3.8 Stars
The nameless protagonist wakes up from his stasis pod aboard the Persephone, a star cruiser on a course for some outer colonies. Around him are thousands of corpses. The ship is damaged, power is in and out, and he is alone with the ever-present smell of rot. To cope with the fear and crippling loneliness, he makes up a friend; a dead man that he pushes around in a wheelchair as he searches for survivors and scavenges deck after deck for food and supplies.
This has an enjoyable balance between psychological horror and the ever-persistent battle of hope and hopelessness from start to finish. I listened to this book through the Loinstream on Youtube and binged the whole ~6-hour reading in one day. I’d been looking forwards to getting around to this book for a while, and I can happily say that it didn’t disappoint my expectations. I’m a sucker for any form of found footage, so Ziggy’s logs were by far one of my favorite aspects of the story.
While I was reading (listening, rather), I kept expecting the Eye to be linked to one of the warring religious factions mentioned and for the book to verge into more Lovecraftian horror with the Eye, but this was not the case. It made the detail of the wars and the unexplained presence of the Eye feel a little off, but it still easily works within the framework of a man simply losing his mind after months alone on a rotting spaceship. I think the ending of this book was probably the bumpiest, but it still finished on a strong note.
I look forwards to reading more from this author in the future, and I’d recommend it to anyone looking for a good horror about a man adrift in the vacuum of space. If you’ve ever played the video game Soma, this book is a lot like that, just in space instead of underwater.
You can find the author on Minds @mattwaterhouseauthor
