TL;DR: Wonderful with one big icky
Source: NetGalley – Thank you to the publisher!!
Plot: Veronica’s revenge! This is one you definitely need to read the first book first.
Characters: This one focuses in on Doctor Cull, Charlie, and a new female character. I didn’t expect to enjoy our two men from book one but I really did.
Setting: There is less Moon time here and more Earth/Io time. The Io setting more than made up for this.
Horror: All the creepy crawlers you could want and we really get more of the space horror which is deeply exciting.
Summary:
There are two halves of Charlie Duchamp. One is a brain in a jar, stranded on Jupiter’s jungle moon, Io, who just wants to go home. The other is hanging on the wall of Barrowfield Home on Earth’s own moon, host to the eggs of the Moon Spider and filled with a murderous rage.
On Io, deep in the flooded remains of a crashed cathedral ship, lives a giant centipede called The Bishop, who has taken control of the drowned astronauts inside. Both Charlies converge here, stalking each other in the haunted ruins, while a new Moon Spider prepares to hatch.
Thoughts:
This was going to be a 5 star read. In fact, if we could have removed one scene from this book it would still be a 5 star, new favorite read. We have creepy crawlers, giant space spiders, a moon full of webs, space horror, and then Io and the goodies there! So much of what this had is things I love. Unfortunately one scene did leave a bad taste in my mouth.
My one and only complaint about this is the on page rape scene. I don’t care who is getting violated, and in this case it is a man, it’s still a rape. So while I can maybe stretch my imagination to see why the argument could be had for this, I still think if we completely lifted the scene from the book it wouldn’t have been missed. It seemed to come from no where, and added very little to nothing to the characters of those involved. Could there be some repercussions in book three? Maybe. Would there have been a better way to reach whatever those were? Yes, probably.
These sort of things happen in real life, and I’m not for completely washing our literature free of everything I find uncomfortable or distasteful, but I want it to have meaning and substance. This felt like it was there to shock. The rest of this novella is fantastic. It’s filled with horror, intrigue, gore, everything you could want. Yet we still had to push to something that’s not useful to the narrative. I’m very disappointed to say the least. I will continue! I can’t tell you how much I loved the rest of this! But wow, do I wish that one/two page scene never existed.
Sarah Evermotion's Book Thoughts 
Leave a comment