Helyna L. Clove

I read this novel for The Self-Published Science Fiction Competition, SPSFC. The following review is my own personal opinion as a judge and does not reflect the views of the team as a whole. Find out more about the competition here and my team, The Space Girls, here, and read all my reviews for the competition here!

Several years into a multi-decade deep space mission, a team of eight scientists—four women, four men—are exploring a dwarf planet near the Kuiper Belt, loading soil samples, rocks and artifacts onto their ship, when they inadvertently bring aboard a stowaway, an unseen entity which is trying desperately to escape from Cargo Hold 4.

Cargo Hold 4 immediately tells you how it is: there is something in cargo hold 4 of the spaceship Gretel. As it’s screaming and banging around in there, the eight-person crew, years into their singular mission of discoveries and path-finding, are trying to figure out what it could be, since nothing organic should be in there: the planet they’d just visited did not have life on it. They try to peek inside the hold from space (since there’s no way they’re opening up the inner vault door) but whatever the view is, it shocks and incapacitates one of the crew, Chelsey. There are more attempts with a drone and through a dangerously accessed vent, but these only convince them of the tenacity and terrifying nature of the creature stuck in there. While the shrieks and unearthly noises continue, they plan a difficult maneuver: there is a supply stash they are soon coming upon, left for them in the middle of empty space decades before their mission was even launched. So what if they link up the supply vessel with the problematic hold, trying to transfer their bothersome hitchhiker out of it? Of course, things do not turn out as expected at all…

As a sci-fi horror, the book starts out fittingly. We can quickly orient ourselves in the situation and among the characters while already being thrown into action: something bad is going on, but we (and the crew) don’t know the details. All the uncertainties regarding the alien or creature or effect bring an urgency to the events, almost a frantic energy as the crew tries to solve their situation with this thing blaring into their ears. Without spoilers, we do get a glimpse of the Thing quite early, but, arguably, this does not help at all and wakes more doubts and questions than it solves both in the reader and the characters. The business of the supply vessel is also intriguing, just like their somewhat goofy ideas of how to make the thing leave without sacrificing too many valuable samples and supplies and with their limited options and knowledge of the creature. In between this, we also spend some time getting to know the crew, for example Desna, the captain, Berlin, her first officer, and Hurd, the strange android therapist. We peek into their lives and into their somewhat chaotic relationships with each other, and this remains a through-line in the book until the end.

For me, unfortunately, the tension quickly dissipated after the first accords of the novel—I was still interested in what the creature was and what kind of havoc it might cause on the ship, but the casual and direct writing style started conveying less of an urgency and terror, and the characters could not convince me about the depths hiding inside them or inside their relationships with each other, the exact thing which could have made me care for their fate. It was still possible to expect their demise in a “watching people die in horrific ways is fun!” style, but somehow this also didn’t work out for me. I suppose a sci-fi horror doesn’t need to get immensely introspective, however, for me it’s always easier to get immersed in a story through living-breathing characters. We do get some background info on each of them, but no real sense of character outside of the framework of the story, which ended up being too little for me. At the same time, as the story goes on and the enigmatic Thing in the cargo hold gets revealed in more and more concrete terms, I felt a bit uncomfortable with the handling of some of the heavier aspects. Although some of these events (involving e.g. sexual assault and grooming) and their consequences in the story were clearly signaled to be harmful and negative (very correctly), I still didn’t feel they were handled with the care they needed to be handled with. As the story devolved into catastrophe towards the end (well, it is horror, after all) I couldn’t appreciate the disintegration of the character personalities and relationships either, since I didn’t have a good baseline for their normal selves and little community. I’m also not sure I ever got a consistent enough picture about the Thing and its exact abilities.

There are also many smaller or larger ethical problems under consideration through the book, which I liked—bursting into the hold and shooting up the place to murder the creature was never truly presented as a desirable outcome, and this was very in line with a bunch of scientist weirdos trying to handle a very weird and dangerous situation. But again, it was hard for me to connect with these ethical considerations through the characters. The ending, however, did work for me: it was fittingly devastating on one side and unsettling on the other, but since the crew needed to make some especially ill-advised choices without thinking about them twice for us to get there, it still left me a bit unsatisfied.

Still, opinions are just that, opinions, and if anything in this review piqued your interest as an outer space horror and weird alien creature lover, do not hesitate to try this book out for size!

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