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.
