Sarah MacMillan's Reviews > Pitch Dark

I'm purely a horror person. Give me your erotic werewolf novels, toss over those vampire romances, but there has to be some horror in it to appeal to my tastes. I was willing to give Pitch Dark a go. The blue glowing skull on the cover was enough to catch my eye, but I'm not a sci-fi person so I was wary this time around. Sci-fi to me is a tricky genre. It can't be too generalized but tropes are frustrating, and aliens are a big no-no for me because its too cliche. I'll be fair here - this isn't a horrible book. It wasn't for me, though.

WARNING: THE FOLLOWING REVIEW CONTAINS SPOILERS.

So, Pitch Dark starts off with some wacky shit going on in a spaceship, an action-packed mess of chaos with this spooky alien force slowly but surely attacking and ruining the ship's inhabitants like a virus. This to me could have been developed more. I barely had a chance to get to know the characters before suddenly things were jumping from one place to the next, and it was like watching that 1980's movie "Contamination" with the pulsating pus-oozing alien egg parasites that mutate people, but less graphic. Not bad, just not developed very much beyond what can freak out a person in the moment.

More frustrating still is that there's no explanation for why the ship has ended up where it is and why these aliens want to harm the ship's inhabitants and turn them into monsters. It's creepy but without a purpose it doesn't go anywhere. There's no chance to get to know the characters, there are a lot of villains and antagonists but not really a motive given for why they have the agenda that they have, and By the middle of the book I was just bored to death with it, hoping it would wrap up soon. This is one of those cases where a writer has big ambitions but not a lot of follow-through. I feel like it harmed the book when there was a chance it could have been more fleshed out and solid.

Space horror isn't very scary to me, either. You're more likely to scare me with crumbling haunted houses, abandoned graveyards and shady small towns than with a lackluster spaceship attacked by aliens and some eco-terrorism. I wouldn't even necessarily classify this as "horror". Action? Definitely sci-fi, maybe thriller, but where was the horror in this. It wasn't scary, but what really turned me off of it was the lack of development and complexity.

Favorite scene: Laura and the Subjugator machine. This was seriously the only scary part of the book, because there's nothing scarier than the dehumanization caused by racial prejudice.

Peeve(s): Tuck, and everything about him. The lack of explanation for any of the evils going on in the story.

Loose ends: the antagonists' motives for anything they did, that made Pitch Dark one giant plot hole.