Spaceships aren’t programmed to seek revenge—but for Dracula, Demeter will make an exception.
Demeter just wants to do her job: shuttling humans between Earth and Alpha Centauri. Unfortunately, her passengers keep dying—and not from equipment failures, as her AI medical system, Steward, would have her believe. These are paranormal murders, and they began when one nasty, ancient vampire decided to board Demeter and kill all her humans.
To keep from getting decommissioned, Demeter must join forces with her own team: A werewolf. An engineer built from the dead. A pharaoh with otherworldly powers. A vampire with a grudge. A fleet of cheerful spider drones. Together, this motley crew will face down the ultimate evil—Dracula.
The queer love child of pulp horror and ​classic ​sci-fi, Of Monsters and ​Mainframes ​is a dazzling, heartfelt odyssey that probes what it means to be one of society’s monsters—and explores the many types of friendship that make us human.

My Review:

The spiderbots should have been the first clue – because they’re RENFIELDs. But I’ll admit that I didn’t get it – or at least didn’t believe I got it – until Demeter went through her cargo manifest and I caught the names of the companies to whom that initial cargo belonged. Names like Holmwood, Billington and Morris – not to mention poor Captain Harker Jones and Mina Murray. Because all of those names that sent a shiver down my spine, including the name of that poor haunted ghost ship Demeter, lead to one monster and one monster only – Vlad Tepes himself.

Drakula, or as modern parlance had it long before the first doomed voyage of the space liner Demeter, Dracula.

The idea that the monsters we’ve feared and dreamed of over the millennia have followed us out into the wider galaxy is not new. My favorite take on this particular idea is STILL Break Out by Nina Croft. It’s also what fuels the nightmares of space horror like The Scourge Between Stars by Ness Brown as well as the work of S.A. Barnes (Ghost Station, Dead Silence, and Cold Eternity)

But this particular nightmare is a bit different from the rest, as it is not told from a human or even a monstrous point of view. Instead, the alarums in this blend of pulp horror and classic SF (and vice versa) are rung by the AI running the ship, Demeter herself.

The orderly ones and zeros of Demeter’s programming are sent into their own tiny little tailspins. Poor Demeter’s efficiency drops into negative numbers. Which, in turn, gives the poor beleaguered AI nightmares of decommissioning and being piloted into the sun by corporate overlords who need to blame SOMEONE for the mass deaths aboard the newly dubbed ‘ghost ship’ even though it’s NOT HER FAULT that a monster keeps erasing her logs to mask a series of monstrous presences – one journey after another.

First – because he’s always first – Dracula. But the Count is followed by a werewolf – as vampires so often are. Then a ship full of refugees from Innsmouth in search of a route to the Great Old One himself. Then Frankenstein’s ‘monster’ and last but not least – well, not least depending on how you reckon things like most and least – the Mummy, also known as ‘Steve’.

The story gets wilder and crazier as it goes – and from a certain, artificially intelligent but deliberately askew perspective – so does poor Demeter. Her programming tells her nothing is wrong – even as she hurtles her way towards a sun that will destroy her and the true monster aboard her. But just as her programming tells her there are no monsters – her scant, surviving bits of memory tell her that what’s wrong is caused by one of those monsters that doesn’t exist. In the end – and very nearly hers – it’s the friends and even family that Demeter has managed to gather around herself – in spite of herself and the programming that says she can’t feel, or love – who save her, not just from the monster inside her, but from the monsters inside each other.

Escape Rating A: That grade feels like a pin thrown at a dartboard, or a measurement of just how much of the spaghetti thrown at the wall of this off-the-wall story managed to stick. A story that marvelously manages to be both a wild romp of a ride and a day trip to crazytown at the same time.

What makes it work is the way that the layers accrete, that it gets scarier and crazier and gathers more heart and souls to it as it goes down into the dark. And then rises in a big ball of fire and a blaze of glory.

And yes, dear merciful heaven, that’s a metric buttload of mixed metaphors.

The idea that monsters have/will follow us into space isn’t new. (I really, really LOVED Nina Croft’s Break Out, with its tale of vampires and werewolves smuggling themselves onto sleeper ships to cross the galaxy and what happened after.) There’s plenty of space horror out there now, as that genre is experiencing a renaissance thanks to S.A. Barnes’ work. (My fave is still The Scourge Between Stars by Ness Brown).

That this story is mostly told from Demeter’s perspective, along with a whole lot of snarky commentary by her frenemy Steward the medical AI, gives us a new perspective to play with – one rather like Scorn from Aimee Ogden’s Emergent Properties – that added a new layer of panic, confusion and motivation to a story that has been told before.

There’s even a Dracula story from the perspective of the captain of HIS Demeter in The Route of Ice and Salt by Jose Luis Zarate, but something about this particular version really grabbed me, and I think it’s the AI Demeter herself. She manages to be both so human and so other at the same time and I was happy to see this parade of monsters and monsters hunting monsters through her eyes – even if she doesn’t always have eyes.

In the end, we feel for her even when she doesn’t believe her programming allows her to feel for herself. We want her to succeed. We want her band/crew of rogue monsters to survive. And we want the two AIs, Demeter and Steward, to go from enemies to frenemies to friends to whatever comes next for them. And we especially want all of them to make a home, together, with each other, plying the spacelanes where no monster has gone before.