Beneath the Rising

James Nicoll lauded Mohamed's depiction of "the vexed relationship between Johnny and Nick", and observed that her portrayal of the Ancient Ones as "highly invested in preventing anyone anywhere from enjoying long-term happiness" made them the equivalent of "inter-dimensional griefers".^[1]

At Strange Horizons, S. Qiouyi Lu emphasized that, despite the many positive outcomes of Johnny's inventions, Johnny is still a "villainous mad scientist" who "channel(s) great evil", and commended Mohamed for not romanticizing the codependent nature of Nick's magically-enforced love for Johnny which, Lu felt, made Nick a slave; ultimately, Lu found the novel to be "near-flawless", with a "brilliantly constructed narrative" that also serves as an "extended metaphor" in which "Johnny's covenant, and Nick's role as her 'companion,' are tools to critique the legacy of colonialism".^[2]

Lu further explored the novel in an essay at Tor.com, in which they described Johnny as "a symbol for coloniality", and noted that Indo-Guyanese-Canadian Nick's identity as a self-described "brown" man in the medium-term aftermath of 9/11 (even if, in the world of the novel, the attacks on the World Trade Center narrowly failed when both jetliners crashed into the Hudson River) "is not an incidental part of the narrative — it drives the narrative," and shapes not just Nick's internal voice but also "how he reacts and makes decisions".^[3]

Mohamed wrote the novel's first draft in 2002, but did not begin submitting it to publishers until 2015. She has stated that the tensions between Nick and Johnny, who differ significantly in both race and class, are based on her own late-teenage relationships with friends "who were in different social classes to me and who were mostly white".^[8]