Let’s start off by getting one thing straight: Blind Spots is very good at what it does. It is very good at spreading a slow, underlying unease that is easy to ignore but difficult or impossible to miss in the long run.
I really liked this story.
Length: 4800 words
Genre: Horror
Author: Cara Nox
Store link: https://books2read.com/b/astrophobia
What follows will be a no spoilers review, for the purposes of which I am not considering anything covered in the first couple of pages to be a spoiler. Then, after that, will be… not so much a review as a literary unpacking, which will contain spoilers. You will be warned.
Blind Spots is part of an anthology of thirteen stories, entitled “Astrophobia”, all loosely speaking horror tales set in futuristic space-y settings. Full disclosure: I have not yet read the entire anthology.
I have, however, read Blind Spots. You should too.
Blind Spots is a quick read, a brief brush up against what does feel from the beginning like a larger world. It feels established, almost tired in its mild tedium – yet, as well, from the beginning there is a sense of unease. From the block quote that begins the story, in fact, we as readers are faced with a few questions: what’s happening, and why, those being common, but the framing of it as a post-facto interview of this sort raises gentle alarm bells in the back of the mind.
Those bells continue to tinkle.
The narrative begins with an overview of the world, of specifically the space station on which the plot takes place, of the main character (and narrator) and of their job. A few of their co-workers, as well, are covered both in terms of position within the company and in terms of temperament and idiosyncracies. It’s an introduction which I would call beautifully dull, but I mean the emphasis of that dual phrase to rest on the former: it is not dull to read in the sense of frustration, but rather that we are immediately presented with the monotonous day-to-day-ness of this whole situation.
It is standard. It is normal. Nothing about it is odd.
This is a very important thing which Blind Spots uses to very good effect (as it uses all of its tricks to good effect), because it allows us, the reader, to feel familiar with the world. Where a space station is presented, we instead see it as an airport, because that is what it is, with all of the setup and peculiarities of airports – the intersection between perfunctory requirements of life like food and sleep, and oddly injected commerce as if people are journeying to the airport specifically to purchase diamond jewellery or to dine on the finest cuts of wagyu beef grilled fresh to order.
Perhaps the reviewer has spent many an hour in airports.
All of this – the company roster laid out in brief, the summation of job tasks, the familiarly cozy atmosphere of waypoints whether they be bus stops or airports or interstellar space stations – it all provides a good, comfortable bedrock.
Remember how it started? No, you’ve forgotten already, haven’t you?
Good.
The story invites us in with the intrigue of our clarity that something has occurred here, something has gone wrong, and then almost immediately washes us over with such humdrum pleasantry as to make the thought nearly slip from our mind.
Nearly.
It lingers, like a single ember still glowing orange underneath the ash of yesterday night’s campfire, but anyone who’s disturbed such a pile of ash knows full well how much heat can be held in. How easily it can re-ignite.
Blind Spots does this very well. Slowly, gradually increasing the tension, to the point that we as readers are not even quite aware of it. It misdirects attention, so as we think “oh that is odd” we don’t quite catch on other, perhaps larger oddities awaiting us.
Not, at least, until it is perhaps too late.
Blind Spots builds up unease wonderfully slowly over the course of its run, and does so smoothly enough that we end up being unsettled without really being able to pinpoint why at first – then, when the why becomes clearer, we are left with the sudden realization of how wrong things have been and for how long.
Swim a little further from shore. Just a little. Isn’t the water nice out here? Oh, dear – where has the beach gone? I can’t even see it anymore.
Read further to encounter spoilers. Or, if you like (and my personal suggestion), go read Blind Spots, and then read further to get more in-depth thoughts without spoilers at all.
Go ahead. I’ll wait.
Have you finished? Are you ready for some spoiler-filled literary discussion? To unsheath the claws of our minds and tear deep into the flesh of the story?
Good.
Keep reading, then.
HERE THERE BE SPOILERS
Blind Spots starts strong, and builds even stronger; I loved a lot of what it did – nearly all of what it did, in fact, and perhaps it could be said (and it could be said) that I am an avid lover of things and perhaps it could be said that this is a weight upon the scales, but my love’s truth persists regardless.
Blind Spots is very good.
From the beginning, the setup of day to day monotony of company life – it’s a beautiful lulling. Yes, this is a horror story, we know this: it is in an anthology which tells us the stories contained within are of horror. The cover art (gorgeously) reassures us of this fact.
(Speaking of which, the cover for Blind Spots is wonderful, isn’t it? Simple but evocative, elegant; the radiant circles speak of echoes and distance, ripples in a pond suggesting the movement of something which we have not seen but can tell with a creeping itch up our spine is stalking us regardless)
We know it is a horror tale. It begins with a clear statement that this, what we are reading, is an after-the-fact statement of something that has gone very very wrong. It is in interrogation, a deposition at the very least, and in the first paragraph it is quite clear from stammers and false starts that the speaker, the main character, is uncomfortable – still worried over what they have seen, perhaps, or over what might happen to them after this.
Yet, it is so easy to forget.
So easy as the smooth (but insufficiently lengthy as to be boring) statements of company monotony lulls us; the descriptions of the space station lullaby us, even despite the occasional spike of something is wrong here.
Did that electronic poster just move? What the- oh look at that food court, ha, yeah I’ve been to a few of those!
Blind Spots uses its setting very well. Cara Nox sets up the setting wonderfully: it is familiar despite being a space station. I have never been to a space station. Have you? If so, do please leave a comment, as we are in rarified company – I digress: despite its clear lack of contact, there is something intensely touchstone about the station.
It’s a shopping mall. It’s an airport. It’s a crowded Metro station with a fruit stand and buskers competing with crowd chatter and bustle. It’s something that, even if we have not all individually known, we have seen on television, in movies, in other stories and such. We have all been places like this.
This makes us slide with ease back into the comfort, even as the unsettling facts pile up.
Speaking of, did you note just how many ships are docked here? The docks were full. Odd we should get to the food court without seeing anyone else. Odd that we didn’t think of that until now – and perhaps you did; perhaps, as me, you noted it immediately upon their arrival. Even still, even though I did notice that “the number of ships described should have more visible activity, clearly something is wrong”, I slip once back easily into comfort.
That is, I think, the great victory of Blind Spots – the true master stroke: not that it presents us with many different chills and thrills, but rather that it presents us with the same one time and time again, with only greater emphasis and greater impact each time (with perhaps one exception; I’ll get there later).
We know something is wrong, but we forget it when the company is being described. The ship docks and there aren’t enough people – we know that’s wrong, but we forget it once the ads are being described. The ad moves, and we know that’s wrong, but we forget it once we get to the food court.
Every time, the unease rises slightly, but it’s not yet that things reach their climax.
First, we go to a fountain, wherein… we forget again. We read a pleasant recollection, a tiny encapsulation of life in the future; coins as curios, odd relic remnants of civilizations and persons past, and in this there is a beautiful literary device being deployed.
Do you know why we toss coins into wells? Do you know why we knock on wood?
The old ways continue, even after their meanings are lost. The knocking is to rouse or entreat the spirits of the trees or of nature. The coins are tithes, to spirits or deities.
There is beauty in this juxtaposition – of a ritualistic invocation which would have been at home thousands of years ago, with a space-age future which is some distance in the future (potentially the year 4130 as suggested by “QY4130” being in both the Incident Report number and the date code of the same – although I would suggest further that “QY” suggests it is not the year 4130 AD, as it is currently the year 2025 AD. Rather, this suggests to me that at some unknown point there is a dawning of a new era, with the year QY0, and four thousand one hundred thirty years after that, comes our story).
The true beauty of it is that both contrast with our current time, sitting here and reading.
You and I both know what a coin is. We’ve probably both tossed a coin into a well. We’ve probably even wished on a tossed coin.
Do you believe in naiads, in water nymphs, in trolls or hobgoblins living in wells, in nature spirits to whom we lend coins by consigning them to oblivion at the well’s bottom?
We already live in a world where this practice has outlasted its genuine belief, in many ways and many cases, for many people, at least. It is then beautiful to have a trilateral contrast between three suspended points in time – it grounds the story, once more, in our familiar experience, whilst also providing a point of divergence. It has drawn our attention to the fact that this is not our world, because our world has coins and this one does not.
Why aren’t there more people at the fountain?
This is where I started to feel it. Where I looked down at my arms and saw the hairs standing there, already attending in concern; do you know why we knock on wood? Do you know why our hairs stand? They wish to warn us.
I hadn’t been heeding the warnings.
We, as readers, haven’t been heeding the warnings, we’ve been lulled back into familiarity and comfort time and again – with each little start we have allowed ourselves to slide away and be soothed once more, and here, where we see our world held up not as a comparison but as a contrast – we have food courts and so does Egeria-1; we have ads and so does Egeria-1; we have irksome co-workers and so does Kor Vell; we have coins but- what’s this? While coins technically exist, they are not just barely used as they are in our world, but so defunct as to be barely recognizable and to be used for nothing other than scrap metal.
That’s odd. Where did everyone go?
Suddenly we realize we are not where we thought we were. Suddenly we realize that not only is this wrong, but so much has been wrong the whole time, and we are so deep into it by this point.
It takes Kor a little longer to figure it out. They go to carry on with their job – still noting, as we the readers have, that things are a bit odd, but brushing the oddities off swiftly. Returning to their comfort.
Nobody wants to live in a horror story, after all.
When Kor hits the same threshold that we have (potentially) already hit, it feels all the stronger for the fact that we are primed with that same anxiety: something is wrong, we insist at the screen as we read, feeling something creep up our spine or our throat, underneath the skin of our calves and forearms. Under our collective scalp.
This brings us to another thing which Blind Spots – and author Cara Nox – utilize beautifully throughout the story, right from the beginning: the travelators.
Most of us have experienced something similar. An escalator at a mall, subway station, or something of the like. An elevator in an office block or apartment building. A travelator in an airport – those horizontal sliding sections of floor, an escalator that goes neither up nor down but simply sideways.
There is a sacrifice of agency, whenever we step on or in to one of these. A deliberate trade-off of which perhaps you’ve never consciously thought, but certainly can’t deny: “this will be easier, faster, swifter – and in exchange, I no longer have control over myself”.
This is a trope which has been done perhaps to death, or perhaps past death and necromantically reanimated, with elevators. This slight subversion of the trope, though, is really wonderful, because it allows for all the same resonance with real-world anchors whilst avoiding the obvious foreseeable: “shouldn’t have gone in that elevator,” we’d all sigh if Kor entered one and got trapped there, “obviously it’s a trap.”
These travelators, though? They feel open (we are in a space station), they feel self-controlled (we are in a space station), they feel like you can go faster or slower if you want (we are in a space station) or even you could turn around and (we are in a space station) run back the other way (we are-) if you wanted to (-in a space station) and if it was suddenly firing you toward a giant open furnace (in a space station) then you could escape (we are in a space station).
It feels like agency, like freedom, right up until it becomes horrifically apparent that it is not. That it never was. There was only ever the illusion of choice, of agency, of freedom.
…surely the resonance of this point is unrelated to current real-world events, eh?
Kor was not afraid on the travelator, the first time. The second time they are tense but it seems not to be worth it – nothing goes wrong, nothing happens. Only that skin-tingling sense that something is wrong something will be wrong something is wrong.
Have you ever been in a mall, in an airport, in somewhere that is designed for thousands of people, and ended up through happenstance to be somewhere that nobody else is? To look around and in every space and every hall see nothing?
This brings us to maybe the only thing about the story which I think I might have done differently – I would debate anyone saying it was a bad thing to do. I would disagree that it was a poor choice, narratively, but it adjusts the narrative in ways that I, personally, think could have been perhaps better in a different way: I’ll explain.
Up next, Kor finds confirmation of a sort of something we’ve come to suspect, and that is that people are dying on this station.
The blood – and the other deaths that follow – are the things I would change. I will explain, but first, before we get into the tale as it could be, let us follow what it is.
The blood is the climax, the true turning point, the confirmation that not only is something wrong, but it is this. People are dead – this guest is dead. As Kor leaves, contact over the radio speaks of other dead: workers of the station, all dead, none explained. No explanation.
The third travelator journey.
This – this – is how you write payoff. Sitting here at my computer, chills have just run up my arm so intensely as to make me pause my typing; this is effective in a way that is stunning to me in less than five thousand words. As this review is making no doubt clear, I cannot take a shit in less than five thousand words.
THANK YOU FOR YOUR CONTRIBUTION.
Did you feel that? That tingle, that chill? That’s beautiful. That thrill – all at once we see all these things that have been there the whole time, and they all come together; there are no people here, this is wrong, the travelator is controlling us and we are in a space station and nobody else is here, nobody is coming, nobody-
It’s agoraphobia, it’s claustrophobia, it’s so many things distilled; it is incredibly effective and not by accident. It is not happenstance that this happens now – every time we subside back into comfort, there is a little bit more tension. Every revelation adds a little bit more tension, and this scene draws it all out.
What’s happening? Why? Is this the space station’s AI? Is it an alien?
Was the water in that fountain taken from an ancient well, home to a naiad?
We don’t know. We don’t get to know and that is part of the beauty. It is and remains unknown.
Herein do we return to the one thing I would change: I think, personally, this story would be a razor’s edge better if no deaths were seen. None. Ever.
Kor goes to the room. The food is rotten. Nobody is there. They leave. Their cohorts over the radio announce not that bodies have been found, but that none have. Nobody has been found. Nobody is here. We need to leave. Kor encounters the Apparition on the travelator, is thanked for their contribution, makes it to the dock horrified that something will happen; the pilots are missing. They are not answering their radios. Qi and Yeln are not dead on the pad but are missing. Zu and Jaxon argue over leaving; one says it would be abandoning the others, the other says they’re gone – Kor enters the ship’s tracking system and finds… nothing. No sign of them. Integrating the ship’s systems with the stations (which perhaps they can do now, having made it to Egeria-1’s control room) they used the station’s sensors as well: no sign. Qi and Yeln are nowhere within the detectable range of the station. None of the pilots are either.
They leave. They never find blood, never find a body. Maybe Kor makes it back to the ship and leaves completely alone, instead – but this, I think, is where it becomes very much a personal decision.
In finding the blood, finding the bodies, Nox provides us with a climax. An inciting incident, something to nucleate those little building chills and cause them to culminate in greater thrills and horror – without that?
Well, without that, we would simply be left with those chills, spreading and clinging and never quite breaking, just a feeling that something, somewhere, is wrong.
Isn’t it? Or is it?
J <3
Leave a Reply