A Song for the Void is an excellent historical fiction novel brimming with cosmic horror ambience. It is extremely well constructed, full of foreboding atmosphere and memorable characters. There are a few imperfections, but what novel can say otherwise? Despite the relatively slow burn of the ‘descent into madness’ trope, the author manages to craft a narrative that is engaging from the outset and continues to impress as the pages drift by.

The essential premise is that of a British naval ship, in pursuit of pirates in the South China Sea, which stumbles upon the trail of a dark entity. As their quarry sets sail for a mysterious island, the crew begins to unravel, and madness and mutiny soon overtake the doomed vessel.

Every story ultimately lives or dies based on the characters that live in its pages, and A Song for the Void has great characters. Using a first-person POV, we are intimately familiar with the hopes and dreads of the novel’s narrator, Dr. Edward Pearce. Told with a cleverly escalated revelation of backstory, we delve deeper and deeper into Pearce’s haunted psyche, his history of trauma and addiction, all of the elements that shape a man into the unlikely person who might stand against a disturbing and otherworldly entity. Several other interesting characters populate Andrew C. Piazza’s novel, including a delightfully execrable villain in the form of the “Eddie Haskell form hell” scoundrel: West. He’s the type of antagonist you love to hate, honestly just a piece of $#!T that you want to punch in the face and it’s just a cherry on top for the story.

There was a time or two when the pacing slowed a bit for my tastes, in particular one scene where climbing up to the crow’s nest takes (I think it was 8 pages) too long. But in a novel with so much introspection and philosophizing, I think that Piazza actually did quite a good job of keeping things on track despite a character that was grappling with his tragic past and the terrifying confusion of a world gone mad. On a related note, some of the “horror” revolved around a concept that felt more intellectual than visceral, and that didn’t really work for me. It didn’t feel scary, it was just sort of an idea. If it had really hit home, the idea was certainly disturbing, but I didn’t “experience” it through character, it was just talked about a lot.

A Song for the Void was unique, in my reading experience. I’ve read some Lovecraft but not much else in the way of cosmic horror, so I can’t say how this fits into the genre other than to say it was well-written and engaging and it felt to me like a really strong example of the style. The prose was mostly straight forward, nothing fancy, but never clumsy, and always painting a solid image of the scene, while capturing the personalities at play.

The ending I felt was solid, but not really surprising. It was well executed but lacked anything I couldn’t have seen coming well before that, which is not always a bad thing, but it did leave me feeling a little underwhelmed. The rest of the story was so well done that by comparison it had just the tiniest whiff of disappointment. But still, when I set the book down, I thought to myself, “that was pretty good.”

My overall opinion is that this was a really enjoyable book. When I went to bed at night I was looking forward to a chance to read it. Piazza did some really interesting worldbuilding along the way, especially with the illusions the story’s madness brought on. The mysteries surrounding the ship’s destination, and the protagonist’s backstory kept me turning pages. And it’s worth another mention that this book had a great villain. Go read this. It’s not perfect, but there is a lot to love here. An ill-fated voyage, an opium addled narrator struggling to discern the horrible truth from his fevered delusions, and island at the end of it all… where waits the Darkstar.

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