My Books of Horror pick for April is a claustrophobic sci-fi horror novel with a tiny cast. It's not, however by S. A. Barnes, whose 'Cold Eternity' I coincidentally also read this month, but by the debuting Caitling Starling, who received a bunch of award nominations for her work. I read this before the Barnes but reviewed that before this, meaning that it was fresh in mind when I sat down to tackle this review.

In many ways, it's an even more pure version of what Barnes does with her sci-fi horror novels. The claustrophobia is because the book is set in a cave, a deep and dangerous cave on an alien planet by the name of Cassandra-V. The tiny cast is so tiny that it's merely two people, anyone else we meet either being a distant memory visited in flashback floating corpse. This pair are separated by a serious amount of rock, Gyre Price inside a protective power suit on a long and delicate mission within the cave and Em her sole contact on the surface, serving as her handler on the other end of a comms link.

The book includes a map at the very beginning, before the text begins, and I found myself going back to consult it throughout. The first challenge for Starling is that this particular segment of underground rock looks exactly like the last particular segment of underground rock and both of them look exactly the same as the next particular segment of underground rock. There are a few geological features, however, that are recognisable, a long steep drop over here, a tunnel underwater over there, but it was easy for me to lose my way and have to look back at the map to see where Gyre was at that moment.

That led me to wonder a great deal, because there are six camps marked on the map and Gyre reaches the sixth of them well before the halfway mark. She and Em actually discuss the final stretch in detail, how they can finish up the job, as early as pages 168-9. 'The Luminous Dead' is a four-hundred-plus-page novel. Clearly there's a lot more to come after Gyre reaches a point that we've been led to believe is the end, but we have no idea what it is and there really hasn't been any opportunity for Starling to set up Chekhov's Gun. All we've seen thus far is rock.

Well, okay, we've seen more than that but how much of it was real is open to question. This book lives or dies on its mood and our engagement with the two characters. There really isn't much to the story and most of the typical ways to connect us to a location are completely inapplicable so Starling absolutely has to sell us on Gyre and Em and she absolutely has to sell us the mood. If you start into this and you find you're not buying into one or the other, let alone both, then it isn't going to be a book for you. You'll be bored to tears and you'll see it as highly repetitive.

At heart, the story isn't about a cave, it's about connection.

Gyre lied through her teeth to get this lucrative job, though she is, at least, a capable caver, and she did it because she needs to get off planet. She was born on Cassandra-V and she's spent all her life there, but her mother left when she was very young, leaving a vague message to follow without detailing any destination. Gyre wants off Cassandra-V and she wants to find her mum. This job, with its suspiciously large paycheck, will allow her to do that.

Em, who turns out to be the financier of the mission as well as Gyre's handler, has firm reasons to want to see it completed successfully, enough so that we're shocked, as indeed is Gyre, when we learn that this is the thirty-fifth attempt. None of the previous ones succeeded, of course, but the only person who got out thus far is Em herself. That might allow us lend some credence to her ability as a handler but it doesn't give us much hope for the mission as a whole. Gyre is a dead woman walking, or however we can apply that to someone navigating a cave system.

Because very little happens plotwise, the story is built through the development of both these characters. We learn about who they are and what drives them and that builds the back story rather than the other way around. Em is doing what she's doing because of a connection, one I will happily let you find out for yourself. Gyre is doing what she's doing because of a connection too, one she wants to rekindle with her mother. And, of course, while they're antagonistic and mistrusting to start with, Em and Gyre find a connection, too, as the mission progresses.

Yes, some of this is demonstrably repetitive, just as the journey through the cave is inherently repetitive, but I was OK with that. I bought into the characters and how they developed both in isolation and together. I also bought into the mood, because the claustrophobia of having tons of rock over our heads for the entire story is absolutely palpable. It's all serious pressure, both physically of course but also mentally and it does take its toll on Gyre. What's more, it doesn't help her that Em has the ability to take unilateral control of her suit, to the degree of having it administer sedatives or anti-psychotics. There are points where that saves her life but it surely doesn't help Gyre trust Em.

And really that's about it. It's about a cave, a notably deep and dangerous cave. It's about two women, one inside the cave taking serious risks and one safely on the surface who knows what it's like down there. It's about a mission that isn't remotely clear at the beginning and ends up changing by the end. And it's about connection, how an experience like this can forge one and how what led up to it can grow others. That's not a lot to fill four-hundred pages but Starling is a consummate writer, even on a debut novel, and I found those four-hundred pages to be rapid turners indeed. ~~ Hal C F Astell