INTO A HEARKENING SKY

Decades after a cosmic disaster, survivors on Earth struggle against bizarre threats from beneath the soil and the seas in Heasley’s SF novel.

With this volume, the author concludes the Hyperbolia series, begun with Under a Darkening Moon (2022). In a strange cosmic disaster, the moon is struck by some kind of object, creating a calamitous three-day Great Eclipse, followed by an era of “moondark.” Billions die as the Earth is blanketed and chilled by debris, but Newtonian physics does not explain other oddities that spring up: Prehistoric beasts live again. Some people stop aging. Others fall into comalike deep sleeps, though they maintain a consciousness, of sorts, and acquire the ability to observe reality through dreams. Wraithlike entities called “specters” emerge from oceans to kill living beings (apparently in futile attempts to bodily possess them), and sea levels fall 600 feet, revealing a lost city that might be the fabled Atlantis itself. Reverse-engineering the city’s ancient technology yields such wonders as anti-gravity (used to create literal flying carpets), and Earth’s survivors drop their partisan squabbles to come to terms with the strange new paradigm in an uneasy coalition of military personnel and mystics. The novel’s heroes include Jody Conque, an ex-priest with glowing blue eyes and formidable specter-battling powers, whose wife, Haleh, has become a sleeper; erstwhile biologist Mort Sowinski, a sleeper now awakened; Doris Huntsman, a Bosnian refugee-turned–science prodigy of this new-world disorder; and Hudson MacDuff, who falls through a mysterious portal in an Atlantic rift—in what seems like days to him, years pass in a bizarre time-dilation effect. As the ensemble strives to solve the riddle(s) of the moondark, a malevolent, shape-shifting underground entity makes its presence known; Jody Conque identifies it as the devil.

Heasley’s third entry often seems to double down on the trippy series’ questions rather than clarifying them; there is a shoutout to TV’s The X-Files (which may be fair warning) as well as nods to J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis. Casual fans might detect a Lovecraft-ian vibe in the horrorscape of sunken temples, underground cities, and chthonic menaces from beneath the permafrost, but it really feels more like a fever dream the creator of Narnia might have had, perhaps under the influence of too much Turkish delight whilst reading Ray Palmer’s notorious “Shaver Mystery” hollow-Earth hoax fantasies (passed off as fact in 1930s issues of Amazing Stories). The author is a Catholic priest, and the material does indeed evoke the presence of God in the sense of the harsh deity behind the Great Flood and the Tower of Babel, places where human hubris pushed too far and got slapped back. The narrative’s biggest challenge is carving out a workable cosmology from the topsy-turvy notion of an Earth “inverted,” with the cosmos and moon somehow enveloped by terra firma and inaccessible, while subterranean places (and abyssal depths) are suddenly wide open and displaying extraordinary and possibly dangerous secrets. “Down is the new up,” helpfully remarks a character; in the end, even the victorious protagonists are hard-pressed to explain what they did, or how they did it, or why it worked, if it worked.

An ambitious, metaphysical SF story.