The Glass Garden by Jessica Lévai Format: eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via Edelweiss
Formats available: paperback, ebook
Genres: horror, science fiction, science fiction horror
Pages: 115
Published by Lanternfish Press on May 13, 2025
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org, Better World Books
Goodreads
Dr. Therese Blake is a homebody archaeologist devoted to the history of planet Earth. But when her sister Lissy makes a stunning discovery near an abandoned colony on a distant exoplanet, the sisters team up to discover its secrets.
Eerie, luminescent images cover the walls of an underground cavern. The glass garden looks like a payday to Lissy, who’s been struggling to turn a profit to keep her salvage crew fed and paid. Therese, however, insists on careful academic procedure. She can’t figure it out: Is the anomaly an artificial creation–or a living organism?
As the anomaly’s mystery draws the sisters into an obsessive orbit, it turns out neither greed nor science can offer protection from its relentless gravity.
My Review:
I’m not sure what I was expecting when I picked this book, but whatever it was it veered off the path I thought it was going to take almost instantly. Which is always a good thing!
In the beginning the story sets up not just one but two potential sources of dramatic tension – one personal and one professional.
In this far-future galaxy, Lissy Blake is a down-on-her-luck, down-at-heels space salvager in desperate need of a big payday to keep her salvage ship operational and her crew fully equipped and fed and housed. (Think of Firefly, only with less moral center, considerably worse luck and an even smaller ship and crew.)
Lissy thinks she’s on the trail of a big payday in the form of an abandoned colony that doesn’t look like it’s been stripped – at least not yet. A world where she’s found a mesmerizing artifact that is sure to save her bacon – and buy LOTS more of it – if she can get it properly authenticated and extracted.
Which is where all those tensions come in, because this operation isn’t exactly on the up-and-up, so Lissy needs an archaeologist she can trust absolutely to work on the down-low. Lissy’s sister Theresa is an archaeologist. Lissy knows that she can trust Theresa not to squeal to the authorities until after the job is done.
But she is equally certain that she can trust Theresa to be, well, Theresa. Meaning a bit smug, more than a bit standoffish, terribly pedantic, insistent on following procedure and protocol to the letter – and generally being a pain in the ass and reminding her every single second of how proud their parents were of Theresa’s accomplishments and just how little they thought of Lissy’s.
Every single bit of which turns out to be utterly true in all the worst ways, to the point where the still-burning sibling rivalry leaks out onto the entire crew. This is not a happy ship – and that’s before they start exploring the planet and the artifact that Theresa dubs ‘The Anomaly’ because it doesn’t make any sense in any archaeological context.
But it is beautiful. And mesmerizing. And quite possibly the reason that the colony got abandoned in the first place. If abandonment is the right description after all.
Escape Rating B: I was expecting this to go in the direction of the sibling rivalry and professional conflict, and frankly end up in either murder or betrayal or both. And it does start out in those directions, with a heaping helping of seeing things more closely from Theresa’s perspective to understand that her situation regarding both her career and their parents, isn’t any better than Lissy’s. Theresa is just less outwardly aggressive about pretending everything is fine, which is part of their dynamic. Lissy runs over Theresa’s – and everyone else’s – boundaries, and Theresa pulls into her shell in defense.
The dysfunctional relationship between the sisters was, on the one hand, something that grounds this story into the real. Their mission may have a lot to do with the far future, but sibling rivalry is among the oldest of the old stories, going all the way back to the Biblical story of Cain and Abel – and probably something similar in every culture’s origin stories. Very much OTOH, that setup felt just a bit mundane, and Theresa and Lissy seemed to be sticking to their tropes – at least until the story veered into the weird and started sticking to them in fascinating, unexpected ways.
(Also, Lissy’s boyfriend was just there to be a ‘redshirt’ and it was a bit obvious.)
What draws the reader into this story is the mystery. The records say that the colony was abandoned, but that doesn’t begin to tackle the way in which it was abandoned. The colonists are gone. Completely gone. If they’re dead there’s no evidence of it. There are no bodies – no skeletons, no remaining, well, remains, not even of the most dry and desiccated type.
Nor did they flee, at least as far as the evidence shows. There’s no indication that they took anything. All their personal effects are not just still there, they are still in place. No food was packed. No clothing was bundled up. Their ships are even still intact and quite possibly functional. The colonists are just GONE.
There’s a historical parallel, the mystery of the abandoned ship Mary Celeste, found adrift in 1872. Once I read about the mysterious disappearance of the colony the story tipped right over into SF horror and very much recalled Kemi Ashing-Giwa’s This World is Not Yours. Because , while the fate of the Mary Celeste’s passengers is STILL a mystery over 150 years later, this story needed some kind of resolution and ‘nobody knows’ wasn’t likely to be it.
Which is where ‘The Anomaly’ comes in, as it draws Theresa, Lissy and the crew into its depths in ways that have to be seen to be believed, taking the crew’s breath away and the reader’s right along with them.
