The Luminous Dead: A Novel

This novel was deeply frustrating. I was expecting a riveting, suspenseful read given the book's description & the host of high-praise from the sci-fi authors whose opinions I trust, including a starred review from Publishers Weekly. I was indeed hooked by initial hundred pages & the promise of suspense & adventure, hallucinations that leave one questioning everything & an unrelenting claustrophobia that increases tension at each page. To be honest I may also have been biased by the film 'Descent'. The novel could have had all this but author blocks every turn the story takes beyond the cave & the dithering of the protag. There is worldbuilding full of potential but it is meagre; there is action but you have to wait until the very end & it is over, in a very unconvincing manner (the protag defeats a very dangerous & powerful thing by shouting at it! And owns the turns of events as her victory instead of an utterly implausible escape); there are other more eventful stories that happen in the same cave, but the protag repeatedly decides not to know anything about them! The author doesn't allow the reader to escape the cave. The protag's hallucinations as so very tedious, that even she doesn't find them perilous. And they are so very, very frequent. Some reviewers have called these ghosts. But their haunting is mostly meaningless & left abandoned in the story. Her journey is made confusing by the lack of purpose & the meandering of the route she is made to take. The only other character in the novel, & the book descriptions suggest a master manipulator, unhinged & very dangerous, turns out to be nothing of the sort. By the middle of the novel she is reduced to little more than tech support. A major part of the novel is the protag being angry, suspicious, affectionate, pitying, desiring & deciding future journey with her. It reads like a YA romance & more of a gesture towards bending genre expectations than any real substantial relationship. What was the point of the cave exploration & this story? There isn't one, or at least one that justifies the alarmingly high body count that happens before the story begins.The author succeeds in keeping me thinking about the book after I have read it, but not for the reasons lauded by the reviewers. This book could have been so much better but author wants us stuck in that cave, wandering without reason or towards a purpose but reeling with emotion.

Actual rating 4.75 stars.A phenomenal read, I was glued to the page from start to finish. I was a literal zombie trying to stay awake and read til the end because I could not put ‘The Luminous Dead’ down. This was an outstanding novel that I want to recommend to all my friends. It’s been a long time since I have been both compelled and repelled at the same time when reading.There is a creepy suffocating ambience that penetrates the story to have you feeling the little hairs on the back of your neck raise. In the last half especially I was squirming, pulling my feet from the floor and taking twenty second breaks to run around the room and shake the hee-bee-jee-bees from my limbs.The only minute thing that held me back from giving this a perfect score was how the plot felt too long, and kept back-tracking on itself. It did add an air of desperation that enhanced to the reading experience, but left ‘The Luminous Dead’ feeling a snatch too long. Juxtaposing this was an incredible talent to keep the pacing from start to finish. It was carnage to me, each chapter left me wanting more. I am an instant fan of Caitlin Starling and eager to see what else she has written. Anyone who can keep me this engaged and creeped out at the same time is a 5 star author in my books.The concept is out of this world too – exploring underground caves on alien planets (essentially in a space suit) with all manner of dangers to face, with a psychological thriller aspect – where do I sign. It was an easy add-to-cart for me. I most definitely was not disappointed.Our protagonist, Gyre is a battler, she’s working hard to provide better opportunities for her life. Coming from nothing, she is not afraid to take risks for that life… and that’s how she ends up deep underground in treacherous territory, finding dead bodies and hiding from alien tunnellers that could either crush you to death as they make the tunnels collapse, or eat you for a morning snack. Gyre’s grit is amazing, yet soft and compassionate. We see her constantly measuring risk and reward with each new challenge.Em is what I like to think of as a definition of ‘book smart.’ She has no qualms in chemically controlling Gyre to achieve her goals, is not chatty over the coms, treating Gyre much like a tool. It was in interesting journey to see Gyre’s influence (through need) in deconstructing Em’s clinical nature and become more than just a stoic, sparse voice over the com.Lack of control, human connection, suffocation, creepy alien creature stalking you in the dark, and dealing with loss.Enthusiastically recommend ‘The Luminous Dead’ to everyone.

OK so definitely don't read this if you're claustrophobic, but if you're not, THE LUMINOUS DEAD is dark, suffocating, difficult, anxiety-provoking in the best possible ways. Gyre is a caver who has talked her way into a big job that'll let her get off-planet and find her mother. Em is her topside liaison, monitoring her path as she goes deeper and deeper into some seriously terrifying caves.Also, it's real gay.Five stars from me!

This was an interesting story, but it could have been 100 pages shorter. The tedious climbing descriptions got old quickly

I've never really been one to read slow creepy books, but I've been in a bit of a reading slump and I wanted to try something new to jolt me out of it. This worked wonders!Gyre is a caver, a handsomely paid career because of the likelihood she'll die on the job. Em is her topside tech support, assisting in any way she can, even manipulating Gyre's suit if she needs to. As Gyre descends into a cave with the highest death toll she's never heard of, she finds the bodies of her predesecors. The deeper she goes, the more she starts to worry about her tech support. Just what is Em doing, sending this many people to their deaths? As Gyre struggles to survive the cave and its beasts, she must rely on the only form of contact she has with the outside world: Em. But can she trust someone who has knowingly sent tens of people to their deaths?As soon as I started this, I was hooked. It starts when Gyre has just entered the cave and I just had to know what happened. It was the right amount of creepy and dramatic that I couldn't not read it. Gyre was a fascinating main character, stubborn and relentless. Em swung between professionally distant and emotionally raw. It was a really interesting reading them play off each other.I did think at one point i was sick of her being in the cave, but it only made me sympathise with Gyre more and made it seem all the more real. I wanted her to get out as badly as she did, so whilst it was frustrating it did propel me to read on.Really fascinating book! If you're looking for something completely different, try this.

Chosen as part of the @PHTBackBookClub on Twitter for September, I had high hopes for this book.The blurb and more importantly the great quotes from authors including a Hugo Award winning one, made my hype levels rise. They between them used words such as “terrifying” and phrases such as “read with the lights on” and “dark ride worth every step”.This book is anything but terrifying. I can see what the author wanted to do but it just didn’t come across for me in the feel of the story. I didn’t ever feel any real danger until the last 50 pages of the book and even then it lasted about 20 pages. It’s a shame because this *could* have been a really terrifying story but it just falls flat.The protagonist is not bad and the shall we say Antagonist, Em, is also not bad but she slowly loses the antagonist status and picks up a boring handler role.There are also some pieces written that made me screw up my eyebrows and shake my head. One of them that stood out was a line “Something about the set of her shoulders looked...guilty.”Shame because this could have been so much more!! 2.5 stars.