Requiem by John Palisano

Book Review

Sarah Deeming

Eden is a moon-sized cemetery in space where Earth sends its dead. It is more than just a place to house the dead; it is a place to collect their memories, for loved ones to visit and celebrate the lives of their lost loved ones. It is a place to remember.

Ava, captain of a small crew working on Eden, preparing it for reopening after an accident, remembers that her beloved Roland walked into the bright light of an unknown entity years ago and never returned. So why is she seeing Roland onboard Eden? And it isn’t just Ava. The other members of her crew are seeing things, hearing things, and experiencing malfunctions. Can Ava get to the bottom of the spreading madness before it is too late?

Written in the present tense, Requiem follows Ava as she returns to space after the death of her partner. The story is told almost exclusively from her point of view, although there are some chapters which cover the experiences of the other characters. It is a story about grief and how people continue when they have lost a loved one. Each of the six-strong crew members have lost someone, keeping them as individuals rather than as a group. Grief affects everything the crew do, what they share, but more importantly, what they keep to themselves, and this is how events escalate from six people on board a moon-sized mausoleum, bringing it back online to accept more people, to a desperate flight to safety.

The story moves along steadily, building in abnormal activity and tension with no rest. The characters’ backstories are compelling, the tragedy they have experienced is relatable, and I was drawn to their struggle for survival against their feelings of loss and self-worth. The chapters are also quite short, which I always find encourages me to keep reading. I devoured the book in two sittings because I needed to know how it ended and who, if anyone, survived.

I particularly enjoyed the approach to other life forms represented in Requiem. Music is an integral part of this story. Tessa, one of the crew members, is a musician, and she has been tasked with creating a song that will play on Eden for the living and the dead. It is through this music that the madness spreads, leading to hallucinations, out-of-body experiences, and auditory hallucinations. Palisano moves away from ordinary forms of communication and turns music into something dangerous.

Requiem’s setting is very atmospheric. Set on a space station the size of the moon and housing thousands of dead bodies, the residents of Eden constantly feel as if they are being watched and an awareness of all the bodies on board. It is creepy, and, mixed with the characters’ grief, it is hard to tell whether the hallucinations are because of the entity on the ship or the characters struggling with their location so far from Earth and surrounded by the dead.

Requiem is a literary space horror which delicately handles loss and grief. With unreliable, relatable characters, Palisano plays with what is real and what isn’t and keeps you guessing to the end. Highly recommended.