The Burning Dark

In a spacefaring future, Capt. Abraham Idaho “Ida” Cleveland’s cunning victory over the Spiders at Tau Retore is rewarded with a posting to a backwater naval demolition facility in the Shadow star system. He soon discovers that his victory has been erased from the official records and that he is a pariah. Isolated and bored, he turns to amateur subspace astronomy and hears a message from Earth’s long-forgotten past, a harbinger of grim events to come. After inadvertently opening the door to Hellspace, Ida winds up at the center of a carefully orchestrated storm of occult and alien forces. The novel is an awkward partnership between the implausibility of space opera and the lurid violence of horror; an idiosyncratic use of ship names borrowed from various 20th-century comics and several references to the phantom cosmonaut crackpot conspiracy theories fail to distract from the cardboard worldbuilding and weak, derivative plot. Agent: Stacia Decker, Donald Maass Literary Agency. (Mar.)