The Luminous Dead

CW: parental death, death, parental abandonment, claustrophobia and some violence

This was a hell of a ride. I really enjoyed this book out of my comfort zone! I liked the fact that we are getting queer stories that are dark.

Gyre is set on not staying on her planet anymore. With a plan in hand to get her ticket out she ends up signing what may her very last contract. Her expectations did not align with her reality. Instead of having a team surveying her moves and keeping her safe she just has Em. Em who has secrets of her own. Em being her only connection to the topside.

This made me so anxious and I sped through the last quarter of this book demanding answers. At first I wondered if this needed to be done as sci-fi and there are certain parts that really rely on it such as the suits and tunnelers.

I don't know if there are any other souls out there that want to read spoilers before they finish or even pick up a book but they are all in here. It's long.
Gyre wants to get off planet to find her mother. Gyre makes some pretty gruesome discoveries about the divers before her. She learns that there have been 27 dead divers before her. She considers turning back at one of the early camps but Em persuades her to continue by doing whatever she wanted. Gyre wanted her to find her mother. As Gyre gets deeper into the caves we learn that Em is in charge of a mining empire and the only one topside monitoring her. One of the bigger reveals is that Em's parents went down into the depths of the caves but only her mother returned. The rest of the team did not survive including her father. Every time Gyre considers turning back there is a point in which Em can convince her to continue on. As included in the synopsis Em sometimes goes wild and plays god by injecting drugs into Gyre to either stop her or force her to sleep. She also has the ability to control her suit which she does take advantage of. As Gyre goes deeper into the cave she starts to see things and she begins to deteriorate. Not knowing if the cave is actually haunted or if she is just beginning to go crazy she has to rely on Em although that also comes with a price. Em shares videos of her parents dive as an attempt to humanize herself and her reasoning for sending others to their deaths. We see her Mother being interviewed as she was the only survivor. Em's mother abandons her and vanishes. It eventually is revealed that Em has sent the divers down to try and find her mother, thinking that that was where she was. As Gyre goes deeper into the caves she sees Em's mother and others lost to the cave. She doesn't share that with Em because she does not want her to inject her with drugs. There is a point where Gyre has lost communication from Em, her battery dying, and no back up food and it is stressful as hell. Eventually Gyre finds a chamber which held some of the dead that were never found before. She offers to bring them topside but Em tells her that she doesn't have to. Instead they have a ceremony in the cave and Em is able to grieve. Gyre is not stable anymore. She ends up getting hurt on her trek up to solid ground. At one point in her madness she opens the files that Em provided to her about her mother. What she found out was that her lapse in her life was becoming pregnant with Gyre on a planet that she was studying and she returned back to her "normal" life. She has a new husband and children. While Gyre is injured Em urges Gyre to make it to the second camp and she would come down herself to get her. Gyre hears the call of the dead, urging her to go deeper and join them, and she considers it. We see that Em rescues Gyre and is doing an exit interview similar to what Em's mother did. Gyre has come back a fragment of herself. Em lets her know that she will get her a ticket to go anywhere. Gyre asks that she comes with her to face her own mother.

3.25 out of 5 stars

When Gyre Price is recruited to survey a dangerous cave system on a far off planet, her only chance of survival is to trust an enigmatic overseer and her own wits, which are slowly diminishing the deeper she journeys into the abyss.

Author Caitlin Starling creates a palpable sense of dread and foreboding as the book progresses. The cave itself is so claustrophobic and unsettling that by the end I was very ready to rid myself of such a sinister setting.

The story itself never really unfolded in the way I wanted it to, though. I was hoping for and expecting more hair-raising horror and thrills, but the book leans more heavily into psychological trauma, which it does communicate in an effective way. The book itself is well-written and engaging, and while the ultimate endgame did not leave me satisfied, I was captivated enough to go along for the ride.

My thanks to Edelweiss and the publisher for an advanced reader copy in exchange for an honest review.

See this review and others at The Speculative Shelf

caves are just incredibly spooky to me, so i already knew that the setting would work for me in a horror novel.

honestly, theres not a lot that i would criticize about this novel, i liked the plot itself, i enjoyed the dynamic between the two characters and the writing style felt very alive.

i do think that the story suffered a bit frol the length of the novel though; this could have easily been way shorter and nothing would have been missing. it wasnt ideal that i went from being on the edge of my seat to “okay can she just get out of the cave now please, im starting to get bored :')”

the last 10% were really strong though and i loved the ending!

Updated Review: This is my most re-read book. This later half of the year, I have listened or read a couple chapters of this book every night, or just about every night. It's become a comfort for me to be in this world. I'm not even sure if I should still keep logging myself re-reading this book as I'm certain by the end of the year it'll have been like 30 times.

I love everything about it. And while the initial heart pounding fear I had experienced the first time reading this (way back in 2019) has worn off as I've grown so accustomed to it, I still can't get over what the secrets are in this novel and I keep changing my mind on what the real vs unreal events were. I love experiencing the same scenes again and again.

It is an oddity for me as a reader to have such a comfort affinity with a book. I think it's more natural to have it with shows and movies but The Luminous Dead really has become something I just reach for nightly to settle in and relax as I'm getting ready for bed.

Obviously, I'm just a huge fan.

2019: Cave expedition gone wrong? Yes, yes and more yes.

First of all, great talent from Starling considering a book this length with only two characters and one setting. I rarely experience this kind of thing well in books and what Starling did was phenomenal. It was like watching a well done horror movie.

Also if you haven't already read the synopsis - I'd recommend going in blind! I had read it fully prior to reading and no, it didn't take much away from me, but a book like this would be fun with little knowledge prior.

To also add for a good reading experience I recommend listening to an eerie music playlist (if music w/ no lyrics helps you focus better or you just like music in the background while reading anyways) I personally listened to Red Clouds on Apple Music and wow, it got me so into the scenes in the cave.

Highly, hiiiiiighly recommend. Everything about this was satisfying.

This is extremely dark.

It's not usually my type of read. But it was engaging and it was good. Even when it felt like a slog, if anything, it helped me connect to Gyre.

I read half of at night alone in my living room and jumped anytime I could hear anything from my apartment (a noise in the hallway or through the wall).

Pros: intense, interesting characters

Cons:

Gyre Price lied on her application and took the caver job expecting to earn enough money to leave the planet and find the mother who abandoned her when she was a child. She didn't know she would only have a single handler on the surface, one who can't be trusted. Nor did she expect that spending so long in the darkness and isolation would make her see things... hear things...

I bought this book on the recommendation of some authors I follow and so never read the back cover to find out what the book was about. I assumed - from the cover and random comments - that it was about zombies on an alien planet. It's not.

Once I realized what the book actually was, the story of what happens to a person when they are isolated and afraid, I settled in for a different kind of horror. Gyre's paranoia ramps up when she realizes she can't trust the only human link she has, kicking off an intense love-hate relationship with the only person who can save her life if things go bad. And things go bad.

In addition to the natural cave environment and the dangers it poses (climbing, falling, equipment failure, swimming, etc) there's also a creature on the planet that can swim through rock. No one understands what calls the tunnelers, but calling one is usually a death sentence.

This is a very intense read. At times Gyre isn't sure what's real and what isn't and waffles between rational decision making and pure paranoid outbursts. The ending is especially tense and I really wasn't sure what would happen to her.

If you like survival stories, this is great.

The tension and the emotions! There are so many times that Gyre could have died, but even as she is working to survive, she and Em are both dealing with grief and obsession. That moving back and forth between emotion and tension was the strength of the book. We also get a pretty good sense of place being underground in the cave. It feels weighty and a bit claustrophobic. If you want to spend time underground trying to survive obsession as well as all the problems in an underground cavern, pick this up!

I'd like to congratulate everyone who participated in selling this book, because they did a fantastic job. The cover is really good, and the marketing copy makes it sound really interesting. But it's not.

This is a 400+ pages novel that should have been a 100- pages novella. The first half is just boring, but the second half graduates to tedious and annoying. The plot is repetitive, and the characters are so flat they might be crepes (plain, with no toppings). And they are also annoying. Their relationship makes no sense, and this is a typical example where we should care for them, simply because they are the characters in the book.

The “romance” is laughable at best, and it might be LGBT by definition, but it's like calling a cheeseburger vegetable because of the onion slice in it.

The first time you think “where is this going?” is the point where you should stop reading, because this is going nowhere. Seriously, there's no light at the end of the tunnel. If you want to finish it just to see how it ends, do not bother. There's nothing at the end. It just stops.

I rarely give a book worse than 3 stars because I always appreciate the effort (and I try to choose books I'll like), but in this case, I had to. If you want more specifics, read the other 1 star reviews, pretty much everything they mention is valid.

SPOILER: caving suit that has the facilities to amputate limbs within the suit? GTFO.

dnf @ 62%
the concept of this is so interesting and it had so much potential but it just fell so flat for me! I really have no desire to finish it. there was absolutely no world-building in this and I was so confused. I didn't feel any chemistry between Em and Gyre and found most if there back and forth to be annoying.

I wanted to love this one but really it was too long and one note for me.

It was very long, and the situation was pretty much the same for like 75% of the book and the character alternated between the same 3 states of mind over and over and over again. Now, I can imagine there are people for whom that kind of horror is particularly effective, but I am not one of them so for me it was just progressively getting more and more tedious. It didn't particularly help that I never really grew particularly invested in Gyre since she never felt like a fully formed character to me.

Neutral 2.5 rounded up.