Elysa Hendricks, $0.99, ISBN 978-1476012254
Sci-fi, 2012
Amy Starr is about to die. She has about 15, maybe 10 minutes before the air runs out in her badly damaged spacecraft. Oh no, what will she do now?
Well, there are several ways Elysa Hendricks’s The Beast Within could go.
Amy could spend what is left of her time to reminiscence about her regrets and could-have-been’s, making this story one that hits the feels.
She may encounter some dark cosmic terror that refuses to let her die, but leaves her in a state that makes her wish every second she exists that she is dead instead.
She goes all MacGyver and goes into a frenzy of inspired DIY fixer-upper madness, repairing the ship in the nick of time.
Amy wakes up and realizes it’s all a dream, and then the shower curtain is pulled aside and she screams in terror at the sight of the thing that steps out.
She decides to open the airlock and throws herself out because, hey, dying on her own terms and all.
Well, the author chooses none of the above and goes for arguably the most family friendly route: Amy gets help from a most unexpected quarter. This is not the most interesting story, and in many ways, it can seem like a cop-out too. Still, this story won’t scare the kids or send readers into an existential crisis, so there’s that.
I don’t have much else to say because this is a short story that somehow manages to still make as less of an impact as possible, despite its intriguing premise. The whole thing feels like the first few pages of an aborted plan for a much longer novel, and the author didn’t want her work to go to waste so here it is, people, for only $0.99.
There is that amusing possibility that Amy’s savior is actually, secretly keeping her alive as livestock or breeding material—surely the title The Beast Within has to mean something, right, like maybe the “food” given to Amy will lead to an alien gestating in her gut and bursting out in gory beauty some time down the road—but come on, if I have to use my imagination to make the story to be far more than it is, I can do that at any time without having to plonk down money for it.
Still, it’s only $0.99, so I can afford to be generous. It’s pretty readable, all things considered, so here’s a generous extra oogie for all the effort, for the want of a better word.
