Ava must fight an entity locked in on taking out the crew of the Eden, a moon-sized cemetery in space, as it brings back the souls of the dead buried aboard. One such soul is Ava’s lost love, Roland.
The spirits of the interred on the Eden haunt those aboard, including a visiting musician is tasked with writing a new song for the dead. Her Requiem calls a cosmic entity that illuminates their darkest fears and secrets. One by one, they’re driven mad. Ava fights her grief and must rise up before they’re lost and the entity reaches Earth.
I’m willing to admit, I’d never heard of John Palisano prior to reading this. This novel has made me want to rectify that, so alluring is his prose and so Gothic is his sense of SF. You can certainly tell that director Andrei Tarkovsky, given his eye for adapting Stanislaw Lem, the Arkady brothers, and Vladimir Bogomolov, would have wanted to adapt this if it were written back in the 60s-70s.
Eden is a cemetery orbiting the Earth, where a skeleton crew (presently led by Captain Ava) maintain it and musician Tessa has begun to compose the ultimate melody to honour the dead. As is always the way with these things however, something else is aboard Eden and is setting the dead free. So ensues bouts of insanity, an aura of contemplative creepiness, and internal and external turmoils as salient as each other.
It feels like a version of EVENT HORIZON (a film I adore) where the Lovecraftian elements have been made Gothic and all the other haunted house elements have been kept in. Additionally, it takes one of two cues from ALIEN, dropping in an android called Midori, which is never a bad thing! The overall effect however is still one of “harder” sci-fi. While it might deter a more casual reader, more often than not it reaps dividends and seems to rise and fall with the melody both of the story and of Palisano’s prose.
Palisano is very careful to build the tension before anything else, yet he doesn’t waste his characters. Rather than using “bug eyed monsters”, it feels more ethereal and emotionally-focused. The end third doesn’t perhaps deliver on all of its promises, since by then a number of the characters are in the midst of madness or sensory turmoils more than thrusting the plot forwards, but it is continually claustrophobic and it deftly allows many twists to sneak up on you; it’s only a step down because the first two-thirds are so mesmeric and cunningly-composed.
While it is a shorter read since you might expect it amp up the tension for much longer, it isn’t short on suspense or emotion. A number of passages are quite melodic in fact and, for all it might be the cover which seals the deal with how appealing this book is, there is more than enough bite and surrealness to the horror and claustrophobia here to push it up to the top of your TBR pile.
Bleeeeeat!
Happy Goat Horror 
Leave a comment