A good book is one that can catch you early with something that the writer tells you in the story, be it a scare, a mystery that makes you curious, and many times, just like the JB Williams did, with homour and sarcasm with this part:
“He hopped from one job to another; from retail, to grocery, to fast food, to retail, to grocery, to fast food, and so on”
Hahahhaahhah.
This is great, because we as readers get a sense of what we are about to get, what type of humour to expect and it invites us in right away. Two points for Griffindor!
Now, on the second page, we get a pretty good view of what are we dealing with. A plant-infested planet. Yes. You’ve heard that right. A plant-infested planet.
I know, unusual, but that’s the good thing about it, specially when you know it’s horror because there are so many possibilities to this, and none of them are not funny, or terrifying.
Just from the first descriptions, you have pollen storms that ravage cities and plants have to be dealt with salt-bombs. Like, what in the name of fuck? Salt-bombs and fire. This is nice.
SOOOOOOOOOO!!!! What is the book about? All I can tell you, for starters, is that for some reason, Ethan, our MC, wants to get out of the plant-infested planet, and luck has it that he enlists himself in a sapce-gig, and lo and behold, he is taken immediately by a crew of “sailors” that needs a medic. To make things even more interesting, he is just a veterinarian with very little experience.
After the introductions and the pleasant atmosphere of poker games with candy prizes and flirting along with gay jokes, shit starts to hit the fan as this mission gives a U-turn at warp speed.
Think about it this way: You are getting paid to go to space, retrieve a guy from a station and ship, and they are paying you lots not to ask questions from someone that doesn’t give you a name. This is all fine and well, but when you get there, well, things aren’t what they seem, let us just say that things “aren’t” at all.
This is the great part of horror around this book, it jumps at you with no warning and when you think that there is a solution to something, or that something is really cool or finished, it isn’t, and they keep getting worse and worse.
One thing that I appreciate about the characters is that some of them, have real common sense, and others think that there is cowardice.
I mean, you are in the mission, and you see that people are not responding, there is evidence of something going bad, and on a scale that your little crew cannot possibly imagine or handle, and when you say: “You know, we should not engage on this bullshit and we should call highger ups to see this and handle this before we all get fucked”, people look at him as if he was the crazy one and push for going in there, alone, to take care of a ship that is, at least 10 times bigger than theirs, and something was able to wreck it.
But hey, you cannot have horror without someone making really stupid decisions now can you?
This is awesome, if you love zombie and alien creatures stuff, you should read this.
My interesting question is: Why does everybody in horror movies when they have a creature against them and a gun always shoot or aim at the torso and not at the head and then end up dying for their stupidity?
Remmember all that zombie stuff? Yeah, add a layer of spores from the Last of Us and prepare yourself for DOOM-style scenes with resident evil lore. This book is gruesome and scary, and when you think that there is a place you can hide from them, you will be surprised to find that they are everywhere. EVERYWHERE.
OH and the plot twist of this is outraging. At least the first. I can’t tell you what it is, but you will be mad about it.
After you’ve read 30 pages of straight running and fighting spore infected zombies, you think that that’s all to it,right? But nope! There are OTHER types of creatures, and one worse than the previous, and then there’s Carmen… Oh, boi. I don’t know who had the WONDERFUL idea to give a snake-human a fucking FORCE FIELD on a zombie apocalypse in the middle of space. WHO thinks that? Well, someone did and it is the worst thing that you can encounter in this crazy ass world.
One thing that I love about this book is how thin the plot-armor here is for the MC.
Ok, he is… frail, sure, but he has great surivival instincts and yes, he is TRASHED, beaten, almost killed like 10 times, bitten, and spends most of the book in the edge of death. There is a point where I was like, “ok, this guy is going to die and this book is almost finishing because there is no way he is going to survive on this” only to realize I was in the middle of the book.
The middle! After most people are dead or missing, there is almost no hope, Carmen happens, a lunatic with a flamethrower and religious beliefs, PTSD and guilt hellbent in killing everything on that ship no matter how infected it is, and a captain that is scared out of her wits because she thought duty was bigger than common sense in the middle of space. And no, nobody contacted for rescue after all of this bullshit happened.
Apparently there are people watching this as if this was an experiment or a game and they may or may not be manipulating this whole thing, but if so, why? And for what?
Ok. This review will be a bit shorter than the others because the book grips you with the amount of action, beasts, insanity and close calls for 250 pages straight, no joke about that.
But what we can tell is this: There is a lot of factors here, and this looks like a resident-evil pacman with plants that want to kill you and the zombies are unkillable because they… well… they… have a survival mechanism that makes them stronger no matter how much you shoot them down or cut them down (which just makes things worse).
The only way to kill them for sure is with fire, but the only person that can do that is hell bent in killing every last survivor, so... good luck with that.
Betrayal and plot twists will fill the pages of this book as everyone is out there for himself and people have interests that are even above their own well-being. The only way to survive this is keep plowing through, and fucking avoid Carmen.
There isn’t just one main villain or monster, there are 7 villains and only 4 of them are monsters, so yeah… It’s a hellfest without reason but maniac entertainment.
Overall, this is a great and intense book with several dozen “oh shit”,“oh fuck”, “oh fuck this”,“oh fucking hell, not again”, “he’s so dead” moments, unrelenting action and gore for 280 pages with an ending that will leave you begging the author for a third book.
If you like horror, space, and heart-pumping action with plot twists thrown at you like the author wants to traumatize you, then this is the book for you. Aweseome, awesome, awesome read. Grab your copy here now.
Pros:
- Excellent fighting scenes
- Excellent horror settings, chatracters, and abilities from the creatures that keep evolving and making themselves even more unkillable. Loved that.
- Several plot twists
- Hateful and demented characters
- High intensity plot that once it starts to get intense, just doesn’t stop untill the end
- Just fun to read all the way
Cons:
- As of this edition, there are parts of the dialogue that are in portguese that don’t have an explicit translation to english on the book, that will take away some interest in the beginning of the book, but after that is smooth sailling
Scribble's Worth 
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