Space Horror is a mash-up of two popular genres, most famously seen in the classic Alien film franchise. Jess Brown sets her debut novel on the Calypso, a generational ship experiencing some troubling issues. Originally from Earth, they had to depart their second destination (a planet named Proxima b) and acting captain Jacklyn Albright’s father (the actual captain) has secluded himself from the ship, their mother and sister are dead, food stores are dwindling, and there is social conflict on the ship. …and oh yeah, something or somethings may have invaded her ship.
As acting captain of the starship Calypso, Jacklyn Albright is responsible for keeping the last of humanity alive as they limp back to Earth from their forebears’ failed colony on a distant planet.
Faced with constant threats of starvation and destruction in the treacherous minefield of interstellar space, Jacklyn’s crew has reached their breaking point. As unrest begins to spread throughout the ship’s Wards, a new threat emerges, picking off crew members in grim, bloody fashion.
Jacklyn and her team must hunt down the ship’s unknown intruder if they have any hope of making it back to their solar system alive.
That may sound somewhat familiar, but Ness Brown takes that familiarity and works their own voice to tell a refreshing, gripping, and harrowing horror tale. Ness does a great job of putting the reader into Jacklyn’s shoes as they tries to navigate a multi-pronged crisis. The chaos is prominent from the start of the novel, pushing Jacklyn to the edge of their sanity, which is not helped by a droid named Watson who acts as a second mate through the narrative. Sometimes the creepiness of artificial intelligence is when the robot/droid approaches the uncanny valley of being too similar to a human being. Ness Brown takes a bit of an opposite approach as they add a very unsettling trait to how Watson communicates and shares recordings it has discovered from other ships. That unsettling nature is, in part, because of the communication itself: a distress signal that portends what is to come for the Calypso.
It is no secret alien creatures are the menace on the ship, something Jacklyn must lead their crew and people to overcome. The “engagements” with these strange noises and disappearances become more frequent. The reveal of those creatures was handled quite well, in pieces of the narrative leading to the full reveal.
The length was just about right for the story, as the pace was frenetic and didn’t permit for too much information about the why and how the Calypso and humanity was among the stars. There was just enough character development for the story, too. In some ways, the length of the story made it feel like an episode of something larger, which is fine and quite effective.
The Macmillan genre imprints (Tor, Tor.com, Tor Nightfire) have been publishing these short novels, novellas(?) to great success. In The Scourge Between the Stars, they’ve published another winner blending horror and science fiction.
Recommended
© 2023 Rob H. Bedford
Published by Tor Nightfire | April 2023 | 176 Pages
https://ness-brown.com/ | Twitter @nessthenovelist
Excerpt: https://www.tor.com/2022/12/07/excerpts-the-scourge-between-stars-by-ness-brown/
Review copy courtesy of the publisher
