The Luminous Dead

The Luminous Dead is a horror story about two women having to both confront and help each other under terrible circumstances. The novel excels at building tension and maintaining a suffocating atmosphere, immersing the reader in the protagonist’s paranoia while establishing a very troubled relationship between its two main characters.

The protagonist, a young caver called Gyre Price, is tasked to explore a dangerous cave system deep underground in an alien planet, but things eventually go awry, and her only means of escape is through her handler, the inscrutable Em, who is far from a forthcoming individual.

The novel’s first sentence is already an ominous warning that points out how Gyre’s inexperience will be a crucial factor during the expedition: “She’d never gone this deep,” the narration begins. The Luminous Dead is tense right from the start, displaying a protagonist that is completely out of her depth, and suggesting that she may not be fully prepared to tackle the obstacles ahead of her.  In the first chapter, the claustrophobia is already present as we have Gyre struggling to make her body pass through a tight crevice, feeling trapped and alone, realizing she is stuck not only inside a cave, but also in a special suit: “The crevice widened abruptly about half a meter farther in, and Gyre stumbled out, reflexively moving to dust herself off. But carbon polymer just scraped over carbon polymer, a frustrating reminder that for the next several weeks – or even months – she wouldn’t be able to feel her own skin.”

Gyre handler also rarely talks to her through the coms, and she’s starting to feel there’s something wrong about the job: although the special suit she’s wearing is very expensive, suggesting the operation is well-funded, there’s actually no team helping her, but just another lone woman, called Em, who’s “also the purse, the director, the dictator.”

Most of the tension in The Luminous Dead is built around the characters’ conflicted relationship. Gyre must trust Em because her life depends on it – a caver must always rely on their surface hander, it’s how the job is done – but Em is everything but trustworthy: she frequently lies to Gyre, or use the truth to manipulate the young woman. In an early scene, Em even locks the protagonist’s suit in place, preventing her to move, just to make a point.

To observe the sumps, lakes, and bottomless holes of the cave system Gyre usually activates a “reconstructed” image in her visor that helps her visualize things that normal sight wouldn’t be able to. In another early scene, Em manipulates that image to hide an element in the environment from Gyre. For the next hundred pages, the protagonist becomes paranoid, neurotically removing the reconstructed image – which leaves her more exposed and vulnerable – just to see if Em is not hiding things from her again.

Paranoid soon becomes a key-word in the novel. Gyre’s thoughts flood the narrative and they soon become filled with “What ifs” and “Maybes”, with the protagonist picturing all the ways she could die at any giving moment, and, as the story goes on and she delves deeper into the cave, even second-guessing her own thoughts and what she has just seen. She knows her sanity is in question, and that she might be hallucinating, but she can’t just pretend that the movement she caught at the corner of her eye simply didn’t happen. Especially after she catches it again. And again. To make matters worse, there’s Em: Gyre could have asked her handler to confirm the reality of what she’s seeing at any given time, but what if Em intends to gaslight her? After all, Em tried to alter her reconstructed view before.

Early on, the suspense is built around the several discoveries Gyre keeps making about her situation – revelations about the cave’s history, about Em’s true goal, and the fate of her past employees – which all keep raising the stakes, making Gyre’s mission seem more dangerous while increasing the distrust between both women. The adjective “cursed”, for instance, starts to be thrown around by the characters when referring to their mission and to the cave system, which feels more and more labyrinthine as Gyre goes back and forth, up and down and seems to always end up in the same places. The reader starts to get the idea that the job would be insanely dangerous even it took place in a similar place on Earth. But Gyre is on another planet and so the cave holds very strange and peculiar dangers.

Take the creature called “Tunneler”, for example. It is frequently mentioned by the characters as a horrible menace that is always lurking in the caves – Gyre is wearing a special suit precisely to protect her from it since it’s attracted to heat and sound. The havoc it causes and the deaths that always follow its sudden surge are frequently and thoroughly detailed, but the creature itself is not: this builds up the suspense, making the reader understand that the creature is fearsome and deadly and yet be unable to picture it in their mind in fine detail, letting their imagination run through.

But more dangerous than the Tunneler is her distrust of Em. Gyre got the job out of desperation: when she faces her first set of difficulties in the cave, she brings herself to think about the paycheck she’ll receive later – if she’s alive. However, the whole operation starts to become more and more personal as deeper as she ventures in the cave.

What makes Gyre’s relationship with Em interesting is its fluctuation. At one moment, Em is Gyre’s mortal enemy and there’s nothing the protagonist wouldn’t do the bring hell upon her handler’s shoulder, ruining her company and her life, but at the other, she’s feeling comforted just by the sound of Em’s voice. At one moment, Gyre is despising the cold practicality of Em’s reasoning, calling it monstrous, but at the other, she’s glad that Em is like that, as it manages to give Gyre a clear goal when things get too chaotic and the protagonist can’t rely on her mind and instincts anymore. One could describe their relationship as a very toxic one – full of touching vows of trust, horrid betrayals, and heartfelt apologies – and they wouldn’t be wrong.

Both characters start to open up to each other as the narrative unfolds. They start to understand that they’re much alike, with similar traumas, goals, and drives. Em is even Gyre’s type. Their relationship, then, becomes more complex as they still try to manipulate and attack each another, but also offer sometimes small, sometimes big, acts of kindness.

And to glue everything together there is the cave – a truly haunted place that preys on the characters’ past, mocking their few achievements, and often bringing only ruin to their lives. Its name, when it’s revealed at the end, gives everything a very ironic touch: the cave’s main trait is that it doesn’t let the characters forget, confusing and playing with their minds and senses just to make sure the past is literally staring right back at their faces. Because, more than anything, both Gyre and Em are shackled by the past, unable to move on with their lives, as Gyre rightly observes at one point: “She hadn’t planned, because her goal hadn’t been in the future. It had always been behind her, pulling her back, pulling her down.”

The title, The Luminous Dead, then, serves much more as a metaphor about the past made present again than an ill portent about what Gyre’s going to find down in the caves – those expecting a furious climax with glowing zombies will be left disappointed. But it’s precisely the climax the moment in which the book falters a little: Gyre and Em’s very troubled relationship doesn’t get the tight resolution it deserves, leaving them in the same “I hate you/love you” state, lacking a final confrontation.

Nonetheless, The Luminous Dead is a powerful horror story that excels at tracing a mind’s descent into paranoia and madness while it’s locked inside a truly nightmarish setting.

May 11, 2020.