Halley Zwick is on the run.

Exposing an interplanetary conspiracy should have brought justice. Instead, it’s brought Halley a target on her back. With nowhere left to turn, she boards a relic of the past: Elysian Fields, a drifting crypt in deep space.

Once hailed as humanity’s answer to death itself, Elysian Fields was trillionaire Zale Winfield’s promise to Earth’s elite — cryo-sleep until medicine caught up with mortality. But that future never came, and the barge has floated dark and silent for over a century.

Or so Halley thought.

Shadows fall across corridors. Scratching claws echo in the vents. Something is crawling, slithering, waking. As Halley descends into the heart of the ship, paranoia blurs into terror. The Elysian dead may not be sleeping—and what woke them is hungry.

‘Cold Eternity’ was an entertaining Gothic Horror in Space novel that was strong on foreboding, made judicious use of gore and monstrosity to increase the fear and ick factors, ratcheted up the uncertainty with secrets and surprises and a slow reveal of the things in the protagonist’s past that made her particularly susceptible to the horrors on the ship. 

There was a rich mix of big ideas produced by a cross-fertilisation between Science Fiction and Horror with themes about the distortion of truth by the powerful, the damage caused by dysfunctional family relationships, the essentially narcissistic nature of a desire for immortality and the courage needed to take personal accountability for tackling an impossible situation. 

I liked that the body horror, which is stark, graphic and frequent, was used for more than shock value. It was used partly as an external sign of the psychological condition of the characters, many of whom were suffering degrees of mental fragmentation. 

The decaying spaceship Elysium Fields, now more an unvisitied museum than a functioning ship, with its floors filled with caskets of the unrevivable cryogenically frozen dead, was a great Gothic Horror setting. It was a science fiction version of Castle Dracula that Hailey, our constantly sleep-deprived heroine, wandered through alone, with a growing sense of dread, never seeing her boss Karl, the only other crew member, except via video screens, and unsure if the things she sees lurking in the shadows are real or the product of her escalating paranoia. 

I liked that Hailey was deeply flawed, even before she became so sleep-deprived. She was already on the run, already questioning her own worth and already had a connection to Elysium Fields that may or may not have been the product of her imagination. Hailey was not a surrogate Ellen Ripley, ready to do whatever it takes to defeat her enemy; she was lost, guilty, uncertain and afraid. All of which made her courage and her determination not to run away more impressive.

After a slow buildup of fear and foreboding, the final fifth of the book delivered intense and exciting action. The ending was excellent and unexpected. 

The first-person point of view was hard to sustain in a novel of this length. There were some problems with pacing and the book probably could have been shorter, but it was a solid SF Horror novel.

I recommend the audiobook version of ‘Cold Eternity’. Amara Jasper’s performance kept me engaged even when the pace flagged a little. Click on the YouTube link below to hear a sample.

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