Title: Paradise-1 (Red Space #1)
Author: David Wellington
Genre/s: science fiction, horror
Content/Trigger Warning/s: blood, gore, violence, cannibalism, emotional and mental manipulation, sexual assault, emotional and physical abuse of a child, depictions of extreme PTSD and depression
Summary (from publisher’s website): Paradise-1. Earth’s first deep space colony. For thousands of people, it was an opportunity for a new life. Until it went dark.
No communication has been received from the colony for months. And it falls to Firewatch inspector Alexandra Petrova and the crew of the Artemis to investigate.
What they find is more horrifying than anything they could have imagined.
Buy Here (publisher’s website): https://www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/david-wellington/paradise-1/9780316496742/
Spoiler-Free Review: So I picked this up because I needed some more horror after finally wrapping up my reread (and read, in the case of The Lure of the Moonflower!) of the Pink Carnation series. I was in the mood for a little more horror after practically devouring Catriona Ward’s Sundial. And since I’m always game for some cosmic horror, Paradise-1 seemed right up my alley.
And in a way, it was! The overall concept was intriguing, and I was pulled into the whole thing by the first handful of chapters. I really wanted to know what was going to happen to the characters as they left the Solar System and headed for Paradise-1, and when the first disaster struck, I was ready to see how things would devolve and how the (surely) horrific mysteries teased at the beginning of the story would be revealed.
But that didn’t turn out to be the case. Fun as the concept is, the potential horror lost a LOT of its power when the story began to go on, and on, and ON. Put simply: this was way, WAY longer than it needed to be. In fact, there are twenty to thirty chapters - whole chunks of narrative - in this novel that could absolutely be taken out and it wouldn’t affect the narrative at all - in fact, it would be a significant improvement. Take it down to something in the vicinity of 300-350 pages, instead of the 600+ it currently has, and it might read much better. Trim out all the fat, as it were.
As for the horror, I can SEE where it would be scary, but instead there’s a lot of parts where it feels like the author’s presenting a kind of set piece to play out in front of the reader, in the hopes that it’ll scare them. Which honestly, just doesn’t work for me: I’m someone who can watch a slasher movie while eating and not be put off my meal. I need something more insidious than blood, gore, and guts to really get to me - and the sad thing is? This novel HAS THE POTENTIAL FOR THAT. It was just stretched out for far longer than it needed to be, and many of the scenes that SHOULD have felt scary felt more like they were there for nothing more than shock value - which honestly becomes really old, pretty fast (especially when the same scenario is presented THREE TIMES, just in slightly different flavors).
The above also affects the characters. Initially they feel likable enough, but it gets kind of hard to keep on liking them when bad things keep happening to them and they keep on walking into them. I’m especially disappointed with the way Zhang was characterized, as there was plenty of potential there to explore the effects of PTSD when one is thrust into a scenario that reopens all those old traumas, but given how long the story dragged and how often he walked into the Same Scenario in Three Different Flavors thing, it’s easy to lose sympathy for him. The only one I think I actually liked was Rapscallion, but I can easily imagine him being an even more interesting character if the aforementioned flaws weren’t there.
You know what really gets me about this though? As long as it already is, as bloated as it already feels, IT ACTUALLY HAS A SEQUEL. Which I’m slightly intrigued by because I want to know what happens next, but if it’s another overlong monstrosity like this one? I might have to pass.
Rating: two AI cores
