Gretel is a big spaceship with a small crew, designed to collect samples from planets and planetoids it encounters. The mission is going smoothly until awful screams begin to emanate from cargo hold 4. Beset by mental and emotional pressures, as well as physical violence, the crew dwindles as it struggles to investigate the presence parasitizing the ship.
Lonnie Busch’s CARGO HOLD 4 is an excellent piece of sci-fi horror. It opens strong, with anguished wailing out of the eponymous cargo hold. Although the plot occasions some scenes of contemplation, the pace moves briskly from one episode to the next. The prose grips the reader just as hard during a tense in-flight maneuver or difficult space walk as it does during moments of shock or stomach-turning horror. This leaves a lot to like in the overall shape of the text: there’s certainly horror, and an emotional undercurrent, but there is also the satisfaction of simple mechanical problems—like how to dislodge Gretel’s unwelcome visitor using the limited capacities of the ship. CARGO HOLD 4 manages to find a satisfying rhythm between these distinct moments in the narrative.
The text manages this, in part, by deftly handling its sci-fi tropes. The Gretel and its functions are well-reasoned and solid, from the straightforward (the crew has no lights or cameras inside cargo hold 4 because, well, why would they need to see inside a room full of stacked boxes?) to the imaginative (Gretel doesn’t carry all of its own supplies, and must make contact with supply buoys that were shot into space years before their mission began). Furthermore, CARGO HOLD 4 isn’t afraid to take its tropes in unexpected directions. As the nature of the alien threat comes into view, there’s a clear sense of how the plot might conventionally play out; but this reveal is made surprisingly early, and much of the story actually involves the growing ethical dilemmas involved in deciding whether to eliminate or coexist with the organism in question.
In this regard, CARGO HOLD 4 deserves special notice for its treatment of the Gretel’s crew. Too often in sci-fi, the plot is advanced by supposedly intelligent scientists acting in both unintelligent and unscientific ways. This novel succeeds in balancing between these impulses. Yes, these characters make mistakes, but that’s because they’re human. They err understandably in moments of high emotion and then regret it later, struggling to bring their scientific minds to bear on a problem. This advances the plot, but also meaningfully engages the reader’s empathy.
However, CARGO HOLD 4 isn’t perfect. Though the characters as a crew feel solid enough, there’s relatively little individuation—even in some ostensibly fruitful areas for exploration. The text also needs some light cleanup; there are unresolved homophone errors (they’re/there, bear/bare) and some clunky sentences that need cleanup (“putting down seemed chancy on some random planet”). But none of this detracts from the overall command of the text, its clarity of vision, and its entertainment value.
Tightly plotted and well-paced, Lonnie Busch’s CARGO HOLD 4 offers a surprisingly thoughtful twist on some sci-fi tropes with both arresting body horror and uneasy ethical quandaries.
~Dan Accardi for IndieReader