Thanks to NetGalley, Dreamscape Media & Dreamscape Lore, Bindery Books, and Ezeekat Press for the ARC. It hasn’t affected the contents of my review.
I had a great time with this weird little genre-bender. I love books where the author was like, should I do mystery? Romance? Paranormal? Horror? Sci-fi? Why not all?? Indeed. Why not all.
Our two main characters are ship’s AI’s, the navigator, and the ship’s doctor. Demeter is the ship’s name, and when the book starts she’s just a normal ship, doing her job transporting humans back and forth from Earth to Alpha Centauri. But soon after that, she’s a ghost ship, her entire crew and all of her passengers murdered by a mysterious entity (a ghost of the name Vlad Tepes on her logs) save for two children she is now tasked caring for until they make it back to Earth. From there, the plot is sort of all over the place (my one criticism of this book is that the structure of the story felt a bit of a mess while I was reading it). But basically it all boils down to: Why Demeter? Why poor, poor Demeter? And what can we do about it?
(The bit with the Cthulu aliens was truly wild.)
From there, we’ve got vampires, we’ve got werewolves, we’ve got aliens, we’ve got mummies, we’ve got a ton of shit that should not be in a spacefaring story, but is, and somehow works.
I will definitely be watching out for whatever Barbara Truelove writes next, because this was a fantastic, imaginative debut with exactly the right tone I look for in stories (goofy, heartfelt, serious, all at the same time).
Highly recommend this one!
(Worth noting: Although I enjoyed listening to the audiobook, it had some very obvious production errors, particularly with one narrator, who kept mispronouncing things or pronouncing them inconsistently, or using malapropisms all over the place, i.e. saying “immorality” instead of “immortality,” pronouncing Agnus’s name “Angus,” and I stg, “dementors” instead of “demented.”)
CBR BINGO: ‘O’
