Regardless of the cautionary measures employed by Gyre, the threat always looms… Gyre’s suit and protocols are designed to prevent attracting the lethal creature’s attention, but so much is unknown about its habits. What is real and what is imagined when the cave’s population seems to climb above one?Īnother horror angle comes by way of the monster known as a Tunneler: a monstrously large wormlike creature that bores through the crust of Cassandra-V like it’s butter. And those effects are compounded by the fact that Em can selectively control what it is Gyre senses through her suit’s HUD. The isolation Gyre experiences also runs amok on her senses. And that’s not to mention the dozens of bodies scattered throughout this cave whose failures at the same mission are a testament to the threat of the cave. Gyre is all by herself on an exceedingly dangerous mission and the mysterious vanishing of some strategically stashed resources puts her very life on a very tight clock. Survival horror is definitely the lion’s share of the heartbeat of the tone. The Luminous Dead is a mix of a creature-feature, psychological horror, and survival horror.

The Luminous Dead reads like a mix between The Descent and Buried: High tension, low character count, and plenty of thrills.

On top of the mind’s eye’s visuals, Starling engineers an atmosphere that I think would do well onscreen. In a setting that is mostly rock and darkness, the things which arrest Gyre’s attention are the necessary focal points and never tangential or unessential. You get a strong sense of what Gyre is seeing and details vary depending on how much attention GYRE is paying, not how much Starling is. Instead, what Starling tells you is enough. I don’t need to know the intricate designs of the lacy frill at the cuff of the king’s shirt, you know?! In fact, I think some authors spend too many letters on detail and in the process pull you away from the narrative. So cinematic in this case hits the nail on the head.Īnd it’s not just because she is detailed in her descriptions. You never see that kind of quality off the line!īut as I read, I discovered that Starling writes The Luminous Dead in such a way that every image of every scene comes to the mind’s eye vividly. You know the move: It is the equivalent of the picture of the Bic Mac in an ad. And I’ll be honest here: The press release used the word “cinematic,” and I wrote it off as pure hyperbole for the sake of hype in marketing. One of the qualities of this book that struck me over and over again as I read through The Luminous Dead was its cinematic quality.

The luminous dead