Ness Brown’s The Scourge Between Stars, a tense, claustrophobic sci-fi/horror blend in the vein of Alien and Event Horizon, will be published by Nightfire in April 2023!

This novella has everything I want in a sci-fi horror: lots of action, excellent character arcs, and a solid resolution.”— Buzzfeed I seriously hope this is like a prequel novella or something to a larger series. I would love more with these characters and within this SF-world. It had been cheaper to take to the heavens than try to undo the environmental sins of twenty-first century capitalism.” Finally, take the weird sparseness of the 1998 Alien ripoff movie Legion, the movie only I remember because Trevor Goddard was in it (though I never finished it because he was the alien’s first kill 🙃 and if TG is out, so am I bb), and set your alien horror story in an equally unestablished, textureless environment. He’d explained it to her before—the decades that the fleet had spent on Proxima b, exposed even at the terminator to the host star’s radiation tantrums, had corroded a number of systems and machines.

Trust me, if you think you know where this story is going, you’re wrong. Combines the sudden, heart-rending fear of immediate danger with the freezing spun-out dread of being lost in infinite space. Just wonderful.”— David Wellington , author of The Last Astronaut This novella has everything I want in a sci-fi horror: lots of action, excellent character arcs, and a solid resolution.” — Buzzfeed While the ending is a little hmmm and reminds me a bit of An Unkindness of Ghosts (vaguely), the beginning and middle parts are straight up out of a horror movie and I LOVED IT. The Scourge Between Stars starts off feeling a bit like a haunted house story - there's inexplicable noises coming from within the walls, things malfunction seemingly without cause, panels explode, etc. It's an effective opening that primes us for Brown's ultimate reveal, even if that reveal isn't particularly surprising, shifting gears from haunted house to violent creature feature. It's very much an Alien clone (in fact, Jonathan Barkan opines that Alien is the perfect haunted house movie in his piece for Bloody Disgusting. If you're going to copy somebody's template, you may as well copy from the best, right?), but Brown puts in just enough of their own touches to make the story feel more like pastiche than pure derivative. Sadly, Brown's few attempts to make the story their own aren't quite enough to salvage the whole enterprise. The Scourge Between Stars is a SF-Horror novella from Ness Brown. I had the opportunity to listen to the audiobook, which is performed by my favorite narrator, Bahni Turpin.

Ness Brown’s The Scourge Between Stars is a tense, claustrophobic sci-fi/horror blend set aboard a doomed generation ship harboring something terrible within its walls. Speaking as someone who is already deep in Alien/Salvation Day territory, this book was everything I hoped it would be. I appreciated the no-nonsense pacing that didn't drag out for no reason what would be an immediate, crisis situation. The writing style was mostly matter-of-fact, but not without lyrical shine at times. It managed to be gritty and dark without crossing the line into exploiting the grief and depression felt by its characters. The nitty-gritty: The Scourge Between Stars had plenty of thrilling action, but the story itself was too big for the short format.She looked as stupid yelling outside the bulkhead now as she had the first twenty times. “We voted to decelerate again today. Repairs are ahead of schedule, but we can barely take another hit.” She recited the items from the briefing at the wall. “I vetoed the delivery of extra resources to Orion and Cygnus Wards. There will be more demonstrations, but our ration levels are already critical.” After a pause, she shared what had happened in Data. “Otto may have figured out a way to avoid the engagements.” Generation ships have been a popular science fiction trope for a long time, but would you really want to live on one? To spend your entire life in the confines of a single vessel, never knowing anyone outside your crew? Never knowing if your descendants will make it to your ultimate destination, let alone establish a successful and thriving colony? is… the Atalanta. Something—ssssss—ollow… xima. It’s… the ship. Wa—ssssss—epeat, warning… ssssss—ssssss—ssssss… on’t… epeat, don’t… ssssss. This is Captain Isidora of the Atalanta. I—ssssss—anyone listening. Please. Don’t open the door.” The doctor asked for you.” The android stood up in a well-oiled stretch of repurposed metal. “He’s made progress.”

A perfect blend of science fiction and horror…Short, fast, engaging, wildly entertaining, and unexpectedly gory, it almost demands to be devoured in one sitting.”— Locus The signal-to-noise ratio was abysmally low. This was nothing like the scrubbed-up audio she had heard in Data. Punches in the static vaguely reminded her of words, but she couldn’t make out anything coherent. Just as she leaned closer to the garbled sound, the transmission cut out. If you enjoy sci-fi sprinkled with a light bit of creepiness, The Scourge Between Stars by Ness Brown might be the book for you, but as someone who was initially drawn to its horror-in-space premise, I confess I was left feeling disappointed. The novella format was also perhaps not the most ideal for the author’s vision of the story, which recycled far too many genre tropes making the plot feel unoriginal and predictable.The Scourge Between Starshad so much potential, but unfortunately it ended up being way too ambitious for its length. Still, Ness Brown’s writing is really good, and despite my reservations about this book, I’d love to see what they come up with next. Pixieltd on Reading The Wheel of Time: Taim Tells Lies and Rand Shares His Plan in Winter’s Heart (Part 3) 6 hours ago We’re thrilled to share an excerpt from The Scourge Between Stars by Ness Brown, a tense sci-fi/horror blend set aboard a doomed generation ship—publishing April 4, 2023 with Tor Nightfire. I trust you understand the magnitude of this moment,” Otto said, closing Watson’s mouth and cutting off the transmission. Now... I am not a stem girlie, but surprisingly, Ness Brown did a fantastic job utilizing engineer and scientific language without overwhelming me. I wouldn't have initially expected this story to be a debut because it has a strong overarching plot with great spaceship world building. You can tell that Ness is a scientist purely from her writing style because she's very direct. The writing doesn't have any lyrical prose because she's describing the scenes as concisely as possible and then jumping into what's next for the characters. This type of writing style, in my opinion, is less common because people like to create lush descriptions of the scenes, so Ness was refreshing in that she doesn't mess around with her writing. Moreover, this writing style led the story to be fast paced with constant action around nearly every corner and sometimes... even within the walls.