Jim's Reviews > Nightflyers

This started with an interesting foreword by the author, read by him, I think. He mentions his love of SF, horror, & hating to put them into genre boxes. This is definitely a blend of the two. That's often great, but it really hurt the story toward the end.

The actions of the inimical force made no sense. (view spoiler)[Making a corpse suddenly able to move in 2G by walking on broken legs sucked. Pushing the landing craft out of the way was worse. It would have had a lot more options with far less expenditure of energy & it was confined to barely being able to move a knife in 1G. (hide spoiler)] Still, if you roll with it, there was a high creep factor. Good characters & an interesting story otherwise. I really liked the alien(s). (view spoiler)[To go through all that trouble only to find out it's basically a cosmic cow grazing mindlessly along. Wow. (hide spoiler)]

I'm not sure this is the correct edition. I listened to an audiobook that contained only this story & was published by Random House. I looked it up & it is an Audible edition. I don't recommend it since the narrator Adenrele Ojo wasn't that great. A little too much emphasis & emotion, but I could take that. The really awful part was she made one of the characters, Alice, almost incomprehensible; reminded me of Mushmouth on the old Bill Cosby cartoon.

So this is a 4 star story, but I'm taking one star away for the narrator. I'll recommend it, especially if you get it with other stories. My original copy of it is one of the doubles Martin mentions in the foreword. I forget who had the other novella. It wasn't one of the old Ace doubles, but an attempt to revive the format. I really liked them & miss them.