Of Monsters and Mainframes

Demeter is a spaceship with one job: carrying human passengers between Earth and Alpha Centauri. Lately those passengers keep dying. Her AI medical system, Steward, blames equipment failures, but Demeter knows better. The deaths are paranormal murders, and they began when an ancient, nasty vampire came aboard and set out to kill every human on her.

If she cannot stop the killings, Demeter faces decommissioning. Spaceships are not built to want revenge, yet Dracula is the one target for which she is willing to make an exception.

To fight him, she assembles a crew of monsters of her own. It includes a werewolf, an engineer stitched together from the dead, and a pharaoh who wields otherworldly powers. A vampire who holds a grudge joins them, and a fleet of cheerful spider drones rounds out the team.

This is science fiction with a horror streak, a queer-inclusive mash-up of pulp horror and classic sci-fi. The tone is quirky and warm, closer to a romp than a dread-filled haunt, though bodies pile up and the villain is the original monster.

Beneath the chase, the book looks at what it means to be treated as one of society's monsters, and at the different kinds of friendship that form among misfits. Reading it is lively and heartfelt, with a found-family crew at its center.