A Mind Imprisoned Is The Greatest Of Hells.
1853. South China Sea. While on patrol between the Opium Wars, the crew of the steam frigate HMS Charger pursues a fleet of pirates that have been terrorizing the waters surrounding Hong Kong.
But now the hunters have become the hunted. Something else has come to the South China Sea, something ancient and powerful and malevolent.
Now, the crew of the Charger must face their worst nightmares in order to survive the terrible creature they come to know as the Darkstar.
Adam
A Song for the Void is a tense cosmic horror set in the backdrop of the South China Sea in the 1850s. Dr Edward Pearce is a recovering opium addict beaten down by the losses in his life. His best friend and captain of the HMS Charger recruits him for a mission hunting down pirates, but a strange comet in the sky and the increasingly erratic behaviour of the crew threatens both their lives and their sanity.
A Song for the Void does an impressive job of matching the characters, plot and setting to its central themes. As a doctor, Pearce is well aware of how we can become disconnected from our flesh, as he must tell himself when he has to perform an amputation on a member of the crew. And his opium addiction has shown him how substances can alter the mind itself. So how valid really can one’s sense of self be? And how much meaning can your life hold when you cannot even be sure you exist? This is what the Darkstar, the mysterious being invading the minds of the sailors, drives them to question. “It was never even me” says one man as he impales his own hand on a sword. Dr Pearce’s position as the ship’s physician, his own experiences with grief, knowing how meaning can be ripped away from you, and his philosophical nature causes him to be the perfect foil for this being as he tries to figure out what is going on before it becomes too late for any of them.
Also making trouble for Dr Pearce is Mr West, his ideological opposite, a man with nothing to lose but money and power, an American smuggler and slaver, determined to get under Pearce’s skin. His presence on the ship adds more paranoia as the man attempts to ingratiate himself with the rest of the crew, tempting them over into his individualist point of view.
The setting itself brings a lot of character, the ship itself a claustrophobic environment rife with dangers when you don’t know who to trust and the plot developments are exciting and compelling even before adding in the supernatural elements. I think when the action moves off the ship it falters a little, with the characters ironically feeling safer in parts of the last third than they did the rest of the book. But the time period is well represented, which does unfortunately mean a fair bit of casual racism against the Chinese coming from the sailors on a British ship, even if thankfully our protagonist does not have the same prejudices.
The tension builds beautifully, especially in the early and middle sections of the book. The horror elements emerge slowly, and they do get truly horrific. Those who cannot handle body horror would best avoid this book, although it’s not the only kind of horror represented, it is the most prevalent.
My one main complaint would be that the book tends to over elaborate its themes and explains more about the phenomena than I would normally expect from a cosmic horror. Part of the strength of cosmic horror is that the threat is not something you can ever truly grasp and there is a neatness to the way things are wrapped up that betrays that.
That being said, I do think the ending was a fitting one, driving home the themes and giving us a good amount of growth for the characters that survive. A Song for the Void succeeds incredibly well at delivering a historical cosmic horror with a strong narrative voice and deftly built tension. If you ever find yourself questioning reality, you’d better hope there’s not a strange comet in the sky.
8.5 / 10
Devin
A Song for the Void is a slow-building, creeping horror of a book that sure as hell delivers on all it promises. I won’t repeat the details of its set up as Adam has done a great job of that above already, so I’ll just add my thoughts here.
To begin, horror isn’t my thing and has never been my thing, so I have zero idea about the usual genre conventions of cosmic horror except that it’s something something Cthulhu. No Cthulhu here, but plenty of body horror that, if you let yourself think too deeply about, will make you extremely uncomfortable. Interestingly, I didn’t feel the book encouraged me to think too deeply about it or consider the experience of it on my own flesh—there was a sense of detachment to the description like our main character was merely observing it with dispassionate interest. Perhaps this is because he’s a doctor, perhaps it’s an authorial shying away to make the book more broadly appealing to people like me who don’t horror. Regardless, Doctor Pearce, as our narrator, acted as a protective barrier against the physicality of the horror, stealing much of its possible punch. On the other hand, the doctor’s more analytical thought process added to the disorientation of the various hallucinations as he fought what he saw and felt with what he knew.
As Adam has already said, one of the greatest strengths of the book was the claustrophobic and isolating feeling of the ship itself, even as it’s also their only safe bastion. There was a vivid sense that even without the cosmic horror aspect, the sailors would make their own horror from the day-to-day grind of such a difficult and lonely life. These complex portraits of life at sea were a highlight, sharpened by the addition of the cosmic horror. Unfortunately, very little of each of these character’s journeys post cosmic horror is achieved, with the rest of the crew becoming monolith after a certain point.
For me, the point where the action really kicks off is the point where the book starts to decline. For someone who doesn’t read horror, it yet started to feel very paint by numbers hero’s journey from there. Our protagonist chooses to risk his life to save the book’s only embodiment of innocence, has to make the final confrontation alone, must overcome temptation, and then put up with the bad guy monologuing like his life depended on it. By this point the horror aspects were becoming a bit repetitive and even the doctor didn’t seem bothered by them, adding to the sense of distance.
Unlike Adam, I liked the way everything was neatly tied up and explained at the end because that’s what I’m used to in books, but again, that might be because I’ve never read cosmic horror.
7.5 / 10
The Fantasy Inn’s final score for A Song for the Void is:
8/10
