Book review: Crawlspace — A slow-burn science-fiction mystery

A quick note before I get into it: I’ve tried to keep this review fairly spoiler-light, but I do touch on the book’s tone, setup and a few elements of how the story unfolds. If you want to go in completely blind, you may want to read the book first.

A lot of the reviews I read mentioned that Adam Christopher’s Crawlspace was too slow and not scary enough for something being sold as science-fiction horror. They were right about one. They were wrong about the other.

I picked it up because the premise sounded interesting—a small crew, an experimental spacecraft, a prototype SLIP drive that takes them nowhere they expected to go. Going in, I was braced for the complaints. But what kept me reading the whole way through wasn't being scared; it was not knowing what the hell was happening.

The real tension comes from active uncertainty.

You're in the crew's headspace—things are going wrong, the ship's systems aren't behaving like they should, and nobody understands what's actually happening around them. Slowly, you realize their assumptions are cracking. I spent the whole book trying to figure out where the story was going, where the actual danger was, and how they were possibly going to escape the situation they were in. 

To me, that's not slow, that's simply a compelling reason to move forward.

And yeah, I actually enjoyed all the attention given to the XK72 and the SLIP drive. I like understanding how the machinery works, even if the science is fictional; it's why I loved Andy Weir's The Martian and Project Hail Mary so much. Understanding the ship made it feel like an actual place, not just a set the characters happened to be standing in.

The audiobook was excellent—8 hours 38 minutes, brilliantly narrated by Jennifer Pickens. The narration especially helped during the more technical sections. Switching between the narration during my commute and the paperback when I was home worked surprisingly well.

There are a couple of small things that pulled me out of the story. The repetitions stand out once you notice them: spacesuits fogging up multiple times, similar descriptions of bile rising in someone's throat. Once you mention something, move on. Find something else. Those moments yanked me out of the narrative. Annoying for sure, but not catastropic.

As for the ending—Christopher doesn't hand you closure. Some readers hate that. I understand why. But it also reinforces what makes this book work: that uncertainty never really goes away. It's not the ending a straightforward horror novel would give you.

Crawlspace is solid science-fiction suspense with mystery and some minor horror elements mixed in. If you pick it up expecting Alien or Event Horizon, you'll come away disappointed. But if you're in the mood to puzzle through a situation alongside a crew that's just as lost as you are, it works.

3.5 out of 5 stars.

Where to get Crawlspace:

🎧 Listen to the audiobook on Spotify
📘 Buy the paperback on Amazon.ca
📘 Buy the paperback on Amazon UK
📘 Buy the paperback on Amazon.com