Jonathan Maberry is one of the most prolific writers in any genre, and especially horror. I came to his fiction within the last decade and I’ve read novels across several different series (Joe Ledger, Kagen, Pine Deep Trilogy, Rot & Ruin) and one thing that has always come across is that he is having an enormous amount of fun writing these stories. With NecroTek, the first in the eponymously named NecroTek series, he might be having the most fun yet. Thankfully for readers like me, that fun is extremely, extremely infectious. Just think about this concept: Lovecraftian Military Science Fiction. Or, Cosmic Space Horror. Whatever you decide to call it, Maberry is telling a balls-out, over-the-top story.
In few hundred years, space travel is the norm and several companies and countries are vying for domination. The novel opens when one company develops a propulsion system that would allow for rapid transportation over vast differences is testing their machine. The warpline gun is essentially an enormous gun that would shoot the vessel across space. When the entire space station – Asphodel Station – disappears from the orbit of Jupiter, the characters who populate the station realize something is incredibly wrong. Especially when the star system in which they find themselves seems to defy known physics and strange things seem to be on the stations. Not only that, things are fused together, people are fused into objects. The horrors are shocking and instant. But they persist.
Maberry populates this epic novel with a range of characters – the priestess Lady Death (Jessica McHugh), the crackerjack pilot Bianca Petrescu, the philosopher Lars Soren. There’s the military leader to whom Bianca reports, there’s the station manager who essentially is the administrator of Asphodel Station. Then there’s the Lost, a ghost (not just a ghost, but an alien ghost!) whose home was the decimated planet Shadderal where the never-ending war of the Shoggoths and their masters the Old Ones have tried to dominate and force their will upon everything.
The Shoggoths are unrelenting, they are numerous. But there’s a way to fight them, a way for a sentient being to bond with the ancient-but-more-advanced-than-humanity’s technology. The problem, these machines of war are controlled by the spirits of the dead. …and there’s the title of this book and series – NecroTek.
Because military science fiction, space-based science fiction across a far-flung galaxy, and Lovecraftian Old Ones aren’t enough for Maberry, he wanted to throw in mecha powered by the dead. On the surface, this should be insanity. I can almost picture Jonathan Maberry as a mad scientist in a lab throwing bubbling and smoking ingredients into a giant vat, cackling and flailing his arms. But I’ll be damned if it doesn’t all work together in a very logical way.
At the story’s heart though, for me, is the horror element. The Lovecraftian/Cthulhu mythos forms the backdrop of the story and having a character like Lady Death be at the center with the knowledge of the Old and Deep ones, and Soren as a multi-denominational religious “interpreter,” Maberry is able to inject some philosophical, faith-based debate and weight into the story. In this NecroTek, H.P. Lovecraft was a real writer, but the mythos the wrote about…or into which he tapped, is very real, and an enormous threat to humanity. Because these creatures, these Old Ones, these gods, have been alerted to humanity, and to the existence of Earth and these monstrous entities are looking for a place to call home.
While the horror is the heart for me, Maberry also spins some excellent space battles. He manages to shift perspective throughout these battles, keeping a very high amount of tension throughout.
The characters are top notch; as could possibly be surmised, I adored Loren and Lady Death. While they weren’t exactly opposites, they came from slightly different perspectives, came across as smart and engaging and provided a really strong backbone of philosophical intelligence throughout the novel. I thoroughly enjoyed how Maberry intertwined their passages in with the space battles towards the end of the novel.
NecroTek is a high-octane, high-concept blast of a novel. For what could have been a mess of a novel, with a varied array of genre concepts thrown into the soup pot, Maberry has concocted a delicious, smart, and well-balanced tale that serves as a great series starter. I’ve read across several of Maberry’s series and there are connections between many of them…there are Easter eggs in both the Kagen novels as well as Rot & Ruin not to mention Maberry’s most famous creation, Joe Ledger. While there aren’t explicit connections between NecroTek (at least that stood out to me) and his other work, as a reader who adored the Kagen novels, I wouldn’t be surprised if there’s a real connection between Kagen and NecroTek. That’s just an Easter egg for fans of Maberry’s copious output and should by absolutely no means dissuade any reader from picking up this novel…it is in fact a great introduction to the kind of frenetic, fun novel Maberry unleashes upon the world for his readers to enjoy.
NecroTek is a damned fine series starter and a fun and interesting slant on the horror genre. If you’re looking for something a little outside of the box (i.e. not a haunted house story, not a slasher, not a possession story), this is a fun, fantastic read.
Highly recommended.
© 2025 Rob H. Bedford
Trade Paperback | May 2025 | Blackstone Publishing
580 Pages (including short story, excerpt for book 2, miscellaneous extras
https://www.jonathanmaberry.com/lp-book-nekrotek.cfm
https://www.weirdtales.com/
Review copy courtesy of the publisher, Blackstone Publishing
