Novella Review: The Scourge Between Stars by Ness Brown

I received a review copy from the publisher. This does not affect the contents of my review and all opinions are my own.

The Scourge Between Stars by Ness Brown

Mogsy’s Rating: 2.5 of 5 stars

Genre: Science Fiction, Horror

Series: Stand Alone

Publisher: Nightfire (April 4, 2023)

Length: 176 pages

Author Information: Website | Twitter

If you enjoy sci-fi sprinkled with a light bit of creepiness, The Scourge Between Stars by Ness Brown might be the book for you, but as someone who was initially drawn to its horror-in-space premise, I confess I was left feeling disappointed. The novella format was also perhaps not the most ideal for the author’s vision of the story, which recycled far too many genre tropes making the plot feel unoriginal and predictable.

Set aboard the doomed generation ship Calypso, the story follows acting captain Jacklyn Albright and her crew as their fleet makes its way back to Earth following a failed attempt at establishing a colony. Facing dwindling resources, poor morale, and a ship that’s barely holding itself together, things look rather hopeless, but Jacklyn isn’t about to let the last remnants of humanity die on her watch. She’s already angry at her father, the current captain, for having retreated to his quarters and abandoning his responsibilities. Now it’s up to her to guide the Calypso on its treacherous way home, a journey that will take them through a part of space riddled with pockets of storm-like phenomena that wreak havoc on the ship’s hull.

Then one day, while overseeing some repairs, Jacklyn notices some strange sounds coming from within the belly of the Calypso. From there, more alarming reports and foreboding messages start to stack up, culminating in a dead body, brutally eviscerated. Something hungry is on Jack’s ship and set loose on the crew, for whom there is no escape.

With a setup like that, it’s hard to believe this book didn’t strike the right chord, but not only did I struggle to engage with the story, there were parts that I found tedious and frustrating. Many of the issues stemmed from the length of the novella—namely, I felt it was too short to truly explore any of its elements in depth. First of all, the reader is thrown headfirst into a situation about which they know very little; all we know is that the colony at a planet called Proxima b failed and that the fleet has been limping along home for quite some time yet nobody in the story appears to be reacting convincingly to what has transpired. Human beings can exhibit a wide range of reactions to a desperate situation, but the attitude on the Calypso feels oddly indifferent considering their captain has not been seen or heard from in more than a week.

As other reviews have mentioned, A Scourge Between the Stars also borrows heavily from Alien, right down to the discovery of alien eggs and a dubious android. Don’t get me wrong, there are timeless tropes I will always love and monsters running amok in dark, creepy ramshackle spaceships is always going to be one of them. But this book was missing a certain, for lack of a better word, flair. Good ideas were underutilized or handled without much innovation. There was a clinical, almost detached approach to the scenes of violence and gore. The atmosphere was stagnant and pretty much non-existent. In sum, you can have all the best horror ingredients but still miss the mark.

I do think I would have enjoyed this more if the characters, plot, and world-building had been more fleshed out, possibly into a full-length novel. However, the current page length is hardly enough to develop any of these sufficiently, and more than likely hobbled the book’s overall potential. I suppose if you have time to spare for a quick, throwaway story which doesn’t use up too much brain bandwidth, The Scourge Between the Stars is perfectly readable and entertaining enough, but I doubt it will make a lasting impression.