.

I’m familiar with the games SOMA and Mouthwashing because my favourite YouTube let’s player, CJU Games, has done videos for both. I remember sitting in stunned, slack-jawed silence at the end of Mouthwashing, before making an indescribable noise of confused horror when Chris said, “I, for one, loved this.”

I love horror, too. It’s a genre with a storied history of queer themes and diversity (for better or worse). I have been obsessed with body horror for as long as I can remember, and even knew that this sub-genre was popular among trans individuals, but never made that connection for myself personally until I unpacked my own feelings about the gender binary and accepted myself as a non-binary individual. When I’m in a bad place mentally or emotionally, or my life is simply hot garbage, I turn to horror to feel better about my own situation.

Something about absorbing the suffering, endurance, and survival of fictional characters, makes me feel better. Getting out of my head and into the vicarious guts and glory are what I look forward to at the end of a hard day.

Please don’t read too much into that.

I did get that cathartic-esque calm that I’m constantly seeking from horror media by reading Entangled, but I also experienced an unexpected emotional reaction. One that I’m still thinking about four weeks later.

In space, there is no oxygen to scream

Similar to the camp ground, the town, and the hospital in Immersed, there is not a lot of context provided when Levi wakes up on the ship that’s already nestled among the stars in the vast emptiness of space. Details in most games are gathered either via conversation with game characters, or through reading scattered materials, and Levi does not have much time between resets before Asher shows up and demands Levi’s full attention (or all hell breaks loose… and demands Levi’s full attention).

Analytical reference to game play mechanics, strategy, tropes, and references to Levi’s deceased older brother are injected throughout the narration, similar to the first book.

A shrinking map. Funneling. Ethan called these a cheap way for the developer to force an enemy encounter because they didn’t trust the player to find it in an otherwise open-world game. He was usually right.

Any hesitance about intimacy that existed in the first book is gone.

Then the barrel was on his throat.

Levi’s breath died as the metal traced down the side of his neck the way Asher’s mouth always did, and it was cold and wrong and his body didn’t care. His chin tipped back before he could stop it, his throat presented for a gun the way it did for teeth, and he hated it.

I saw this series tagged with “slow burn” on romance.io, and that is inaccurate, to say the least.

Immersed portrayed Levi struggling with Asher’s increasing sexual advances, and his reluctance to increase intimacy, due to his lack of experience and the ongoing fear of Asher’s volatility. In Entangled, Levi’s reservations about sex—and game progression—take a back seat to Asher’s demands.

Their sexual relationship already rested on a bed of coercion, with past violence and the clear threat of more violence never far from memory. In this sequel, their sexual relationship escalates in both the actions taken, and Asher’s disregard for consent, as well as Levi’s physical wellbeing, in a way that mirrors how a heat scale might be applied in a romance novel. I found it to be a formulaic approach to sexual content, and as a result I automatically expected their intimate scenes to continue being more and more intense. Looking back at this first scene, where Asher draws the gun barrel across Levi’s skin, there is a clear collision of sex and violence, sensuality and coercion, intimacy and insistence, that will not be denied.

As things progress, that line is obliterated.

Check In. Relax. Take your life.

The novel’s second location is a remote hotel where everyone is attending a staff retreat for a company called “Meridian Tech.”

He stayed in the arms that held him while they had had been crush and suffocated, the same arms that had held him under water while humming to him, aching for the gentle touch of hands that had killed him.

After a brief reprieve in their hotel room—you know, for Levi’s safety—they re-emerge to check in with the NPCs and learn that a thick fog has surrounded the hotel. I thought the fog would reveal King or Koontz style monsters causing terror and emotional devastation, but the evil was akin to Buffy – Season 6, and the real antagonist turned out to be our own self worth after being ravaged by life’s misgivings.

Asher’s breathing was still fast, his head snapping to the door as he stared at the handle. “I can hear the lock still.”

… Levi pressed a kiss to Asher’s shoulder and didn’t say anything when the sound of a ventilator echoed in his ears.

Well, plus the creature in the woods, and the risk of being killed by paranoid hotel staff or insecurity-infected NPCs. This section of Entangled has a lot of moving pieces, and there’s very little time to prepare before the fog rolls in and people start succumbing to its depressing influence.

Levi’s own frustration with the endless barrage of threats and survivalism clash with Asher’s want to barricade themselves in their hotel room and simply treat it like a vacation. This culminates in an argument wherein Levi says the quiet part out loud and confronts Asher on his lack of both personality and personal history:

“You can’t answer because there’s nothing to answer. You don’t have a past. You don’t have a before. You’re asking me to sit in a room forever with someone who can’t tell me his mother’s name… Be a person. Tell me one thing — one memory, one face, one name — that proves you existed before I walked into a campsite and you decided I was yours.”

What happens next can really only be described as a suicide montage. Levi is done playing by the game’s rules, and by Asher’s. But what life is he so eager to return to? An empty apartment, the reminder that his brother is gone, no other family, few friends, a pointless job, and a small streaming audience. If Asher isn’t real, then his declarations of love are worthless.

Will anyone be there for Levi when he tries to recover from the mental and emotional trauma of playing Virtual Vice?

Be real. Be very real.

Final thoughts

Entangled is an effectively devastating read.

Both for its brutality and its unflinching exploration of (unhealthy) intimacy; but unexpectedly, it wasn’t the violence that triggered me, it was its tenderness.

You know that trap relationship question where you get asked “would you still love me if I was a worm?” Entangled asks “would you still love me in the real world,” and much like the worm question, it skimps on the details so that the answerer is forced to commit to their own ideals and hubris about a possible outcome, and not the actuality. Wherein the actuality is more like an episode of Criminal Minds, or one of those rare true crime documentaries where the interviewees that knew the perpetrator share that they always had a feeling something was wrong with that person.

Would we still love Asher if he was little more than a computer program that could be engaged with through a screen and unable to do harm? Absolutely! Do we still love Asher at the end of Entangled? That’s a bit more complicated.

Entangled is for fans of Sweet Home who cheered for Hyeon-soo even as he questioned his instincts for survival in spite of his desire to commit suicide. It’s for anyone who cried when Quentin Coldwater said, “Did I save my friends, or did I finally find a way to kill myself?” in season 4 of The Magicians. People who draw the curtains and dim the lights just to achieve peak ambience when watching horror, will enjoy this series.

“When I wake up, he said. Rough. Barely there. “And you’re already there… what do I look like?

Asher’s fingers paused in his hair, “Your eyes are open,” he said. “But you’re not there. Nobody else noticed — they talk to you and you answer, but the answers are wrong. Too slow. Like someone reading a script.” His thumb traced the curve of Levi’s ear. “I can always tell… And then you gasp.”

Levi was quiet.

“Every time,” Asher said. “You always gasp when you come back to me.” His voice dropped, his tone softer than anything he’d said all night, “It’s my favourite sound.”

Levi’s eyes burned. Not from crying. From the thin that lived in the same place as he loves me and he hurts me in a way that had nothing to do with his body.