The first title released as part of Solaris Satellites – Rebellion Publishing’s new direct-to-reader range of novellas – Premee Mohamed’s These Lifeless Things is a strange, unsettling, ambiguous tale of the costs of survival and the difficulty of piecing history back together. One of a handful of survivors from when They invaded, Eva ekes out a rough living in the city, avoiding the terrifying sentinels and all the other new dangers, and keeping a journal of her days. Decades later, young Emerson finds Eva’s journal on a research trip to the city, recognising it as a rare opportunity to gain an insight into what actually happened in the years following the invasion.
The two timelines have strikingly different voices – Eva’s journal is understandably written in intimate, reflective and informal first person past tense, while Emerson’s narration is in a broader first person present. Between the two characters they offer glimpses of the world (it’s implied, though not outright stated, that the story takes place somewhere in Ukraine, in an unspecified future) both during and after the Invasion, and the strange realities of life at both points in time. The end of the world for Eva and her fellow survivors is terrifying, deeply traumatic and utterly heartbreaking, as she details what they’ve lost, and who and what they try to hold on to. Anthropologist Emerson faces her own challenges, desperate as she is to understand what happened during the Invasion from a human perspective. Undermined and questioned by one of her peers in particular, she constantly worries over her value among a group of more technical scientists.
A sort of quiet, post-apocalyptic cosmic horror story, this isn’t a book which tries to explain everything or provide concrete answers. It’s full of interesting, sinister details that are often only hinted at as the characters take them for granted, and while some elements are revealed as the story progresses, just as many remain tantalisingly – frustratingly – out of reach. The Invaders, known only as Them, are godlike and inscrutable, but are long gone by Emerson’s day, and likewise most of the creepiest indications of their presence – the moving statues, the trees that scratch and grab, the horrifying sentinels. To Eva they are simply facts of life, dangers to be avoided or endured, yet to Emerson they’re as strange and unknowable as they are to us the readers. It’s a style of world building that won’t be to everyone’s taste, but which adds to the evocative mystery that really suits this sort of creeping, unsettling horror story.
It’s hard to know quite what to make of a story like this, with all the questions that it leaves unanswered and the sense it gives of a wider, more expansive world just waiting to be explored further. Readers who like stories to be neatly wrapped up by their conclusions may well find it frustrating, but there’s no question that it’s compelling from start to finish, beautifully written and quietly powerful. As a vision of the cold, chilling unknown it’s extremely effective and often deeply emotional, examining questions of survival and the awful prioritisation that requires, love, loss, the preservation of history and even the competitive realities of competitive science, all under the lurking shadow of the faceless, nameless, abstract yet deeply disturbing Them. It’s certainly a story that will last long in the memory, unsettling but thought-provoking.
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