The mining planet of Sh?nmén is your usual colonial backwater with second rate management, apparently ill trained security, and a bunch of indentured workers labouring to pay off their company debt. Toru McClintock-Riley, the matriarch of the family company Knot, is doing her best to turn everything to the Knot’s advantage and surely this time round has struck pay dirt. An underground mining collapse leads her to discover a door of alien design and manufacture, Toru quickly realises this could be the ticket to getting the Knot out from under the pressure of company debt. She decides rather than reporting her find to the company she’ll see if the local clandestine organisations might be prepared to divvy up a decent payday. Unfortunately, just when it seems Toru might have chosen the right option a massive horseshoe shaped space craft appears over the planet. The craft bombs the local population centres with a black rain of death that transforms the local fauna and humans into nightmarish monsters.  Rescue appears to be weeks away but the miners are given some hope when contact is made with the Righteous Fury, a Colonial marines vessel that carries the Jackals, an elite group of former Marines and Royal Marines led by Zula Hendricks, who’s clandestine mission is to wipe the Xenomorph species off the board before unscrupulous corporations can weaponize the critters. The Knot and a few other survivors retreat to the mines and blow the entrance tunnels to keep the monsters at bay, but are forced further underground due to incursions overrunning their hasty defences. The only option left is to go beyond the recently discovered Alien door, but what new dangers might exist there, and is anyone going to get out alive.

I think I might just take a break from reviewing expanded Alien universe novels for a while, they seem to be getting worse with each new publication. While I view any alien book with a lot less critical analyse than I would generally apply to a typical horror novel, we’re talking pulp fiction here, if mistakes are being made with the writing then they need to be spelt out. We’re not here to give anything a free pass, and for sure are not beating any political drums, which the current novel in question does. So upfront I am going to say that Inferno’s Fall is not a good example of the novel, horror or otherwise, and even fails at the most simplistic of pulp requirements, that would be to entertain the target audience. 

Firstly, there’s nothing wrong with the writing in terms of structure, authors Ballantine and Carija either have attended a lot of writing courses or know how to get the best out of their word processors. The writing is not complex, you won’t need to re-read things to understand what is going down, and you are not going to be overly taxed in understanding the written page. Don’t expect anything up to Stephen King standard, read King if you really want to understand how to structure a horror novel, but we are getting a decent enough pulp book here. It’s in the delivery of the narrative that things fall apart with any number of mistakes being made, chief of which as stated above is the insertion of social politics that have no place in this type of novel. We’ll get to this issue before we are finished, believe that.

One of the mistakes writers can make is to introduce too many characters, spend time developing those characters, and then add them to the body count. This wastes page real estate as what is being attempted is to gain reader sympathy for some of these characters so that their deaths becoming more impactful. The writers of this pulp fiction don’t achieve this and we are left wondering why exactly time was spent on what amounts to NPC who are simply in the novel as cannon fodder. For example, I was hard pressed to separate the members of the Knot till they started to die off, and I was definitely not concerned when they did. Writers as diverse as Stephen King and Peter F. Hamilton, not to mention J. R. R. Tolkien, can get away with this approach as they are superior at their craft and tend to add just enough meat on the bone to their minor characters.

More problematic is there is nothing new in Inferno’s Fall that we haven’t seen in either other expanded universe novels or general literature. The whole concept of the indentured workers who can’t escape their situation, well hello Wake in Fright, the black goo dropped from a dreadnaught, I really wish we could get beyond Covenant, which really didn’t take the franchise in a good direction. Big breath taken, the concept of the red aliens fighting the traditional black aliens, is that Hive World peaking in from the dark corner, the whole Engineer underground facility, we already covered that in Prometheus. I could go on but I don’t have room to list every single “borrow” from previous entries in the franchise. 

The astute reader, that would be anyone with a reading age above about 12, will notice the authors have a fix agenda which is pounded on throughout the book, and which once again wastes space that could have been used for action scenes or simply cut to reduce the page count. Every lead is a woman of colour and the males being represented are either hopeless inept at what they do or hulking brutes. Yes, folks we have a novel dedicated to the Mary Sue character and white males who are the worst examples of the species. Wow, remind me to avoid novels by these authors in the future, I thought the culture war was over and the forces of diversity hadn’t exactly won that battle. Naturally the “ist” and “phobe” words are going to be bandied about by the simps and neo-feminists, but we call a spade a spade here, if you live by the political sword you generally die by the political sword.

“She should have known better. Men always disappointed – no matter whether flesh or plastic.” (Page 389). The irony here is Toru is upset her artificial person didn’t save a couple of other family members, yet he has been programmed by the Knot Matriarchy to defend her at all cost, and later in the novel Toru is able to override this programming. Jesus wepted, so men are being blamed for Toru's own failingsa, pair for the fracking course kids.

Once again I’m going back to the authors not recognising their market and pandering to a completely different market. Another hundred pages could have been cut from Inferno’s Fall if the editor’s recognised the target audience are not interested in feelings and exploration of relationship, seriously did anyone sit back and wonder who was going to read this book? Guess the Simps lapped it up, for the rest of us the narrative becomes boring regularly, and to be honest you will be skipping whole sections rather than getting bogged down in chick literature.

What could have been a decent enough read is spoilt by ideas being simply stolen from previous Alien outings, a political message that is simmering behind the page, and to be honest a turn into chick lit territory. I’ve made a commitment, if I ever see the name Philippa Ballantine or Clara Carija on the cover of an Alien novel then I will be giving that book a miss. Yes, folks we can no longer guarantee a hundred percent coverage of the franchise, live is simply too short to take time out of it to read an embittered writer’s manifesto. Clearly no recommendation on this one, the book dials in the boredom factor at stages and I’m not in country to read Mills and Books level self-absorption by female characters. Hopefully someone who understands markets and target audience will take over at Titan, otherwise I can see a slow erosion of support as we get more of the mush presented in this book, and I didn’t even get into the mess that is Mia, Jesus wept right there.