The Luminous Dead: A Novel

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The best word to describe this novel is claustrobic. Blending together science fiction with elements of light horror, this story offers an atmospheric, yet gripping, reading experience. Recommended reading for anyone who enjoys cave exploration, speculative/horror elements, survival tales, LGBT+, and pulse-pounding intimate science fiction. I love good caving stories. Love them. This didn’t hit me that way, I’m sorry to say. It didn’t scare me either. I might have rolled my eyes. A lot. That’s all. the catch? nothing is as it seems. as gyre descends further and further beneath the surface, both she and em discover just how far they can push each other -- with devastating consequences. When Starling does write about labor, it is an embodied practice as much as it is a social relationship. The suit Gyre is fitted with offers her employer a chance at better resource extraction from a dying colony; here, novel technology only augments necessary human labor. It does not rescue its workers from the demands of time, efficiency, and authority. Instead, the laboring body can be controlled by the employer’s will—stopped and moved, injected and manipulated from afar. Starling imagines a future of work which is closer to Gavin Mueller’s persuasive argument that technology and its optimization serve as a “political tool to subvert worker power” and undermine an already limited agency within the workplace. In TLD, technological determinism offers no escape from the crises of capital. The mining companies require technology, which in turn leads to Gyre and Em depending on each other to fuel a nightmarish obsession.

The Luminous Dead - Spooky Reads! — Horror Bound The Luminous Dead - Spooky Reads! — Horror Bound

The Luminous Dead” by Caitlin Starling started out interesting as it created an atmosphere around the main protagonist and her “controller” when it comes to cave diving/exploring. At first, I was pretty interested to see where it would go but my goodness, by the time anything remotely interesting happens, it took a ridiculously long period of time to get there. I’m talking at least 3 to 4 hours of reading annoying banter between these two characters. Em is a handler. That means being a completely useless, unprofessional head of ops who is prone to emotional outbursts, yelling, and convenient bouts of absence when things get tough. We learn of it late, but the cave in the novel is called Lethe. As readers of fantasy and legal documents, we know the power of names. Lethe belongs to Greek myth, a river whose waters effect a forgetting of the past; in Christian retellings, it is where Dante washes his earthly sins. For philosophers, the name carries the weight of a related word: alethia, or truth. Lethe is concealment, and truth is an encounter with what is no longer concealed. What ??? All that and then they are ... just ... really ?! They are both completely nutters and need to go build spore castles together and drink tea. Egads.Gyre knows just how far she can push her suit. It's what's keeping her alive. In the sump between Camp Five and Camp Six, instead of rushing out to fall short of the cache, she drops the line. She knows how far she can push her suit and this is too much. I loved her descent into madness...the question of what is or isn't real is always one of my favorite aspects of horror. A thrilling, atmospheric debut with the intensive drive of The Martianand Gravityand the creeping dread of Annihilation,in which a caver on a foreign planet finds herself on a terrifying psychological and emotional journey for survival.

The Luminous Dead - Caitlin Starling - Archive of Our Own The Luminous Dead - Caitlin Starling - Archive of Our Own

Em sees nothing wrong with controlling Gyre’s body with drugs or withholding critical information to “ensure the smooth operation” of her expedition. Em knows all about Gyre’s falsified credentials, and has no qualms using them as a leash—and a lash. And Em has secrets, too . . .Like The Children of Time, it could have played on fundamental fears--in this case, claustrophobia--but somehow, through the writing, I was only riveted. Except for the water scenes. Those were scary. In some ways, it is like The Martian, only with a main character who is far less well-adjusted and funny. I'd say character-building is the clear strength of this book. Gyre is a caver. That means being an inexperienced cave climber/diver who lied on her resume, prone to fits of hysteria and not listening to anybody and also swearing a lot. Ness Brown's The Scourge Between Stars is a tense, claustrophobic sci-fi/horror blend set aboard a doomed generation ship harboring something terrible within its walls.