Everyone, sooner or later, understands death for what it is. Change, revelation, the moment one thing becomes another. Ivy Grimes’s novella, The Cellar Below the Cellar, with its poetic turns of narrative to its easily imaginable characters, reminds me time and time again that to die is not an absence, but a shift in perspective. 

Following Jane, the protagonist, after a Miyaki event, we see all the bildungsroman trappings of what it means to change. Jane suddenly has to help her grandma, has to grapple with not being the mature, self-assured (and assuring) matriarch that she is, and has to do things she ultimately loathes doing. In another writer’s hands, the narrative would take all the usual turns any apocalypse would, whereas Grimes rightfully focusses on the reparative constructs that tend to remain whenever globalised orders collapse, that of community, kindness, and, what Grimes likes to untangle most in this novella, faith. 

With no digital infrastructure, there’s no screens, and Grimes identifies here more than ever that we are dependent on a world of virtual connections, the same way that believers might have been dependent on their unseen divinity they lay their trust in. When the digital world goes, however, Jane’s daily toil to ensure the community’s safety, her endless chores for Grandma and a particularly nasty family by the name of Osprey, reminds us reading that faith in a structure, in each other, in order, is built on praxis. We must act as we believe if what is believed can manifest. Jane has difficult choices to make, difficult decisions to ponder, and it’s deeply touching in the way any story about growing up and making sacrifices tends to be. 

It really feels like a reclamation of nihilism, if anything else. A word so easily used to disparage any pessimistic outlook. In reality, the word has been taken from its meaning. Nihilism is the fundamental power anyone has to make meaning out of the world. If anything, what Grimes argues we need in a world wrought by disconnection, violence, and murder, is more people willing to make meaning out of a world so desperate to keep itself mysterious.  In such a time, and in such a place, anyone could do anything; could kill—will kill—with seeming impunity. This is the kind of environment in which older, stranger (and sometimes even kinder) powers are at work, and these are the forces that Grimes brings to bear in her fiction, using folklore and archetype as fertilizer for her world-building. 

The Cellar Below the Cellar is a tale narrativising how tales are powerful modems of faith. Not faithful as in the sense of devoted to religion, but to one another. In Grimes’ world, someone will tend your garden if you are ill; they might even store your demon-filled jars for you, no matter how strange that request might seem. The overarching theme that emerges is one of community—that sometimes just “putting up with one another” is a profound and constant act of faith.

When we first meet Jane, she appears passive, unable to understand how to interact with this brand new world, with its strange contours and stranger inhabitants. Even those who were once familiar—like her oddly-adept-at-survival grandmother—become alien to her, suddenly foisting upon her familial demands. Jane herself feels oddly transparent to us, like glass that we use as a lens to see through. That transparency is nothing but narrative porosity. If she is easy to see through, it’s because Jane isn’t the person she needs to be—yet.

I am purposefully occluding a deeper interaction with the subterranean plot of this novella—the cellar, as it were, of the The Cellar Below the Cellar. It is the final hurdles where that porosity obscures, becomes murky, and the deep intensities that tangle up a life weave tight Jane and her connection to the world, so that as the narrative closes up, Jane’s eyes open to the wealth of history she is connected to, to the mysterious Unraveling, to how death and souls and minds all work. We get the sense that we are the buried thing, in the novella, and when the cellar below the cellar makes itself manifest, when the deeper secrets about the Unravelling, about how flesh turns to air, how dying breaths meet the milk of empyrean mountains, we are already so beholden to the idea that faith keeps us here that we are ready and willing to let Jane command and steer the ship of the narrative. Grimes manages to really flesh out the sometimes intangible ideas of apocalypse, of blowing trumpets and falling stars. It really is spectacular, and idiosyncratic in all the ways masterful works of fiction are. Grimes reminds us that the end of the world is more the end of some power structure’s idea of the world, and that a million worlds end every day, in murdered sons or abandoned daughters, in lost pets and waning grandparents. By the end of the novella, when Jane feels ready to take on the world so confusing to her, with all its occultic accouterments and haunting lineage, Ivy Grimes reminds us that the world always ends—and it’s people like Jane, like us, that we keep faith in to bring the core, vitalities—of the vulnerable, the lonely, the sick and the sad—together. 

The Cellar Below the Cellar is due for release 18th February 2026. You can pre-order your copy on Bookshop.org