GOD'S GONNA CUT YOU DOWN

Human space colonization is disrupted by bizarre invaders and forces from an outside dimension in Gillespie’s SF novel.

This second volume in the author’s Riders of the Stars universe is a grim adventure set in the same dysfunctional star system as the opening installment’s Atom Bomb Baby (2023). Serenity Orbital is the ironically named vast space-station array circling the colonized planet Arcadia in a future in which humans—thanks to technological gifts from aliens—have spread throughout the galaxy. The Kraal, tentacled, incomprehensible horrors apparently from another dimension, have launched a devastating attack; attempts to repel them with nuclear weapons has only made things worse, creating "void storms" that emit mutant creatures. Luckless human victims of the invaders become living-dead “growlers,” mindless and hostile decaying things. Diego Alvarez is an adolescent boy among the survivors subsisting on a now-isolated Serenity Orbital, a remnant of civilization that has degraded into a religious dictatorship. Because Diego suffers growler-like facial scars and possesses paranormal powers, he is much bullied and feared. After Diego’s parents are killed in a Kraal attack, corrupt prophet Carlos exiles the boy to the dreaded lower-deck rings, which are overrun with growlers and other void mutants. Diego survives on his own for a year before he gets some human company—kids he knew from Serenity who have been forced into the terror zones by Carlos as a “rite of passage.” One need not be familiar with Atom Bomb Baby to appreciate this story, which owes much to William Golding’s classic Lord of the Flies (1954) as jealousy, treachery, and toxic machismo subvert the banished youths’ would-be brotherhood. Readers of zombie fiction will dig the ghoulish growlers, who shamble through a George Romero-like consumerist environment of defunct retail spaces and are not undeserving of some sympathy. Not much is learned about the Kraal, but followers of Japanese anime will recognize the trope of enigmatic alien hostiles who pop out of nowhere at the convenience of the plot.

A compelling SF survival saga in which humans turn out to be the prime threat.