Reviews with content warning for Confinement - The Luminous Dead

Reviews tagging 'Confinement'

The Luminous Dead by Caitlin Starling

86 reviews

ronniethereader's review against another edition

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adventurous dark mysterious tense slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Plot
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.0

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millibear's review against another edition

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dark mysterious sad fast-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Plot
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

5.0

To chop up a Tumblr post I made about the book:

The Luminous Dead was a super effective horror novel for me. I had to go sit next to my partner and be patted on the arm while I was getting through the last 10%, lmao.

The limited third-person POV works so, so well in a story where one character’s understanding of her environment starts deteriorating.

Our protagonist Gyre is exploring a deep cave system at the behest of a mysterious corporate concern all by herself. She’s wired into her cave suit, recycling and recirculating waste material in a closed loop, and subsisting off of food delivered straight to her gut because a monster in the caves may be attracted to any trace of humans.

From the second Gyre enters the caves, she’s robbed of connecting to her environment with three of her senses: smell, taste, and touch. She especially laments the last as exploration of the cave wears on her.

All that’s left to her is sight and sound, and it’s not enough as she starts questioning why she's been hired to go down here and whether she's really alone.

While I can think of a logical reading of the novel—Gyre is hallucinating badly because of paranoia and stress from early on, and it only getting worse as things go to shit—the timbre of Gyre’s panic and her constantly rounding back on herself on whether or not she can believe her perceptions color that whole experience. I cannot in good faith just say to somebody, “Oh, she imagined all those things.” Somewhere deep down, I question myself, too. And that’s why “The Luminous Dead” will be on my mind for a long time.

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shiny_'s review against another edition

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adventurous emotional mysterious sad tense slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? No
Loveable characters? No
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

1.25

This really didn't do it for me. It started out with tons of potential, but then seemed content to settle into a very repetitive structure of bickering dialog and sump diving scenes that blurred together into a muddy, poorly described silt out.

It tried to tease out its most interesting questions until answering them in extremely flat and unsatisfactory ways. The romantic elements have potential at first, but

their relationship dynamic never truly evolves beyond a toxic, back and forth blame game and gives no indication this has changed by the end

.

The most horrifying about things this book were the maturity level of the characters, the continuous bad decision making that stemmed from that, and the absurd gaslighting they put each other through. These are, ostensibly, two professional women in their 20s -

one of whom has been running and innovating a massive business for a decade at this point

- but they act like angsty teens plucked straight out of a YA novel.

It's not a complete wash up, and I'm sure lands better with some people than it did me. But it's far from the same league as The Martian or Annihilation, like the description implies.

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