The Luminous Dead

I’m not entirely sure what my thought process was picking up The Luminous Dead; I was looking for a sci-fi story that would give me a bit of Andy Weir’s space survival genre and a bit of horror to keep up some tension and I somehow landed on this, but I remember already being a bit dubious when I pressed the “buy” button on Amazon. Unfortunately, that feeling never left as I started reading and I’m left questioning if the book was really worth my time.

The book follows Gyre, a twenty something year old living a decent enough life with her dad but is motivated to find her mother who left whilst she was still a child. However, to do this, she needs money and resources and the fastest way to get those is caving for a large corporation. Getting hired as a caver however is difficult requiring both an extensive resume and invasive surgery as caving comes with the threat of tunnellers who are attracted to human breathing, thus any caver needs to have their stomach surgically bypassed to allow for the direct insertion of nutritional paste whilst the caver is sealed within a suit sometimes for weeks at a time depending on the expedition’s length. This is all a complex, dangerous and expensive set up to send down one person to potentially identify some minable ore, it becomes absurd when one thinks about the world this story takes place in. Humanity has taken to the stars and has colonised several planets, tunnellers are somehow a threat on several of them despite not being a space faring species, but disregarding the illogical fauna, the main question here is: why not use a drone? They are smaller, do not need food nor sleep, do not attract tunnellers, can fly, and are more agile. Some sections of the caves are under water but if a civilisation mastered faster than light travel, I’m sure it can figure out how to make an amphibian drone. The premise is inherently flawed and many a situation that Gyre finds herself in would be a non-issue if Em had just used a drone, in fact any negative events and the entire plot hinges on a human having been sent down instead of a drone.

In any case Gyre lies about her background, gets her surgery and is hired for this job. She is guided by a handler called Em who is responsible for leading her through the cave network, ensuring her safety against the threat of tunnellers and if necessary injecting her with various drugs whether it be sedatives or anti-inflammatories. I had questioned the communication system they used as with Gyre going several kilometres below ground through water and winding paths, no radio signal should be able to make it through to her. There is apparently something called “Through-the-earth-communication” technology which allows for minimal text communication with miners in our current world and it is fair to assume that this technology was improved upon in the timeline of this book but with how niche with it is and with the premise being flawed due a to a gigantic technological oversight by the author I’m not sure Caitlin Starling actually thought about the communications issue.

It turns out Em knew that Gyre lied but she still went ahead with hiring her because experienced cavers weren’t able to complete Em’s expedition before. It is quickly revealed that Gyre is the 28th of a long line of cavers being sent down by Em to recover her parents’ bodies who died in the cave. The irony of this reveal is that it is entirely based on another technological stupidity: visual reconstruction. Caves are dark and torches don’t give enough peripheral vision so the author invented visual reconstruction, an over complicated sonar system that then reconstructs its data on the caver’s HUD…but infrared night vision is a thing and by any metric is a better, more reliable solution. The only reason reconstruction is necessary is because Em has to attempt hiding the bodies of the previous cavers from Gyre’s reconstruction to create conflict.

The conflict between Gyre and Em takes up a large portion of the book, and you would easily be able to shorten it by about 25% if you were to remove every paragraph having Gyre flip flop between hating Em for being a sociopath sending dozens of people to their death to give her parents who died 20 years ago a proper burial and loving Em for being…a woman? The characterisation of both characters is very awkward, Em is a monster, there is no denying that, she is a selfish, lying, rich, entitled brat but being Gyre’s only contact for the better part of a month, Gyre develops a weird form of Stockholm’s syndrome and falls in love with her. The problem is that the narration wants us to support this relationship yet there is no incentive for it, Em shows little to no remorse and keeps pushing and abusing Gyre for her own benefit but the story still keeps oozing undeserved sapphic love.

Em isn’t the only character with issues however as Gyre is just as bad. Gyre wants to find her mother, so much so that when she manages to coerce Em into giving her more than what was previously agreed upon for this expedition, her first thought is not “yay I got more than expected”, it’s “how can I manipulate Em into giving me even more”. Em being a horrible person does not justify Gyre being a horrible person back to her, that just makes both of them horrible. Gyre is also unbelievably cocky, whilst Em is carrying the load of having led 27 people to their deaths, she at least shows caution and uses that experience to be better for Gyre, something Gyre repeatedly dismisses and repeatedly lead her to almost dying and eventually actually amputating her own arm. It’s important to remember that Gyre lied about her experience, she has no formal caving experience and has no reason to be cocky nor proof of her competence, she is simply taking risks because she is stupid. The ultimate example of this is that when Em reveals to Gyre that her mother left her because she simply wanted to go back to living the high life with other rich people, Gyre’s immediate instinct isn’t just sadness, disappointment or anger, it’s suicide as without the goal of finding her mother she sees virtually no reason to keep on living (let’s remember that her dad is very much alive and that her life was otherwise perfectly liveable)…

That sounds cheap though, it’s easy to call someone stupid and there is something else going on in this cave, 27 deaths is a lot even for the high risk activity of caving in this world. As Gyre goes deeper she starts seeing dead cavers looking at her, Em’s mother following her and maybe her own reasoning is being twisted by some malignant force making her wish to stay in this cave and die in it, and maybe that’s what happened to the other cavers and to Em’s parents. This suggestion is the book’s strongest part, it’s short-lived unfortunately but it does succeed at creating an oppressive, claustrophobic atmosphere, the visual idea of being stuck 20km below ground in pitch blackness with evil spirits dogging you is a powerful one and the perfect set up for the supernatural twist of this horror story.

There’s no supernatural twist though. Gyre is just stressed and is hallucinating and that’s kind of it. There is the ongoing threat of the tunneller which eventually reveals itself; it turns out it’s really just a sand worm from Dune except this one is going through rock and Gyre beats it (a first in the History of this world) because it…falls in a hole. The only real threat from this 400 page long book is despatched within half a page because as soon as it revealed itself, it fell into a hole and died, there’s nothing to add here, it is as bad as it sounds.

So, the supernatural threat wasn’t a thing at all, the real threat of the tunneller has been wasted, the relationship between Gyre and Em is underdeveloped and at odds with their characterisation so what’s left? What happens for the rest of the book? Not an awful lot there either unfortunately, if you can shorten the book by 25% if you remove Gyre constantly questioning her feelings about Em, you can shorten it by 50% if you remove the tediously repetitive descriptions of Gyre walking, climbing and swimming. The narration keeps repeating how tired Gyre, how her muscles are shaking but it never has any consequences. There’s more words being spent on describing the dozens of food breaks Gyre takes and how she pumps the nutritional paste into her stomach than on the entirety of the supernatural fake out plot line. The book is just boring, it is overwhelmingly padded by Gyre caving without anything happening which is ironic and unfortunate because despite this it is incredibly unclear where Gyre is actually going. Descriptions of her path are confusing and all over the place, it’s very difficult to imagine what the cave she is going through actually looks like, there is a map at the start of the book but it feels more like a band-aid fix.

Overall, The Luminous Dead is an unfortunate disappointment. There is a story with that very set up that could have been told convincingly. Rework the lore from scratch, Em is the only one sending people down because there’s interferences that stop drone controls after a while allowing for the introduction of that missing supernatural element and instead of Gyre cutting off her own communication with Em because of a childish tantrum, have the anomalous interference do that. Lean in on the horror of the anomaly causing Gyre to spiral down the insane desire of killing herself to stay in the cave forever and you’ve got a much more enticing story instead of this low grade lesbian romance with no single thread of story being properly resolved.