The Scourge Between Stars (Tor Nightfire, April 4, 2023). Cover by Chris McGrath

Tor’s new Nightfire horror imprint has really hit the ground running. Launched in April 2019, its first project was the audio-only horror anthology Come Join Us By the Fire in October 2019, and it hasn’t slowed down since — with books from T. Kingfisher, Brian Lumley, Lucy A. Snyder, Catriona Ward, Thomas Olde Heuvelt, Cassandra Khaw, Silvia Moreno-Garcia, and lots more.

Its latest title, The Scourge Between Stars, is a delicious-looking debut novel from Ness Brown, a deep-space horror tale that Ally Wilkes (All the White Spaces) calls “a stellar, perfectly-formed piece of space horror: a smart blend of Alien-esque monsters with generation-ship existential despair,” and Publishers Weekly praises as “Tense, gory, and genuinely creepy… sci-fi horror that holds its own with the classics of the genre.”

Here’s an except from that Publishers Weekly review.

The Calypso is part of a struggling fleet trying to return to Earth from the failed colony on Proxima Centauri b. With the ship already badly damaged by mysterious forces, perilously low on stores, cut off from the rest of the fleet, and dealing with persistent unrest on board, the last thing acting captain Jacklyn Albright needs is another problem. While helping with repairs from the latest catastrophe, however, Jacklyn hears scraping and banging noises inside the ship’s bulkheads and soon thereafter, what precious stores the ship has left are going missing and crew members are turning up eviscerated. Fragments of panicked, despairing messages from the rest of the fleet reveal that the Centauri ships have been harbouring something terrible that lives in the walls and is very fast, very clever, and very hungry…. a sci-fi horror mash-up that holds its own with the classics of the genre.

Read the complete review here.

The Scourge Between Stars was published by Tor Nightfire on April 4, 2023. It is 176 pages, priced at $16.99 in trade paperback and $11.99 in digital formats. The cover is by Chris McGrath.

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