The Luminous Dead

I went into this book vaguely remembering that it was meant to be super gripping and immersive and tense and whatnot - which turned out to be true, in the end! - but was absolutely not true in the beginning. I had a hard time getting into it at first, and after turning it around in my head for a while I think I know the reason: failure to establish a clear baseline.

We're told from the start that Gyre loves caving and is very excited to get underground. We're also told that caving on Cassandra V is super dangerous - significantly more so than on Earth - and that a significant percentage of cavers die during the two or three trips they need to make to earn enough money to get offworld. Immediately afterwards, we're told that's why Gyre jumped at the chance to do it in only one. Triple the pay, presumably triple the danger, but only once. This feels like a discrepancy, and her motivations aren't totally clear - her primary reason for wanting to get offworld (which is thematically important, even!) doesn't come out until several days in, in dialogue.

So Gyre is on her first serious excursion and has no more experience than the reader, and we know already that caving has a high fatality rate even on normal excursions, and that presumably there's a reason why this one pays so much more. We also know that she (allegedly?) likes being underground, and should at least at the beginning feel pretty comfortable in her environment. Given all of that, her reactions to practically everything at the beginning feel completely overblown. She sees red flags everywhere (and yeah, there definitely are a few), she's utterly shocked when she finds out how many people have died down here before, and so on. Maybe it really is shocking! But with no hard numbers before, just a general "many people die before they earn enough to get offworld" - plus the extra financial bonus here - it absolutely didn't feel shocking to me as a reader. Gyre's overreactions are so all over the place that I couldn't get a solid grip on her character, her environment, anything. Her moral disgust at certain things also felt foreign to me - I guess she thinks it's worse when individuals do things than when corporations do those same things??? I guess a profit motivation is more palatable to her than a personal one???? Because capitalism?????

Gyre is the viewpoint character, and Em - who exists mainly as a voice in her helmet, and is the only other major character - is presented from the start as manipulative, untrustworthy, and dangerous. Which makes it awkward that I found her significantly more relatable than Gyre, at the start. "Relatable" isn't even the right word - "predictable" comes closer, but really it's something between those. "Reasonable", maybe. I didn't know her deeper motivations, but I could understand why she did the things she did, follow her logic, &c., in a way I couldn't with Gyre. Even when she lied, I felt she could be relied on to have Gyre's safety at heart: completely counter to the way Gyre thought of her.

This all sounds very much as though I didn't care for the book at all, which to be honest was kind of true for the beginning - which makes this book one of the biggest differences between how I felt about it at the beginning and the end that I've read yet.

I can pinpoint the exact moment it turned around, though I won't because spoilers. The point is, once things started changing, the beginning up to that point became the baseline - which meant that all at once Gyre's emotions and reactions felt much more grounded. Somewhat ironically, seeing as Gyre herself began to be considerably less grounded, but there it is.

As of that point: it was gripping, it was immersive, it was tense, and I enjoyed it. There are basically two components to it: survival and trauma bonding. There are high emotions all over the place, often - but not always - because of immediate physical danger. There's a lot of immediate physical danger! There are lot of very thin margins! There are a lot of things going wrong when the margins are already very slim! Which is all to say that it may be a cathartic read for some people, but it is certainly not a relaxing one.

Selling points: it's a survival story with trauma bonding and a [somewhat spooky?] cave in a sci-fi wrapper, plus also lesbian rep. Either you like that sort of thing or you don't!

Warnings: unreality, loss of autonomy, few calm moments between the tension; takes a bit to get going.

Obviously I tore through this one, and recommend it highly for horror fans who can deal with a little claustrophobia. I liked the dedication to ambiguity as well; the author never felt the need to provide a definitive answer to what was going on, and thus everything was made more horrific. Characters have theories on why things are happening, but they'll never know for sure. The SF premise only heightens this. I loved it.

I'd really rather give it 4.5 than 4, but GR will do what it does. The ending... Mmm. I felt the ending was just a little too clean after the dark murkiness of the rest of the book.

I think I just might not like happy endings for books that spend so much time on horror and terror and violence. That might just be a me problem. I can understand wanting comfort after a book like this. I just don't want it for myself.

THE LUMINOUS DEAD is dense, claustrophobic, atmospheric horror, dripping with details. It builds a miasma of uncertainty by describing what the MC thinks happened then sometimes admitting that she was wrong, rarely revealing if her guide was mistaken too. The first half lingers on meticulous detail of the path through the caves, so that later we will know why a missing cache is worthy of terror, why the thought of pressing on towards one camp or returning to another elicits a silent scream. It tells in pieces a small and personal history of death underground, the dependence on the only voice around, helplessness when chance, mistrust, and technological failure cause breaches in connection.

I’m finding that I really like this kind of quiet horror. Books where most of the story is just explaining literally what’s happening, but the horror is in what should be happening but isn’t, shouldn’t be happening but is, and the precariousness of having to trust other people about one’s own body, in contexts where it is difficult to control whether or not boundaries will be respected. It understands that gaslighting is isolating and terrifying, and the terror is in being almost sure, wrong once, right once, and then never again being quite certain of what’s really happening. Hallucinogenic substances, involuntarily ingested, may be involved, in various times and manners. 

I love this for many of the same reasons that I love Mexican Gothic by Silvia Moreno-Garcia. The settings are very different, but they have many tendrils of horror in common. If you like sci-fi and liked Mexican Gothic, you'll probably like this (and if you like The Luminous Dead and like aesthetic non-sci-fi horror, you'll probably like Mexican Gothic).

It's Bram Stoker time over at the Horror Writer's Association. Which means a flood of books to consider as contenders for "The Best of the Year." This particular book from the list stood out to me, so... I figured I'd talk about it.

"The Luminous Dead" is the debut novel from Caitlin Starling. The setting is simple: a series of caves that the protagonist, Gyre, has to explore on behalf of her employer, a mining conglomerate. Her task is pretty much to re-supply a bunch of "camps" already set up in this cave from previous expeditions and to establish a final camp. The author also provides a helpful map for the reader in the front .

Tiny problem. This is Gyre's first official expedition. In addition, Gyre lied regarding her experience to get the job.

Tiny other problem. Her employer also lied.

The narrative caught me straight up. We first meet Gyre trying to navigate through a crack in the wall she could barely fit through. And it just got more intense from there. Overall, the underground experience, the isolation, and its effects on the human psyche; all of it was methodically presented by the narrative.

This was a slow burn. I felt myself getting more and more tense. Several times, I kept reading, referring back to the map as things went wrong saying "How's she going to get back through that?!" The reality of what she--and her employer--were going through and the emotional foundations of their motivations were well set up.

I ended up simultaneously appreciating and loathing their relationship. Especially as the situation forced them to rely on each other more and more. The resolution to those feelings felt earned. And it took up to the end to see if our protagonist would even get out alive.

Bottom line? If the idea of someone trapped in a cave, far from help, terrifies you... or if you feel alone due to isolation, consider picking this up!