The Curator

The Curator is a 2023 novel by Owen King.

Dora, or "D" as she thinks of herself, is a former university maid with a mission: to find out what happened to her brother after he died. Set in a nameless city during the throes of a worker's revolution, D enlists the help of her lover Robert Barnes, a lieutenant in the new government, to gain curatorship over "The Museum of Psykical Research", the arcane society that her brother spent most of his time in before he died as a means to get closer to the truth.

Arriving to find the museum almost entirely burned to the ground, Robert notes that the neighboring museum is none the worse for wear and in need of a curator, scratches out the name of the museum of Psykical Rsearch on the provisional government's order, and makes D the new curator of the Museum of the Worker.

Much like D, this museum holds several secrets, not least of which are the triangles adorning several exhibits, cabinets with moving pictures, or the occasional mysteriously appearing new exhibit of wax workers with peculiar professions. But things aren't quite settle with the revolution, and danger lurks everywhere, even from the neighbor in the nearby embassy.

Not to be confused with The Curator by M. W. Craven.

The Curator contains examples of:

• Bad People Abuse Animals: The society behind the Museum of Psykical Research and Alloys Lumm in particular, kill cats on general principle, and to use their femur's to write the Red Letters.
• Beneath Suspicion: D, whom everyone assumes is harmless for being a woman of low birth and a polite maid. Turns out she murdered both her parents as a child because of their callousness to her brother as he died, and their complete neglect of her. Captain Anthony found this out the hard way, commenting how she was the one person out of everyone he'd tortured or met who was actually innocent and "harmless", only for her to drive a drill through his left temple.
• Big Damn Heroes: Joven and the ghost crew of the Morgue Ship arrive in time to save the city and her citizens from being massacred by the crown's soldiers.
• Break Out the Museum Piece: Played straight with an odd twist. The Museum of the Worker is full of wax figures of workers, and thanks to Ike most still have the tools of their trade. While most have only improvised weapons at best, there's the mysterious exhibits that appeared while D was out. The reader will recognize they are a tank or motorized artillery piece, a claymore manufaturer, a "miner" with a barrel full of biohazardous material (with the multi-crescent circle symbol described) and a drone operator with 4 drones. All apparently from a parallel Earth that is more advanced in warfare. When Joven lands the Morgue Ship in the fifth floor, the ghosts inhabit the wax figures and use the fully functional future weaponry to rout the king's forces.
• Cats Are Magic: Downplayed. The common people of city worship cats, with a hill covered in hundreds of small shrines that they routinely leave offerings with.
  • But then again, the cats have an agenda, they want to kill Alloys Lumm for murdering cats for centuries. And to do it, they help Joven avoid entering the regular afterlife and create his ghost ship. They also know where the doorways to the in between are, and can readily identify members of the Psyckical Research society.
• Character Catchphrase: Ike will often end a phrase with "This Ike", as in "You can count on this Ike!".
• Chekhov's Exhibit: D notices at least three exhibits that she doesn't remember seeing when she first took possession of the Museum of the Worker. They include what the reader will recognize as a combat drone operator, a mechanized artillery vehicle or tank with 2 operators, a miner with "yellow sand" in a barrel adorned with a biohazard symbol, and a claymore manufacturer. D theorizes that the soot from the burned down Museum of Psykical Research, which has caked the walls of the Museum of the Worker, is the cause. For that matter, the strange cabinet showing crude moving images of Simon the Gentle's stage show may have been the first, it doesn't fit with the esthetic of the museum and the original curator would never have wanted it there. All of these become very important by the end, see Break Out the Museum Piece.
• Disproportionate Retribution: Sargeant Van Goor. He had horrible time growing up apprenticed to a wheelwright who constantly mocked and ridiculed him. A chance encounter with a soldier taught him that "rude makes rude" and he felt entitled to be rude back to his master. By hitting him over the head, tying him down and raping him, so he wouldn't report the crime of him leaving before his contract was up. Throughout the rest of his life he became incredibly thin skinned and resentful, seeing offense in the slightest things and meting out horrible punishment.
• Evil Versus Evil: In an ironic twist, Sargeant Van de Goor goes to try and rape and kill D, and when she escapes he goes to Captain Anthony for help finding her— only for Captain Anthony to capture, torture and kill him. Despite dying in the process, he gives Captain Anthony a limp for the rest of the book.
• Five-Finger Discount: Ike, and his "protegés" Len and Zil, all of whom are street urchins who frequently steal and scavenge to survive poverty and the revolution.
• Flying Dutchman: The Morgue Ship was creepy enough when it was just a floating morgue, but it becomes this when Joven's ghost takes over as captain and sails it through the air, paintings, solid buildings, and theater backdrops to gather up the unjustly killed.
• Ironic Nickname: Joven the plate-maker was nicknamed "The Charmer". As The Scrooge, he was incredibly miserly and hard working, and so abrasive, sour and headstrong that he had no friends and at best grunted when something pleased him.
• Irony: Alloys Lumm considers writing a story about a young woman who is angry at a brilliant playwright (i.e., him) who is dangerous for being a meek woman and often overlooked. While the play he intends to write would have this young woman thwarted for her baseless hatred and ruined, Alloys ends up thwarted himself by D, whom he insistently overlooks, just like his mentor overlooked him before betraying her.
  • Captain Anthony ends up a victim of this as well, see Beneath Suspicion.
• Open Mouth, Insert Foot: Robert in all his interactions with Sargeant Van Goor, to disastrous results. Robert makes several assumptions about Van Goor that are classist without even knowing it, and his attempts to be polite all come off more as condescension. In one horrible exchange, Van Goor thinks Robert is offering him Dora as a sex worker, while Robert later comes to the embarrassing realization— that Van Goor must have assumed he offered Dora to fix his boots when she really doesn't know anything about cobbling.
• Hypno Trinket: The "Red Letters", papers with red symbols and triangles are able to brainwash the Weak-Willed.
• Immortality Immorality: The Psykical Research society know a technique to rejuvenate themselves. It requires the death of people who have a red triangle somewhere on their body (even a cloth patch will do). The souls then go to an in-between place where the souls is burned while the person is hynpotized, the light and energy heals the members but destroys the souls. This is what happened to D's brother.
• Magick: The Museum of Psykical Research.
• Mistaken for Exhibit: At one point D considers hiding from Sargeant Van de Goor by posing as a Maid Exhibit, but discards it just as quickly.
• No Communities Were Harmed: The nameless city the story takes place in is very likely equivalent to London. The story mentions several European and Middle Eastern nations, and a "close ally" of the fallen crown is a country whose flag had stars on a blue field and red and white stripes.
• Oblivious to Love: D, regarding Ike's infatuation with her. Perhaps immediately after she beats him at "Drips and Drabs", he decides to propose they marry, and gets anything and everything she might need. While D grows to care for him, enough to face a serial killer to protect him, she never notices his loyalty is borne out of love.
• Orphan's Ordeal: D's experience at the Lodgings, growing up after her brother and parents died of Cholera, and her nursemaid lied about not being able to adopt her.
• Perpetual-Motion Monster: The ghost animated wax workers. While most eventually stand stock still, Joven's continues to make clay plates without tiring.
• Portal Door: Simon the Gentle's cabinet. Entering it and spilling a few drops of human blood allows anyone inside to enter a Spirit World, an in-between dimension where a person can change their face.
• Psychic-Assisted Suicide: The Red Letters are able to force a person to commit suicide. Previously, the Psykical Research society sent out hundreds of these to get enough people to fuel their rejuvenation ritual.
• Rape Is a Special Kind of Evil: Sargeant Van de Goor is not just a thoroughly unpleasant, corrupt and vindictive person, they take pleasure in being "rude" to others in the "rudest" way. Including raping the loved ones of those who are rude to him while being Forced to Watch.
• Reed Richards Is Useless: This is Alloys Lumm's opinion of Simon the Gentle. Simon discovered a means to enter another dimension through his cabinet, but never bothered to document or share how he made it, and the most interesting he could think of to do with it was stage magic to make himself and an audience member appear to swap heads.
• The Revolution Will Not Be Vilified: Played straight and averted. The core of the revolution is sincere. Lionel, ideological head of the students wants to help the country's poor. Mosi, head of the dockworkers, wants the workers to be free of the government's oppression. However, Alloys Lumm is manipulating things so that the revolution was born "early" and weak, and will be crushed by the crown. His agents engineer a massacre to turn the population against the revolution and his control of the General Crossley means the city is cut off from supplies.
• The Scrooge: Joven the plate-maker. He is miserly, incredibly hard working, but so abrasive and off putting that he was given the ironic nickname of "The Charmer." Unusually for the trope, he becomes heroic first as a symbol of the monarchy's abuse when the finance minister first tries to stiff him the compensation for an order of fancy plates, and later murders him on the street in front of witnesses after Joven insulted him in public.
• Scullery Maid: D's job, what she was trained as when she became an orphan.
• Secret Circle of Secrets: The members behind the the Museum of Psykical Research.
• Serial Killer: The man calling himself Captain Anthony. Of the type trying to understand human behavior. He abuses his position as an interrogator to start killing anyone sent to his office at the embassy, which combined with the revolution makes the populace suspect the revolutionaries are purging the loyalists.
• The Star Scream: Alloys Lumm to both the provisional government / revolution and his mentor, the old head of the Psykical Research society, whose death he engineered.
• Torture Technician: Captain Anthony. However, he was only ever assigned as an interviewer. Being a serial killer, he takes his job as an opportunity to torture the people sent his way to try and understand the human condition and punish the guilty, whom he inevitably determines everyone to be as soon as he tortures them enough.
• Token Good Teammate: Simon the Gentle to Psykical Research society. All he ever did was perform stage magic and make people happy. Whereas the society murdered cats, forced people to suicide to achieve immortality, and were willing to kill thousands to put an end to the worker's revolution. Despite being harmless, Alloys Lumm was so annoyed with Simon that he engineered his assassination using a red letter.
• Uncanny Valley: The Museum of the Worker is chock full of wax figures of common workers and professions, but just about all are in a bad state of repair, missing eyes or tools.

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