SPSFC4 Review: The Afterlife Experiment by Sam Weiss

Blurb:

Previously published as Cynosura 99 by Sam Weiss.

“The night the moon bleeds is the night the world will end. There’s death in the moon. And the moon is you.”

Atra Hart has spent the last seven years locked away in Vanishing Plains Psychiatric Hospital. In that time, her shadow has transformed into its own entity and is growing stronger by the day, threatening to devour her mind. She calls that shadow Dread, and only her missing father knows what it is.

When a fire breaks out at the asylum, Atra makes her way to freedom just in time to see an electric-purple rift sunder the sky. Like Dread, the rift is only visible to her.

Atra’s already loose grip on reality unravels when she learns the rift is a gateway to the world of the dead. And the Queen, an ancient evil lurking on its fringes, wants Dread for her own.

Even worse, Atra can’t tell if any of this is really happening. She might have escaped one asylum, but the closer she gets to unearthing answers about Dread, why her father knows it’s there, and its role in the Queen’s plans, the more she risks getting trapped inside her own mind forever.

Maybe some truths are meant to stay buried.

Review:

I read this book as part of the SFFI Insiders Team judging for SPSFC4.

Have you ever read a book that you enjoyed overall but also when you finished you just had to look around asking yourself where you went just now? I’m genuinely not entirely sure what I’ve just experienced other than it felt like a fever dream of dimensions, taking the randomly appearing Cheshire Cat from Alice in Wonderland and some science from Stranger Things. 

Admittedly I also felt like I was in those Old Spice commercials where the guy told you to look up, look down, he’s on a horse, he’s got diamonds or something. Atra was just in all these different places and planes of existence.

Ok so the book. It focuses on three main people: Atra, Tom and Ophelia. How they connect you don’t really know until further in the story. But Atra is in an asylum with a shadow that may or may not be real and doing things. This is kind of less of a major than the blurb would have you believe, and I think part of that is because Atra doesn’t know what it is herself other than she hates it and make it stop. So in a way it’s interesting that we’re finding out everything happening to the MC at the same time she is. Except in one note where I was like ‘This is definitely what’s going to happen.’ and it did. I’m usually wrong about these things so it was an achievement for me. The connection thereafter I didn’t see coming but I think my note on that was ‘Oh…oh dip.’

Tom is more interesting at the start because he’s being stalked by someone who knows what he did, not last summer, but over a decade ago. Then he seems to largely just go around making some bad choices. I loved the scenes with him driving and the shadows following him. That got my heart racing.  Beyond that, he does a lot of things that if this were a film I’d be shouting at the screen not to do. 

We meet the third focal character in the start of part II. To be honest, I didn’t really get her storyline. I’m not sure it needed to be there and I don’t really think it added much. So other than this bit, I’m going to focus on Atra and Tom. 

So many of Atra’s scenes genuinely had me wide eyed and heart racing. Some of the character interactions she has are terrifying and arguably where a lot of the content warnings outlined in the book come into play. I’m pretty ok with gore, or so I thought. Now my amendment to that is I’m pretty ok with gore, unless eyes are involved. Heed the content warnings on this book is my advice. 

The bit that let things down for me, aside from so many things happening in all different directions I felt like I was reading an MC Escher painting, was this bit in the blurb: Atra’s already loose grip on reality unravels when she learns the rift is a gateway to the world of the dead. 

Between that and the shadows chasing Tom initially, I really thought the world/planes/land of the dead would be a bigger thing and it was more mysterious planes of buildings where a cat occasionally roamed between to possibly help? I’m actually not sure. The cat sounds a little suspicious. I am suspicious of this cat. 

A lot of this happens in Part IV of the book, Cold Blood Moon. So I guess I would have to say the bit that let me down was that part of the blurb and this last section of the book. None of that is to say it was bad. I enjoyed the book. The eye gore may put it in the ‘I never want to read this again pile’ cause I might throw up, but I did enjoy the book. I think with just how intense everything else had been set up, how all over the place and sci-fi words things had been, I had different expectations for how things would have settled. 

Honestly, I am still wrapping my head around everything that happened in the pages. I think I’ll be untangling these threads for quite a while. This is certainly a book that sticks with you.

If you like your sci-fi with threads of horror, thriller and suspense, you will almost definitely enjoy this book overall. If you enjoy your sci-fi without things happening to people’s eyes, I am apparently also in this camp with you.