First published 2025
Demeter has one job: ferry passengers between Earth and Alpha Centauri without incident. She is good at her job. Then the bodies start turning up. Her medical AI, Steward, keeps filing the deaths as equipment failures, but Demeter knows better. Something ancient and deliberate has boarded her, and it is working through her humans one by one. The culprit is Dracula, an old and vicious vampire who treats her ship like a private hunting ground. If Demeter cannot stop him, she will be decommissioned. She cannot stop him alone. So she builds a crew out of the only candidates available: a werewolf, an engineer assembled from dead parts, a pharaoh wielding powers no instrument can measure, a vampire who has personal reasons to want Dracula finished, and a fleet of spider drones that approach every crisis with alarming cheerfulness. Together they are society's castoffs, its monsters, its mistakes. The book asks what that word actually means, and whether the creatures labeled dangerous are really more monstrous than the forces that labeled them. At its center is Demeter herself, an AI learning that protecting her passengers requires something no one programmed into her.
Genres: science-fiction, adventure, mystery, fantasy, horror, dark-fantasy
Vibes: atmospheric, dark, gritty, philosophical, suspenseful, thought-provoking
Tropes: found-family, ragtag-crew, redemption-arc, unlikely-allies
Setting: Earth, Alpha Centauri
411 pages · Paperback · Bindery Books
Content warnings: death, murder, violence