The Luminous Dead

To chop up a Tumblr post I made about the book:

The Luminous Dead was a super effective horror novel for me. I had to go sit next to my partner and be patted on the arm while I was getting through the last 10%, lmao.

The limited third-person POV works so, so well in a story where one character's understanding of her environment starts deteriorating.

Our protagonist Gyre is exploring a deep cave system at the behest of a mysterious corporate concern all by herself. She's wired into her cave suit, recycling and recirculating waste material in a closed loop, and subsisting off of food delivered straight to her gut because a monster in the caves may be attracted to any trace of humans.

From the second Gyre enters the caves, she's robbed of connecting to her environment with three of her senses: smell, taste, and touch. She especially laments the last as exploration of the cave wears on her.

All that's left to her is sight and sound, and it's not enough as she starts questioning why she's been hired to go down here and whether she's really alone.

While I can think of a logical reading of the novel—Gyre is hallucinating badly because of paranoia and stress from early on, and it only getting worse as things go to shit—the timbre of Gyre's panic and her constantly rounding back on herself on whether or not she can believe her perceptions color that whole experience. I cannot in good faith just say to somebody, “Oh, she imagined all those things.” Somewhere deep down, I question myself, too. And that's why “The Luminous Dead” will be on my mind for a long time.

TL;DR

I think I was going into the book thinking it would be something else. This is a girl who has a very advanced suit that can do a lot of things climbing inside a cave talking to another person who gives her information and suggestions. Doesn't really feel like a science fiction book but it wasn't a bad read. If you like climbing then you will appreciate it more.

If what you want is the atmosphere of being trapped in darkness like the cave part of this book but with way more science fiction I would highly recommend The Last Astronaut. I thought this book would be similar but it wasn't.

My Scoring System

I have five things I look for in a book, if the book checks all five it's a 5/5 stars book, if it checks none it's a 1/5 stars and everything else is a combination:

X - Main Story: I like the idea but not much the execution, as I said I thought this was going to be a different book. Not a bad story just didn't have much to do with science fiction to be honest.

X - Side Stories (if it applies): Eeh, the side stuff with both our characters is pretty uninteresting, thankfully it's not the major part of the book.

✓ - Characters: There are only two and thankfully I liked both of them, their banter was the best part of the book.

✓ - Setting/Ambiance: The idea of being trapped inside a cave is a nice idea, also not knowing if there is someone or something else down there is scary.

✓ - Ending: Regular ending, nothing too surprising happened but it wasn't terrible.

Extensive Review

The strong point and my favorite part was the interaction between our main protagonist (Gyre) and her handler (Emogene) I really liked that and thankfully it's the majority of the book. I enjoyed reading every time they talked.

The worst part for me is the climbing. I never did this sport but to me it was very boring just reading pages and pages on how she put her leg here, the arm there. Put a bolt in the rock here a rope there... I really disliked that. Even just traversing down from a slope, since this is a science fiction book I was expecting her suit to have some nano technology that let's her just adhere to the stone, or some advance suspensions on her legs to witstand high falls, or maybe some kind of device that leaves a pad that you can safely fall on. No, instead we get to read about how she went into her backpack and took out the rope and some bolts to hold it. Used the drill to place the bolt, run the rope inside, check the stability to see if it's secure, use the rope to slowly descend onto the rock. Leave it there and move on to the next obstacle. I'm sorry but in my opinion this is very boring.

The story and the idea of being trapped in the darkness of a cave was okay. Too bad that her suit has the ability to kind of simulate very clearly how the cave looks without needing light or anything so she's not in the darkness unless she turns that off, both our protagonist and her handler have different reasons for going into the cave and don't trust eachother. The ending was serviceable, nothing unexpected happened or some crazy twist, but it wasn't terrible.

The Luminous Dead by Caitlin Starling is a sci-fi psychological horror novel. Gyer is a spelunker, going down in a cave in a high tech suit hoping to earn enough to get a ticket off-world. The book has lots of twists and surprises. It has a few unsettling sections. Unfortunately I don't have many other good things to say about it. I felt like this book was too long and too repetitive, and therefore kind of boring. The characters kind of just did the same things over and over, with minor differences. Things picked up a bit toward the end, but I found one character (and there were basically only two) pretty unlikable and therefore struggled with how the book ended. I picked this up thinking it was going to be sci-fi horror, and it is, but it's really more psychological in my opinion. Sadly I wouldn't really recommend this one, unless you're super into caves or something. ⭐️⭐️✨

Yeah...if like me, you were expecting for this to be something more akin to Dead Space, Sunshine, and Annihilation, best out this lacklustre scifi book back on the shelf. I lost interest around chapter 10, but touched it out in hopes that there would be some epic twist ending, but no, it just kept trudging through one-note monotony. I forget the name of the short comic about an astronaut trying to make it back to his ship in an advanced AI spacesuit, but the suit keeps eliminating non-essential parts of his body in order for him to survive and keep moving. But that short comic alone does more with terror, suspense, and space tech than this overlong book.

Full review here:  https://wp.me/p21txV-I6

TW/CW for novel: emotional abuse, claustrophobia

Okay: wow. IDK if I was in the precisely right frame of mind to read this, given the background radiation emanating from the SFF community on Twitter when I chose to pick it up, but I still think it's an incredible read. Complicated characters caught up in a very complicated relationship that I read as very emotionally abusive, but somehow the way it's written is just– It's like a car crash: you know it's terrible, but you just can't look away. It's an awesome read that made me feel a lot of things, but it's definitely one that's going to make some readers very uncomfortable. Don't pick this up if you think it'll trigger you, but if you still want to give it a shot, please make sure that you have support within immediate reach and/or contact.

I can't wait to read more of Caitlin Starling's work. This was excellent, it was, however waaaaaayyyy tooo long. Seriously, at a 100 less pages this book would have been perfect. I read it because it keeps showing up on the “best horror of the year” lists and I think I just define horror differently than other readers. While this may induce claustrophobia, it's not [b:The Descent 239065 The Descent Jeff Long https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1388280312l/239065.SY75.jpg 231578]. What I appreciated was the descriptions of the caving techniques, the design of the suit and the personal relationship between two very unique women. Horror? Nah. Scifi? Better description. I get feelings sometimes and I predict we are going to see great things from Starling. I'm going to hunt down some of her earlier work now.