Book Review: The Hematophages
Review by Casey Douglass
The other day, I found
myself wanting to read some space-based horror, something that might
contain blood, ideally in rattling metal corridors and featuring a
strange, twisted threat. I browsed through some of the horror presses
I follow on Twitter and after a few clicks, Stephen Kozeniewski’s
The Hematophages was sitting on my Kindle. The blurb told tale
of a strange fleshworld, ghoulish skin-wrappers and depravity, which
are three things that I didn’t know I was looking for, but on
seeing them, made it an easy purchase.
The story follows Paige
Ambroziak, a student who, in the opening pages, is going through a
job interview. The job in question is a salvage mission to recover an
old seed ship from a bizarre fleshworld, a bounty that various
megacorps are salivating about claiming. Paige has spent most of her
life on Yloft, a deep space outpost where she moved when she was
young. This new job offers the prospect of adventure, fortune and
excitement, and on landing it, her fate is sealed. She doesn’t
believe this is just any seed ship however, but The Manifest
Destiny, a ship that was launched when countries were powers in
the world. The Manifest Destiny’s plight is even the subject
of a movie that everyone seems to have grown up watching.
Paige’s journey to
the fleshworld doesn’t go smoothly. Her new ship, the RV Borgwardt, crosses paths with gruesome pirates called skin-wrappers, a strange
group of mummy-like creatures in which illness caused them to flay
their flesh and live in zero-gravity. Beyond the threat of pirates,
the fleshworld itself holds various dangers, its blood-like
protoplasm the home of the Hematophages of the title: the blood
drinkers. I enjoyed the fleshworld as a location. There is something
quite gruesome about a planet with an ocean of blood, even the
thought itself has a very strange weight to it, like dropping a stone
down a wishing well and hearing something chilling echo back, rather
than a “plop”.
The Hematophages
themselves are a fun adversary, if fun is the right word. There is
something about them that brings a lovely paranoia to the tale, and
what the crew of the RV Borgwardt learn about their true nature
evolves them from a simple adversary to one with a pleasing depth.
Even though the Hematophages are the titular terror, I found the
skin-wrappers just as engrossing. Just to get into the head-space of
someone who is suffering from so much pain that they choose the life
of a mummy, it’s a thought that makes you shudder.
The universe that The
Hematophages plays out in is a bleak, high-tech and greedy one.
The corporations rule all and fight amongst themselves. The
technology allows for travelling vast distances into the “ink”
while also allowing people to inject crank with the press of a
button. The characters that populate the story all have their own
personality, from Paige’s bunkmate Zanib who forever calls Paige
“virgin” (for not having travelled before) to the intimidating
Director Diane who seems to cling to protocol even when the shit
hasn’t only hit the fan, but is fizzing in the electrical system
too. Paige herself is a sometimes likeable, sometimes unlikeable
character. She can be a bit of an arsehole but she is also capable of
thinking of others. I liked her, and I appreciate the skill in
writing a character that contains shades of grey.
I did get a little lost
by the thread of the story on one occasion, a confusing encounter in
the first half of the book left me wondering who was really dead and
who wasn’t. There was a “reveal” involved which made sense, but
it felt layered in a way that I still wasn’t sure about the detail
of what happened, just the general big picture stuff. It’s the only
thing that jumped out at me as something I had issue with, and that
very well could have been on me and my concentration at the time. The
story as a whole was a fun ride, and the horror elements were
particularly eye-watering. If you read the book, you’ll fully
understand my use of that phrase.
The Hematophages
is a book that takes you on a dark journey through the “ink”.
There seems little of beauty in the parts of the universe it touches
upon, and what beauty is there, seems fleeting, needy and
self-obsessed. There is a great mixture of fleshy horror and human
greed, and it all plays out in those thrumming metal corridors that I
always find add a lovely sense of claustrophobia to proceedings. The Hematophages was really fun. Enough said.
Book Title: The
Hematophages
Book Author:
Stephen Kozeniewski
Publisher:
Sinister Grin Press
Released: 1
April 2017
Price: £13.13
paperback / £2.32 Kindle (currently)
ISBN:
9781944044558
