Hard to know how to factor in the inevitable element of subjective reaction where reviewing is concerned. Christopher has many fans, and his latest novel comes with some impressive back-cover endorsements ('a riveting sci-fi mystery reminiscent of Shirley Jackson's The Haunting of Hill House' says Martha Wells; 'Creepy and Compelling' says Gareth L Powell; 'not to be missed' says James 'James' Lovegrove. Also Scott Sigler says 'Christopher puts Sci-Fi in a Metaphysical choke-hold—The Burning Dark makes reality tap-out', which may be praise. Or not. To be honest I'm really not sure what Sigler means). To say I did not find it so is to register that my organ-of-spookage was not tickled, the hairs did not raise at the back of my neck, I neither cared not was scared. Or was scarred, but then the novel probably wasn't trying to do that. Your eeek!age may vary.
The novel is, I believe, the first in a series called 'The Spider Wars', after the supersize cyborg villains against which future-humanity is fighting a galaxy-wide war. This novel, though, has relatively little to do with the Spiders, apart from one flashback by the protagonist at the beginning (in which some Spiders are literally devouring an entire planet: I didn't believe it for a minute) and some later-in-the-novel spoiler-redactedness. Most of the novel concerns Captain Abraham Idaho Cleveland, a decorated war veteran about to retire, and referred to throughout as 'Ida', in what is either a clever piece of gender-subversion or else an irritating distraction. The world of the novel is bounded by the 'Fleet', the military organisation prosecuting the war, piloting all the space ships and dismantling the space station U-Star Coast City. This Fleet is somewhere between Star Trek's Star Fleet and the army-as-fascist/utopian-model-of-society familiar from Heinlein. Christopher doesn't really capture the aura of neo-Prussian authenticity that makes Military SF so popular Stateside, and he's certainly not as ideologically moronic as Heinlein; but it's a pretty old-fashioned set-up nonetheless. Old fashioned verging on stale. That said, Christopher's focus is clearly on the haunted house story, not militarism, its ethos and praxis, so maybe this matters less. But not being able to suspend my disbelief in the military diminished my investment in the spooky story the novel wants to tell. Long story short: I was not scared by the strange noises, things going bump in the night, sudden chills etc. Accordingly the couple of hundred pages devoted to this stuff didn't ratchet up the dread and the tension, it just bored me ... too much exposition, too much faux-tough dialogue and blather. To quote the Raven: nevermore.
The Scare is subjective. What scares one person will leave another scratching his bald patch and pulling a slightly pained face. The star around which U-Star Coast City shines with a weird purple light; but instead of putting me in a Solaris frame of mind, it made me think of those fly-zappers you see in butchers. A mostly deserted space station just doesn't have the same vibe as a haunted house, because ghost stories have to be about a malign form of groundedness, a poisonous kind of belonging (fundamentally: death that is so linked to life that it can't, quite, leave it) and space stations are all, and this one a fortiori, temporary structures ... it's being dismantled as the story is being told. The tone of voice of Abraham Idaho Cleveland, hard-boiled, sweary, blue-collar American brogue, never rang true for me: not quite Go-Bakda-Joisey-Ya-Moron!, but not far away. But then again I have an imagination, and can use it to imagine a reader who is drawn into the atmosphere and tension, and for whom the novel generates real Spook. You pays yer money, you takes yer choice, you dismantles yer spacestation.
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