The Luminous Dead
Gyre Price lies her way onto a solo caving expedition on the mining planet Cassandra-V, dropping kilometers below the surface in a pressure suit she cannot leave for weeks. Her handler Em is the only voice in her ear, and Em is hiding what happened to the cavers who came before, what the cave did to their bodies, and why this expedition is funded out of a private account. Starling keeps the entire book inside Gyre's suit and Em's voice, building a two-hander that grafts hard-SF caving procedure onto a biological horror that bends the rules of what a body can survive.
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A young caver descends a hostile alien planet alone in her suit, with only a lying handler in her ear, in Caitlin Starling's claustrophobic SF-horror debut.
The Luminous Dead was written by Caitlin Starling and published in 2019. It was Starling's debut novel; she has since written The Death of Jane Lawrence, Last to Leave the Room, and other horror works.
Yes. The Luminous Dead is a sci-fi horror novel about a caver on an alien world whose only contact is with a remote handler. It is widely cited as a defining claustrophobic genre novel.
The Luminous Dead is 432 pages in standard print editions, though page counts vary slightly between hardcover, paperback, and large-print formats.
At an average reading pace of about 250 words per minute, The Luminous Dead takes most readers 6 to 9 hours to finish.
The Luminous Dead is a standalone novel by Caitlin Starling, not part of a series.
The Luminous Dead is available in hardcover, paperback, ebook, and audiobook formats from Amazon, Bookshop.org, ThriftBooks, and most major bookstores.
