The Chrysalis Body is a sci-fi horror piece by N.M Silveira which is either her debut novel or her longest novella to date depending on where you want to put the line. 47,000 words of equal parts creepy plant monsters and self-recrimination with a nice soupçon of anti-capitalism and gender fuckery. A nice page-turner that doesn’t overstay its welcome, and a setting I’d love to see more from.
Candor Greaves is a space salvager, earning a living scouring the dangerous solar corridor for salable material. After the accidental death of their crew’s navigator, the open position is filled by Laurie Estrel: a bright-eyed and bushy-tailed greenhorn straight out of trade college.
Laurie’s arrival threatens to jeopardize Candor’s plans to escape the salvager life, but Laurie has dangerous secrets of her own. Her first task as navigator is to steer the crew to a strange, hulking wreck invisible to company scanners, where an inexplicable terror awaits. There, the crew must try to set aside their secrets and their old regrets in a desperate struggle for survival.
While I’ve definitely never had a problem with horror, I’ve stuck so steadfastly in my SFF lane that it’s only been fairly recently while judging a few spec fic book contests, that I’ve expanded far enough into horror as a subgenre to have all that much to say about it. I still very much prefer sci-fi horror, or fantasy horror to straight contemporary or historical horror fiction, and The Chrysalis Body has all the sci-fi goodies I could want.
Being restricted to a few brief scenes outside Candor’s ship or the station where most of the plot takes place, it’s hard to really get a good sense of the world around them, but what is there is great. There’s a strong ‘The Burn from Star Trek Discovery, if the thing inside the JJ Abrams mystery box wasn’t incredibly ridiculous and completely ruined the whole concept’ vibe that I appreciate. A corporate future where instead of being all shiny and chrome with a rusted and rotting underbelly, the whole thing is just falling apart and you get the sense that the corporations are already at the ‘barely holding on at the end of the rifle barrel’ point.
All of that is really just a backdrop to the events of the novel, a much more claustrophobic creature feature in the vein of an Alien or Predator. This is where the shorter length really shines. To have told this story as a 100k novel, you’d have needed a much larger crew to fill the time, or a much slower pace of disaster moments, both of which would have detracted from the overall experience. There’s just enough time for some exploration, some building of dread, and then the increasing pace of ‘oh shit oh shit’ that any good horror tale needs.
Combine that with a fascinating climax revealing some extremely significant world details and you’ve created a perfect entryway into a whole setting that could easily become its own little extended universe of stories.
I’d love to see more of Candor, both because non-binary rep, and because despite the fact that they’re really only ‘space old’ (28, but considered an experienced veteran given the general life expectancy of salvagers being extremely short) there’s a bit of a surfeit of ‘older’ protagonists in sci-fi that aren’t just 40 year old men. It might also be interesting to see them engage with the non-salvager world where suddenly they’re just a young adult who had some very weird life experiences.
But there’s also a lot of ‘there’ there in this setting even from only these 160 pages that raises a lot of interesting questions I would like interesting answers to. I look forward to seeing whether any of those answers materialize.
Great story, cool setting, unapologetically queer, and just the right level of creepy and suspenseful for people who are maybe only starting to cross over into horror from straight sci-fi, but with enough tension and horror to satisfy horror readers who are starting to cross into the sci-fi portion.
Dan received his copy of this book as a submission from the author. As per the Strange Currencies submission policy, neither a review, nor a positive review are promised or implied.
