The Bottom Line: Cargo Hold 4 elevates space horror, deftly replacing jump scares with nerve-racking dread, unforgettable supernatural phenomena and big-payoff action scenes.
For the eight scientists aboard the starship Gretel, space travel is anything but cold and silent. The racket from Cargo Hold 4 — banging, crying, moaning and a guttural vibration – is deeply unnerving, and the spooked crew has various theories on what it might be. The ship’s assistant science officer, a hybridized human, posits that it could be some kind of spirit or energy presence.
Meanwhile, a new problem surfaces – the ship will be reaching their rendezvous with a supply pod several months early. It’s a potentially dangerous logistical nightmare they’re not even close to being ready for, to say nothing of how the enigmatic entity in the cargo hold might complicate things. Despite the crew’s protests, Captain Desna decides to attempt a risky spacewalk to find out exactly what they’re dealing with.
What Desna experiences is something she can scarcely describe. After hearing her explanation, a crew member soberly suggests they flood the cargo hold with poisonous gas.
In Cargo Hold 4, Lonnie Busch – author of staff favorites All Hope of Becoming Human and Project Übermensch – creates more anxiety-inducing suspense with the characters’ collective dread than most novels achieve in a book filled with explosions.
Through the crew’s vividly drawn experiences aboard the Gretel, Busch expertly plays on the fears, obsessions and paranoia of each crew member, made all the more compelling by the fact that each of them are scientists. Make no mistake — the book also delivers plenty of action as well, but most scenes are hardly conventional thanks to the uncertainty about what the entity actually is, what it wants, and what it can do. The result is a character-driven narrative that probes the mysteries of space and the human psyche.
Compared with a conventional sci-fi monster yarn like Alien, Cargo Hold 4 offers a far more cerebral journey, one that is spiritually closer to the thoughtful blueprint for the Star Trek series while maintaining a much darker edge. Speaking of which, the presence of Hurd – who bears considerable resemblance to Star Trek’s Data – is especially well-timed. Given the emergence of actual technology being tested to augment human intelligence, something that was only a dream until now, the crew’s struggle to accept Hurd as an equal while growing dependent on him feels more relevant than ever.
