Romance authors pivoting to sci-fi seems to be a new trend, if Olivia Waite and now Alexis Hall are any indication. But while Olivia Waite leaned into her experience with cozy, uplifting stories to create her Dorothy Gentleman sci-fi mystery series, Alexis Hall instead leans into the excitement and eroticism in their new space epic. Hell’s Heart, which came out in March, is a brilliantly odd reimagining of Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick set aboard a space-faring hunter barque in pursuit of leviathans in the atmosphere of Jupiter.
Framed as the published memoir and reminisces of the narrator (known only by the initial “I”), Hell’s Heart tells the tragic story of the Pequod, her monomaniacal captain, and their doomed quest to hunt the legendary Möbius Beast. Raised in the seminaries of the wealth-worshipping Plutonian church, the narrator has more experience wrangling unruly schoolchildren than extraterrestrial beasts. But when her mounting debts and innate restlessness spur her to look for new employment, she sets her sights on the lucrative but perilous leviathan-hunting industry. After forging an unlikely bond with “Q,” a fearsome harpooner from Old Earth, the two join the crew of the Pequod for a multi-year journey into Jupiter. While most of the crew just wants to harvest enough spermaceti to make a living wage out of their small fraction of the ship’s take, the captain “A” is determined to hunt down the particular monster who took her leg and nearly her life in their last encounter. Though this single-minded quest for vengeance creates tension aboard the ship, the narrator can’t help but be drawn in by the fierce determination of her charismatic captain.
The most striking element of this story for me was the narrative voice, which gave a similar reading experience to Tamsyn Muir’s Gideon the Ninth. Snarky, crass, and self-deprecating, the narrator injects humor into every world-building digression and character introduction. But her backward-looking perspective and ominous allusions to their fateful final encounter with the Beast also help to create a slow-building sense of dread. The narrator teases the reader about her own unreliability, admitting to her imperfect memory, her tendency to exaggerate, and her self-aware use of metaphor and other literary devices. She intentionally withholds information from the reader, including the full names of the people she cares most about. And she often drifts into meta-commentary about her own thought-process when it came to structuring and re-telling her story. This intrusive and self-aware narrator gives the Hell’s Heart an air of the Victorian literature it mimics, even as the vocabulary, sense of humor, and very frank approach to sex are contrastingly modern.
The world-building in this novel is another high point. Alexis Hall has created a hypercapitalist far future that maps surprisingly neatly onto the early nineteenth-century setting of Moby-Dick. This era is one of extreme wealth inequality, though in the case of Hell’s Heart it is not industry barons or aristocrats that hoard resources and power but rather the massive mega corporations that run the solar system, while the voiders are forced to devote their days and risk their lives for the opportunity to earn a pittance. Much like the whaling ships of old, the Pequod brings together a diverse array of cultures from across the known universe: there are members of different religions and inhabitants of different planets, forcing the narrator to confront the stereotypes and preconceived notions she grew up with. While cultural clashes can and do lead to conflict on the ship, the narrator’s relationship with Q is a beautiful example of love transcending language barriers and wildly different backgrounds.
Overall, I found Hell’s Heart to be a unique and clever narrative with a thoughtfully developed sci-fi world—and you don’t even need to have read Moby-Dick to appreciate it (though if you have, you may be even more impressed with how much of the original story Alexis Hall manages to incorporate). You can find Hell’s Heart on shelves now at your favorite local retailer or order a copy online and support The Gothic Library in the process using this Bookshop.org affiliate link. If you’ve already read it, let me know your thoughts in the comments!