Full Immersion
**FINALIST for the BSF Award for Best Horror, 2023**
A traumatised woman with amnesia finds her own dead body and sets out to uncover the truth of her demise in a race against time, sanity, crumbling realities and the ever-present threat of the Silhouette.
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What can you do when you’re reeling from trauma but you’ve tried it all? Counselling, yoga, pills, meditation, art, healthy living… none of it makes a dent. What’s left?
Magpie is out of ideas. She’s desperate enough to try anything. Just when she thinks her life can get no worse, she discovers herself, or rather her own dead body, partially buried in the mudbank of a river. A man stands by, a familiar stranger. What does he want? And why can’t she remember getting here? Why can’t she remember anything?
Unbeknownst to her, two pairs of eyes watch from behind an observation screen, in a room filled with computers and sensors. An experiment is unfolding, but is Magpie the subject, or practitioner? Reality becomes a slippery concept. And beyond the glass is something worse still: a hint of an outline, shaped in darkness…
Magpie realises all too soon that her journey has transformed from healing to survival. She must become the hunter rather than the hunted, with her missing memories the prey.
In turn brutal, beautiful and absolutely terrifying, Full Immersion is the latest speculative horror from Bram Stoker Award-nominated author, Gemma Amor
File Under: Horror Fantasy [ Silhouette | Suspension | Bristol | Motherhood ]
**Content Warnings** suicidal ideation; post-natal depression; implied acts of violence towards a child; birth scene
A traumatised woman with amnesia finds her own dead body and sets out to uncover the truth of her demise in a race against time, sanity, crumbling realities and the ever-present threat of the Silhouette.
---
What can you do when you’re reeling from trauma but you’ve tried it all? Counselling, yoga, pills, meditation, art, healthy living… none of it makes a dent. What’s left?
Magpie is out of ideas. She’s desperate enough to try anything. Just when she thinks her life can get no worse, she discovers herself, or rather her own dead body, partially buried in the mudbank of a river. A man stands by, a familiar stranger. What does he want? And why can’t she remember getting here? Why can’t she remember anything?
Unbeknownst to her, two pairs of eyes watch from behind an observation screen, in a room filled with computers and sensors. An experiment is unfolding, but is Magpie the subject, or practitioner? Reality becomes a slippery concept. And beyond the glass is something worse still: a hint of an outline, shaped in darkness…
Magpie realises all too soon that her journey has transformed from healing to survival. She must become the hunter rather than the hunted, with her missing memories the prey.
In turn brutal, beautiful and absolutely terrifying, Full Immersion is the latest speculative horror from Bram Stoker Award-nominated author, Gemma Amor
File Under: Horror Fantasy [ Silhouette | Suspension | Bristol | Motherhood ]
**Content Warnings** suicidal ideation; post-natal depression; implied acts of violence towards a child; birth scene
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Community Reviews
"It's therapy. And the purpose of therapy is growth. Emotional growth, and the absolution of severe emotional disturbances."
(I did read the ARC of this book courtesy of NetGalley and the publisher, Angry Robot Books, so it's entirely possible this quote did not make it into the final print, but if it didn't, it should have.)
FULL IMMERSION by Gemma Amor is a fast paced thriller that begins with a woman finding her own dead body, prompting her to set out on a journey to discover the events that led to her death. Accompanied by a new friend, this woman, Magpie, traverses through memories of her past in an attempt to shed light on the puzzle pieces of her life. The journey turns into a race against time as Magpie discovers that not only is reality crumbling around her, a terrifying being known as Silhouette is relentless in its pursuit of its prey: Magpie and her new friend.
Talk about a page turner! I read this book in less than 24 hours - it was so interesting to read about the technological techniques used, but when I first encountered the sinister presence of the Stick Man, Silhouette - I was HOOKED. The mounting dread and suspense kept my eyes glued to the pages to see what would happen next - in addition to being keenly intrigued to learn about Magpie and her past events that led her to where she was when we met her - discovering her own body.
FULL IMMERSION has many elements that will delight readers of multiple genres: fantasy, horror, and science fiction to name a few. I read the book description and thought I was going to be reading a good story about a murder mystery and it turned out to be so much more than that. I even caught myself with the book in my lap, realizing I had stopped reading to mull over how much we don't know about the mind - what it's capable of - and how terrifying the not knowing is. I loved how Gemma Amor's creative genius took my imagination down into the abyss and turned it loose into the murky depths....with Silhouette.
In an interesting twist, I found that I didn't really like any of the characters. I was more interested in the techniques being employed (you'll just have to read it to see what these are, it would be a spoiler for me to detail them here) and once I got a taste of the fear of Silhouette, I was hooked. At that point, Magpie became a means to an end for me. The setting, of which again I can't detail due to spoilers, I found captivating and if you're a gamer, you will too. (Especially Mario fans, lol) The one thing I actually did not jive with - the ending. For me personally, it was too easy? That may not be an accurate description...hmmm...mayhaps I was salty it was over so fast? The ending was open-ended, so the reader can use their discretion to imagine what happened next, but I reckon I was looking for a final type of resolution. Horror and Sci Fi fans will likely disagree with me here because it's actually just the right ending for those genres. Ugh! Now I'm reconsidering - ha! That's when you know it's a good one my friends!
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