Review: Requiem, by John Palisano

Ava must fight an entity locked in on taking out the crew of the Eden, a moon-sized cemetery in space, as it brings back the souls of the dead buried aboard. One such soul is Ava’s lost love, Roland.

The spirits of the interred on the Eden haunt those aboard, including a visiting musician is tasked with writing a new song for the dead. Her Requiem calls a cosmic entity that illuminates their darkest fears and secrets. One by one, they’re driven mad. Ava fights her grief and must rise up before they’re lost and the entity reaches Earth.

https://www.flametreepublishing.com/requiem-isbn-9781787589544.html

My Review

Thanks to the team at Flame Tree for sending me a copy of this book. Hardback, Deluxe edition, foiled and embossed, with decorated edges – it is gorgeous! I know how much you’re selling it for and I know enough about publishing to know sending me a free copy hurt a bit.

Thanks to Anne Cater for organising this blog tour. As always, marvellous job.

Ava Armstrong lost her partner Roland while they were on the Moon, and now she’s being sent to an artificial moon, Eden, where the dead are interred. After a disastrous accident on Eden the company that owns and runs Eden, Vita Nova, need a P.R. coup. And they’ve decided to send a composer up to Eden with the first team back to write a new requiem for the dead. This is Tessa. Along with Ava and Tessa, are Ron Lee, Sanjay, Dr Derek Poole, and Midori, a Humani, or virtual intelligence that lives in an artificial human body.

Eden is huge and creepy, but the team are confined to a tiny part of it. Tessa struggles but finally writes her requiem. Or, something writes the requiem through her. People start to go a bit mad, seeing and hearing things that aren’t there. People start getting hurt. Eden itself is struggling. Whatever has come with the music has taken over, invaded.

As the team struggles to survive, Ave sees her beloved Roland again, and has multiple flashbacks to their last days together. For some reason the music affects Ava and Poole less than everyone else. They discover why after a brutal assault by the being in the music.

Eventually, Ava comes up with a plan and enacts it, saving everyone, even Eden, who has developed a consciousness of its own.

All of the characters, including the being in the music, get their viewpoint chapters as the events unfold over a very short, intense period. We see each of the humans go slightly mad, even unto death, while the artificial intelligences fight for their existence, are taken over, or shut themselves down. The characters are rounded and individual, except possibly Ron Lee, who exits stage left quite quickly so there’s less time to get to know him.

The structure of Eden is as much a character as a setting. It comes alive and changes, opens up and closes in, as the beings inhabiting it react to the music that is trying to take over. It’s huge and impressively imagined. The sort of thing a tech billionaire would dream of for their future away from Earth, with massive amounts of space, swimming pools, a great auditorium, and uncounted living quarters, but as a mausoleum instead.

I could see this being a good film, although a producer would probably shoe horn in a steamy romance between Ava and Poole, rather than the developing friendships that are present.

This was a fever-dream of a read. It took me a lot of effort to get into it, mainly because of the weather. It’s been too hot lately for me to settle at anything. I’m down to the wire today (Sunday 29th June 2025) but I sat down this morning and started reading. It helps that it’s marginally cooler today, and I can focus better. Now I’ve read it and it only took 4 hours. At 245 pages this is a standard novel size, but this is very much not a standard novel. It would make a very good horror movie. It’s very visual! The author does a great job of bringing the hallucinations and reality together in conflict and convergence.

The crew pick up fairly early that they’ve been picked either because they’ve got no one left and because of diversity measures. Nova Vita chose a mixed-ethnicity woman to lead, a Jewish doctor, a gay Chinese tech, an Arab Muslim tech, and a possibly lesbian woman composer to give the crew a ‘diverse’ nature, for good PR. It’s later discovered that two of them have a hidden disability, fixed by technology at birth. It’s in their medical records, so Vita Nova knew before the crew did. Sending a mixed crew looks good for a company trying to recover its reputation, but is incredibly cynical. It’s the sort of thing a mega corporation would do. There is a criticism of the corporatisation of life and death and the shallow efforts they make to look good, in there somewhere.

The use of Ava and Poole’s unknown disability to help them survive is quite a clever plot point and explanation for why they’re less affected, but the ‘miracle cure’ narrative as they are ‘perfected’ is a bit irksome. It’s irritatingly common in sci-fi for disabled people toto not exist in the imagined future, for disabilities to be cured by technology or genetic manipulation in all its eugenic glory. Even if the author didn’t mean it that way, the plot line has resonances that lend it that taint.

There’s an exploration of consciousness and the nature of ‘souls’ in the chapters from Midori and Eden’s perspectives, and in the conversations between Ava and Animus, the being that has invaded the station. It’s interesting; how do we decide if a being has a consciousness that we humans will recognise and respect, and what will we do when faced with that, either in artificial beings or in alien life? It’s a question we have yet to answer, since we barely treat each other as equals in consciousness, and cling to notions of hierarchy in life forms.

Over all, I was hooked by this novel fairly quickly and raced through it once the action really starts. It was terribly creepy. The tension builds subtly and steadily until the final race to find Tessa and then Ava’s meeting with Animus.

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Author Bio

John Palisano is the author of ‘Dust of the Dead’, ‘Ghost Heart’, ‘Nerves’, and ‘Night of 1,000 Beasts’. His novellas include ‘Placerita’, ‘Glass House’ and ‘Starlight Drive: Four Halloween Tales’. His first short fiction collection ‘All that Withers’ celebrates over a decade of short story highlights.

Palisano won the Bram Stoker Award in short fiction for ‘Happy Joe’s Rest Stop’ and has been nominated for a Rondo Award. His short stories have appeared in Weird Tales, Cemetery Dance, PS Publishing, Independent Legions, Space & Time, Dim Shores, Kelp Journal, Monstrous Books, DarkFuse, Crystal Lake, Terror Tales, Lovecraft eZine, Horror Library, Bizarro Pulp, Written Backwards, Dark Continents, Big Time Books, McFarland Press, Darkscribe, Dark House, Vincere Press and many more.

Non-fiction pieces have appeared in Blumhouse Online, Fangoria, and Dark Discoveries magazines and he’s been quoted in Vanity Fair, The Writer, and the Los Angeles Times. He’s a recent past President of the Horror Writers Association.