Book Review: Last Flight of the Necros Night

An interesting premise which sadly didn’t come out in the execution.

I picked up Last Flight of the Necros Night by Eldritch Black & E.G. Seven for free on Amazon, and the premise sounded good, also I really dug the vibe of the cover art. I fancied a little taste of cosmic/sci-fi horror, especially since I recently played the new remake of Dead Space, so I’m on a bit of a kick at the moment. I’m sorry to say this one didn’t do it for me.

Blurb

The Chronicle Corporation has created a star ship capable of deep space travel dubbed The Necros Night. Persephone Chronos has conscripted a crew for this new ship to embark on a once and [sic] a lifetime mission. To explore a new galaxy and search for habitable worlds. Having lived through interplanetary civil wars the crew has hope for the mission. Once the crew journeys through the stars they discover mystery after mystery. They stumble onto terrors that put their mission at risk and make them question their own sanity. Will they make it out alive or will the cosmos become their eternal graves?

Review

I won’t spend time going over the book’s issues, but there were unfortunately a not-inconsiderable amount that hampered my enjoyment and took away from the tense vibe the book was going for.

The premise of the book sounded very interesting to me: an expedition crew going where no-one has gone before and encountering horrors in the depths of space. Classic stuff. The plot itself is good. The crew of the Necros Night become stranded after encountering a derelict doppelganger of their ship in intergalactic space, and in the process of trying to find out what’s going on and get their version of the ship moving again, they unleash an abstract nightmarish malevolent entity which picks them off one by one. It conjures Event Horizon mixed with Alien and Dead Space. And just past the middle of the book, when the story slows down a little, there’s some good atmospheric and evocative stuff here, it’s just a shame it’s so short-lived. I wish the way that the crew’s hallucinations are described had been applied to the rest of the setting.

There was some back and forth between the financier’s daughter - who, I must say, is by far the most interesting character due to her circumstances - and the super soldier. By the end, those two turned out to be the most well-written characters. There’s a flashback sequence with the daughter, which marks her as the main character very late in the book. I felt that more time overall should have been spent in her POV, and I think the flashback should have come a lot earlier. It would have given the book a lot more focus and provided a better through-line. The monster I don’t have any complaints about; it’s an abstract humanoid entity which is described in vague terms and moreso by its impressions on the crew. This is perfect for cosmic horror, and it’s also only the avatar for the giant unknowable thing outside.

I think the main takeaways are that the book should have been a lot longer. More time should have been spent developing the characters as individuals, more time describing the setting, more time given to feeling the impact of the traumatic events and let them settle. The skeleton of a great story is here, and some great ideas, it just needed more time.