#75 The Luminous Dead

The Luminous Dead by Caitlin Starling 

The Luminous Dead is an adult debut atmospheric/sci-fi/horror 2019 release. This story follows Gyre Price who lies on a job application and fakes her experience level to bag a caving job that pays a lot of money. Her motivation for this is that she is searching for her missing mother and needs to make a lot of money to travel to other garden planets to find her mum. The cave job is offering an extortionate pay out as its a very difficult expedition that many others have died attempting before.

Gyre undergoes surgery to have a suit fitted that will protect her from the elements of the cave and ultimately protect her from the 'tunnellers' which are monster type creatures that dwell in the caves and are attracted by human voices, they are highly dangerous as they can cause the cave to disintegrate and can also create new tunnels making it difficult to follow a map. Gyre must avoid them at all cost. The suit she is fitted into has built into speakers and microphones to the helmet so that Gyre can stay in contact with her handler, Em. It is Ems job to externally control the suit and ensure Gyre completes the excavation successfully.

The book takes a twist when Em doesnt seem to want to help Gyre and is cold towards her. She leaves Gyre for long periods of time without speaking to her and slowly begins to manipulate and blackmail her to conform to Ems agenda.

The book is highly atmospheric and has a really creepy vibe to it, i listened to this on audio book and i think that really added to the overall tone. The tension really builds throughout and the writing is fantastic. I enjoyed this book a lot, its highly underrated in my opinion. I enjoyed the high tech elements to this story, it was really interesting to read about the advancements and what the suit was capable of.

Gyre as a character was really well fleshed out, shes strong and knows what she wants but shes also extremely vulnerable and the cave and isolation really takes its toll on her. Em is also very interesting, her character is very mysterious and in the beginning you dont know why she is so frosty towards Gyre and why she isnt doing her best to help her through this mission but all begins to unravel as the story goes on. In the beginning few chapters i thought it was such a risk to only have two characters throughout the entire book but it really played to the books strengths and helped me as a reader get so invested in both characters mind sets.

I ended up giving this one 3.5 stars as it is a great October/fall read but i felt like some sections were overly long and certain bits felt really repetitive. I think this would have been easier to read physically as there is a map with the excavation site at the beginning and it was quite difficult to visualise when listening to the book. I was shocked that this was a debut as it was really well done and highly original, one of the better 2019 releases ive read this year and i really want to pick up a physical copy now.