Your Mind Is A Terrible Thing: Novella Review
Hello, dear reader!
Happy belated Canada Day to my fellow Canuckians! I hope the holiday was full of fun and family.
And happy Firework Weekend to my American friends, who celebrate fireworks by hosting celebrations from Thursday until Tuesday!
Now onto the review! I have kept this review spoiler-free since it is a new release so read on with no worries!
The Author
Hailey Piper is the Bram Stoker Award-winning author of Queen of Teeth, The Worm and His Kings, Your Mind Is a Terrible Thing, Unfortunate Elements of My Anatomy, Benny Rose, the Cannibal King, and The Possession of Natalie Glasgow. She is an active member of the Horror Writers Association, with over eighty short stories appearing in Pseudopod, Vastarien, Cast of Wonders, Daily Science Fiction, Dark Matter Magazine, Planet Scumm, Flash Fiction Online, Year’s Best Hardcore Horror, and other publications. She lives with her wife in Maryland, where their paranormal research is classified.
— Hailey Piper’s website
Find Hailey through her website, on Twitter, and on Instagram.
The Novella
Published in May 2022, Your Mind Is A Terrible Thing is a sci-fi horror set aboard the M.G. Yellowjacket.
Communications specialist Alto's shift aboard the starship M.G. Yellowjacket turns hellish after waking from a tryst to learn every crewmate has vanished. Worse, a sinister presence has crawled aboard the ship. It's violent, destructive, and it can reach into your thoughts to make you see and feel what it wants.
Anxiety-ridden Alto might be the least-qualified person to face a creature that can hack minds like computers. Only a perilous journey to the ship's bridge can reunite comms specialist with crew and give them a chance to call for help.
But the intruder only scratches the surface of this crisis, and discovering the truth will bring Alto face to face against a nightmare beyond flesh and thought.
— Your Mind Is A Terrible Thing Amazon Page
The Review
I’ve said this before and I’ll say it again: the horror genre needs more sci-fi horror.
But now I’ll also say: the world needs more Hailey Piper space horror!
Your Mind Is A Terrible Thing starts off fast and keeps you gripped the entire way through. The main character, Alto, wakes up to a ghost ship situation — which is saying something, considering that the Yellowjacket is carrying cargoholds full of corpses and working with a skeleton crew (okay, I’ll stop.)
After that, every page is packed full of suspense and action as Alto tries to figure out what happened on the Yellowjacket and where their crewmates have gone.
But it’s a race against the clock and against the mind-hacking intruders that are slithering around the halls.
Despite the novella length, Hailey masterfully builds a fleshed out world (universe?), with guilds, politics, and industry — all without affecting the tight pacing of her story.
I love the main character, Alto. They are well-rounded, dynamic, and flawed in an oh so relatable way. I could immediately relate to Alto and their struggles as they sought a solution, a way to escape the crawling nightmares haunting the starship, and I couldn’t help but root for them, all the way through to the end.
Dealing with themes of isolation, anxiety, and self-doubt, Your Mind Is A Terrible Thing explores what it means to be human, what it means to be one’s authentic self despite flaws and hurt. It’s beautiful. It’s brutal. It doesn’t let go and the ending leaves you with a bittersweet mix of hope and despair.
10/10
PLM
p.s. (slightly spoilery but not really) I loved the idea of the wraiths. It’s terrible but so realistic that a Merchant Guild wouldn’t be content with crushing just living humans under their mantle of hungry consumerism, but the dead humans as well. Chilling, but genius.
