The Luminous Dead: A Novel

After finishing this book I’m not really sure how I feel. I don’t hate it but I honestly don’t feel it was a good time. Gyre is underground in a cave on another planet fulfilling a very expensive, well paid, secretive caving job for her abrasive employer Em. As Gyre gets deeps into the cave things start going worse and worse. Soon she’s struggling to not just survive, but to make it back to the surface in one piece. This book had so much potential! I love survival horror, space horror, and caving stories because I find them so terrifying! This one had ghosts, weird alien worms called tunnelers, and an antagonist that is complicated and Gyre’s key to survival. All the pieces were there but the execution was not. While Gyre was a great character it was hard to relate to the other main character Em who is responsible for Gyre’s plight and her reasons for it are dumb and pretty nonsensical. The author tries to make it sound like her motives have a meaning but honestly they don’t and it makes her incredibly unlikeable and impossible to relate to. Also, the forced romance between Gyre and Em I found really gross. Stockholm syndrome does not equal love, and the fact that this unnecessary abusive and toxic relationship was even a thing, just sat very wrong with me. Gyre would be in a horrific situation and thinking about Em and how she cares for her despite all the abuse Em dishes out. I don’t like novels that glorify toxic or abusive relationships, and this one was so off the rails and really not necessary. In addition, this book is so long and slow with nothing really sci fi going on beyond the suit and these tunnelers that we don’t see until the end of the book and only for a page. The pacing is far too slow, with a majority of the book being climbing and traversal of the cave intermixed with Em and Gyre’s interactions, and Gyre’s slowly unraveling sanity which made this a hard one to get through for me. In the end it wasn’t even worth it because the ending was so anti climactic and again just kinda gross due to the toxic relationship here. This one had so much potential and was honestly a big disappointment.

I was so interested in this book due not only to the description indicating some unknown terror deep in an underground cave but also (silly enough) due to the cover art hinting at some unknown enemy lurking in the shadows.

But sadly, after reading 17 of the 37 chapters (approx. 50% of the book) I just couldn't latch on to this story.

The premise sounded great, but the main character(s) were annoying AF. Gyre constantly lashing out at EM (her "handler" and boss), complaining about the reason for the expedition, and the repetitive thoughts going through her head page after page led me to dislike her very much.

There was just nothing that really jumped out and grabbed my interest after 222 pages and I'm moving on.

this book was deemed as "atmospheric" and was compared to The Martian. however, i wasn't really intrigued by the atmosphere of the cave. perhaps i don't know that much about caving, or perhaps the main character was too comfortable with caves, but i can think of a lot of other stories i've read that have done a better job of making all the inherent characteristics of a cave seem spooky. instead, i found much of this story to be incredibly repetitive. lots of pages were devoted to the tiny details of climbing, diving, feeding, and navigating the body suit. again, maybe i just don't know that much about caves, or maybe the main character knows too much about caves, but the wording was too technical and repetitive to be intriguing.

ultimately, this book couldn't decide if it wanted to be horrifying because of the cave (claustrophobia, darkness), ghosts (the other dead cavers), unknown biological flora/fauna (the glowing fungus, the tunneler), or the gore of the body suit (rerouting the digestive system, loss of tactile feeling, handler injecting drugs). instead, this book throws all of it at the wall and excels at none of it, ending confusingly with an eye-rolling stockholm syndrome romance between the emotionally and physically broken caver and her monstrously misguided handler.

A caver on a terraformed planet is hired for a mysterious solo mission underground. This character-driven novel achieves a lovely balance between suspense and revelation. The pace at which the history/backstory is uncovered isn’t overwhelming, like many sci-fi tales. Treads the line between horror and science fiction very well.