Book Description 

They are monsters, legends, gods.

They are our prey.

Earth is dead. Which leaves us stuck living in atmospheric domes on planets that will kill us if we blink wrong, or run out of fuel. And by “fuel” I mean “the cerebrospinal fluid of gargantuan, quasi-psychic space monsters”.

I joined the hunt hoping to get paid and maybe laid, but mostly paid. Instead, I followed a captain chasing abominations in the skies of Jupiter.

We battled the Möbius Beast itself, there in the red eye of the world.

Spoiler: we lost.

My Review 

I’ve been a fan of Hall’s books for almost ten years, so I distinctly remember an early pandemic group readalong of Moby Dick on Twitter. Perhaps that was the inspiration for this sapphic sci-fi take on the classic whale hunting novel. 

The book follows the source material fairly faithfully with the notable exception of the protagonist banging just about everyone on the space ship. I am all for sex positivity, but the whole thing got a bit repetitive midway through the book. 

I was especially fond of the Q character, inspired by Queequeg, the indigenous Polynesian seen as a “savage” by his God-fearing shipmates. Q in this book is from old-Earth, which was mostly abandoned centuries ago because apparently we didn’t get our act together about anything that we’re doing. Anyway, a fun fact about Q is that she speaks exclusively in Latin. 

I would recommend Hell’s Heart. This book is very clever because Hall is a very clever writer who seems to love subverting traditional genre expectations. However, this book is pretty niche. It will appeal to people who enjoy Moby Dick homages bordering on parody (and I mean that in a sincere way, no snark detected), but those people must also appreciate sci-fi and sapphic romance. Fans of the latter might find there to be too much leviathan talk. You can see how the stars need to align for this book to work. Pun intended. 

I received a digital ARC of this book from Tor/NetGalley.