Synopsis
Humanity’s time is done.
The Earth is freezing over and human civilization is gone.
For Ira Hartman and the dysfunctional band of survivors that surround her, all that’s left of the old world are ghosts trapped beneath the still-forming ice sheets.
When Ira and the survivors discover a secret military research facility housed deep within the San Bernardino Mountains, at first, it seems like the perfect shelter. Plenty of rations. Water. Warmth.
Then they discover the remnants of horrifying experiments. Corpses, strapped to operating tables, horror etched on decomposing faces, experiment rooms filed with strange machines and occult symbols, and the logs of a raving lunatic. The unmistakable feeling that something is watching them, waiting in the cold, tubular concrete tunnels, in the shadows.
What Ira and the others don’t know might just kill them.
Review
MIND’S HORIZON by Eric Malikyte is a post-apocalypse science fiction horror novel with elements of the Cthulhu Mythos. Which is a lot of genres all smashed together but all of the ones that appeal to me. Mind’s Horizon has a kind of B-movie sci-fi movie feel to it and is an enjoyable hallucinatory journey. It has its flaws but it is, overall, a very successful novel for getting you to both care for the protagonists as well as be scared for when things go south.
The premise is that the Earth is now covered in a cosmic dust cloud that has blotted out the Sun. The temperature has continued to drop until only the equator is habitable and even that wont be for long. Ira Hartman is a young woman living with a group of survivors that have managed to keep themselves alive in the uninhabitable North America by living in the underground tunnels of Riverside, California.
Well, things are not going well for the group as they only have enough stored food for a few more months as well as their makeshift heating system breaking down. The group is also at each other’s throats with no one really liking anyone else, even those who are romantically involved. Ira holds a torch for Eddie, a man who fought for the Revolutionists of the Second American Civil War, which goes over like a ton of bricks with her Loyalist brother despite the fact that the civil war was ultimately unimportant in terms of humanity’s survival.
Ira attempts to find a way to survive this increasingly grim situation and finds a heat signature using their confiscated military equipment. Coming from a nearby mountaintop, Ira and Eddie discover a seemingly abandoned underground military base with a still functioning fusion reactor. Thinking they hit the jackpot, Ira’s enthusiasm rapidly diminishes as the survivors discover it was home to obscene medical experiments seemingly designed to pierce the barrier between realities.
Wackiness ensues.
I like this horror novel because it starts as a post-apocalypse novel like The Last of Us or The Walking Dead before slowly switching over to something closer to Event Horizon. I like this as the genre shift works well. The HP Lovecraft element in the story is more the nature of how madness inducing encounters with the Mythos can be. Our protagonists start having nightmares, waking hallucinations, and flashbacks to their worst memories before any actual monsters start to show up.
The characters are a bit broad in their stereotypes and the accents used in the audiobook make it worse but are overall very interesting and detailed. They’re people who have spent way too much time in each other’s company and wouldn’t have been the kind of person they’d hang out with willingly. One of the characters rather rapidly degenerates into supervillainy but you need an Ash or Burke if you’re going to do a good Aliens-esque story.
Overall, I think Mind’s Horizon is a good horror novel and while a bit on the cheesy side, was still a lot of fun. While I have some issues with the audiobook narration, I recommend it over the text version as the narrator does a lot of acting to enliven the performance. The Lovecraftian abominations are a bit too malevolent for my tastes, I prefer mine amoral than immoral, but this is a small complaint.
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