(courtesy Pan Macmillan Australia)
Accomplished horror preys, and yes that word is wholly intentional, as much on our fear of what will happen, of what lurks in the dark or unseen realms just out of perception as it does on what actually comes to pass.
It’s the dread, the sickening anticipation, the crushing expectation of evil about to strike that strikes fear into our hearts and Ness Brown used it to brilliantly unsettling effect in the first half of The Scourge Between the Stars, an inspired cross-genre hopper that not only serves up some Alien-esque horror and female empowerment but also the kind of dystopian sci-fi that reinforces our mortality with every piece of dark world-building and mounting loss.
In Brown’s galaxy, which she world-builds with ferociously clever speed and incisive humanity – at 163 pages, The Scourge Between the Stars depends on everything moving quickly which it does without sacrificing rich characterisation or a sense of people who matter encountering events and things that might break them unless they really step up.
And step up the acting captain of starship Calypso, Jacklyn Alrbright does, as the 6000 ex-colonists fleeing back to earth after a failed attempt to colonise Proxima Centauri b, the closest exoplanet to our own shiny blue haven, come under attack from a mysteriously deadly something that seems to be inhabiting the walls of the ship.
The techies must have missed this malfunction–or maybe it wasn’t an accident. Jacklyn remembered how, during the times she had heard the anomaly, the hypodroid had overheated, how the observation deck detectors had stopped working, how the terminal down in the hold had glitched.
Any sense that something evil this way comes is dismissed at first as fairytales and myth.
After all, the future of humanity as a species is under grave threat with its remnants having fled Earth a couple of hundred years earlier to escape war and climate change catastrophe, to find a better life only to discover their hoped-for idyll was an inimical to their interests as the home they’d just fled.
Setting back out for Earth with scant supplies and ships that, if pushed, may break down well ahead of seeing Sol and our home system, survival is on the knife edge and so it’s understandable that Jack, whose list on mounting concerns, dismisses any suggestion of a monster prowling the vast expense of the ark as some sort of fanciful distraction.
That is until a body appears and then another, all killed in gruesomely monstrous fashion, and Jack, wrung out to the extremes, realises that far from being a sideshow to the Darwinian sh*tstorm enveloping them, the threat lurking somewhere within the wards of the ship may pose the greatest danger of all.
There, fellow readers, lies the inspired creepiness of The Scourge Between the Stars, which goes from something is out there and it’s not good to full-on, heart-stopping, pulse-pounding gore in no time flat, taking us, not so much merrily as breathlessly and with fingers holding tight to the page with anxiety and nervousness, on a journey of sheer survivability that is fantastically unsettling and deeply, endlessly absorbing.
(courtesy official author site)
What really strikes in amongst all the bloody and deck-thudding running for their lives action is how much humanity brown has managed to effortlessly and affectingly fold into the story.
By any measure, The Scourge Between the Stars has a lot going on, much of it happening in terrifying real time where instant decisions can literally mean life and death for everyone involved, and yet even in the midst of this frenetically adrenalised narrative, the author injects a sizeable dose of really accessible humanity, the kind that adds real emotional intimacy to a story that might just a soulless blockbuster-y fight for life otherwise.
To be fair, it would be a damn good blockbuster-y fight for life without the humanity since Brown has a real knack for writing action that feels immersively immediate and that it matters, really matters, what happens all the way through it, but her ability to keep people, and principally Jack at the centre of proceedings and to have them really mean something all the way through elevates The Scourge Between the Stars to something utterly and compellingly brilliant.
She starts big, discussing how humanity as a whole is on the brink, then goes smaller still drilling down to each ship in the fleet, all of them now silent bar the Calypso, silenced in the depths of interstellar space by something that’s picking them off one-by-one, before honing in on Jack, who with an increasingly human-like android Watson, lover and Bridge-mate Jolie and other crew members who are like family, has a huge amount to fight for on a personal level.
This body was very old.
One of the team members shouldered their weapon. ‘We all heard a scream, right?’
‘Didn’t come from this lady,’ another member answered, bending for a closer look at the missing viscera.
Yes, The Scourge Between the Stars is a superbly written, utterly thrilling and intensely beguiling piece of sci-fi horror writing that plays well on our fear of the unknown, but it’s also a skillfully-wrought exploration of what it means to be human, of how even against insanely terrible odds, we will fight and fight and fight … and then fight some more.
At times in this pressure cooker of a story, you could forgive Jack and everyone onboard for just throwing in the towel and giving up, deciding that coming across vengefully bloody extraterrestrial life for the first time is the final straw in an existential battle that’s coming right down to the wire for a whole host of reasons, and that the best course of action is simply to step back and let the cards falls where they may.
But that’s what we do, or have done as a species ever; it’s that innate need to survive and live that fuelled the rush to Proxima Centauri b, and then impelled the rush back to Earth when that proved fruitless, and it’s what powers this magnificently and ferociously alive story that never lets up once but still manages to keep a tender heart of real, vulnerable humanity beating throughout.
It’s honestly one of the best stories you’ll read all year, proving that while life has horror aplenty, in this case in monstrously terrifying form, it also has much to recommend it and that’s worth fighting for, as a person and as a species, and it fills The Scourge Between the Stars with all the wonder, thrills, scares and vibrantly intense humanity and a sense that while the fight may be viciously scarring, the victory, and this novella has one hell of an ending that makes everything before it wonderfully worth it, will feel greater still.