Sofia Ajram’s debut novel Coup de Grâce is a markedly Gen Z take on allegory, bringing visions of Dante, Orpheus, and Medusa to dance alongside figures from twenty-first-century internet lore like the Nutty Putty Cave Man and Elisa Lam. The result is a modern horror story marrying classic mythologies with creepypastas, all unfolding in the bowels of the Montreal STM.

Much like Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves, Coup de Grâce is a novel in which the setting has as much agency as any of the characters. Hallways circle back on themselves, staircases dead-end into barricaded turnstiles, and the wet concrete drips indefinitely – a labyrinthine structure that becomes manifest for the reader in the final pages of the novel. Part modern oracle, part choose-your-own-adventure, Coup de Grâce is a powerful fictional debut that makes an ethical demand of its reader. 

The novel begins with a compelling premise: falling asleep along the green line somewhere between Assomption and Honoré-Beaugrand, protagonist Vicken awakens to find himself in an empty terminus. There’s no signage, no cell service, and no one around –  or so he thinks.

Having boarded the metro to throw himself into the Saint Lawrence – “my river Ouse” – Vicken’s purgatory is as much psychological as it is physical. Trapped in the liminal space of the underground maze, Vicken spends countless days surviving off the spoils of an abandoned dépanneur, rationing his medication and using his iPhone to illuminate narrow tunnels. With other human characters kept to a minimum, much of the horror takes place within the confines of Vicken’s own mind. 

River Ouse, of course, invokes Virginia Woolf, while other phrases in the novel smack of Canadian classicist Anne Carson. The allegorical backdrop is woven throughout, only somewhat heavy-handedly heralded by posters in the metro advertising the latest show at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts: an exhibit on the “taboo in art,” with Orpheus and Eurydice dancing beneath the banner that reads “Don’t look back.” Hades’ command takes on a chilling significance in the context of other classical myths, like that of Medusa, as well as contemporary references like Ajram’s invocation of the internet-famous Elevator Game (think Bloody Mary but set in an elevator). 

Coup de Grâce moves with an imaginative gusto that at times seems difficult for Ajram to harness. He draws from various mythologies but never for more than a few paragraphs, a postmodernist tactic that here feels at turns liberatory and at others frustrating: not adhering to a single story prevents the novel from falling into predictability, but also leaves the constant references feeling sometimes clumsy and overcrowded, never yielding any real insight. 

Likewise, Ajram’s use of language is visceral but appears at times to outpace his command. For instance, Vicken describes slipping on some unknown liquid “like socks on cold cat vomit,” a phrase that made me recoil on its first iteration, but less so when it reappeared verbatim just five pages later. And while Vicken tells us at the outset that he is going to recount his story “with the melancholy of a poet,” it never becomes clear why as an EMT – a profession that relies on logic, unsentimentality, and coolness under pressure – he has such a penchant for flowery language and niche literary references. 

These flaws are minor considering the ambition and imaginative scope of Ajram’s project, which extends beyond the novel’s content to engage with form as well. The strongest and strangest parts of the novel are those that seem straight out of an r/Horror megathread, using well-known internet phenomena to revitalize classical references that otherwise might seem obscure or irrelevant. Just as Dante’s Divine Comedy can be read as an allegory for spiritual self-discovery, Vicken’s journey through the terminus can be seen as a navigation of his own mental abyss – one can almost picture Jigsaw in the place of Virgil, telling Vicken that he’s not cherishing his life. 

Intelligent, unsettling, and ripe for re-readability, Coup de Grâce is a horror story for anyone who has ever tried to navigate the tunnel system running below Sainte-Catherine, as well as any STM commuters stuck in an indeterminate purgatory waiting for service to be rétabli.mRb