Salvation Day | Book Review
They thought the ship would be their salvation.
Zahra knew every detail of the plan. House of Wisdom, a massive exploration vessel, had been abandoned by the government of Earth a decade earlier, when a deadly virus broke out and killed everyone on board in a matter of hours. But now it could belong to her people if they were bold enough to take it. All they needed to do was kidnap Jaswinder Bhattacharya—the sole survivor of the tragedy, and the last person whose genetic signature would allow entry to the spaceship.
But what Zahra and her crew could not know was what waited for them on the ship—a terrifying secret buried by the government. A threat to all of humanity that lay sleeping alongside the orbiting dead.
And then they woke it up.
SALVATION DAY
Kali Wallace | 2020 | 321pgs | Fiction
Salvation Day was a lot of fun. It drops you into a fully fleshed and formed world in the far future, where humanity has exploded into the stars, then imploded here on earth, everything collapsed and began to mend. Then we started exploring the stars again. The above blurb does a lot of the heavy lifting explaining the plot, Zahra and her crew are breaking into a long-abandoned space vessel that had been decimated by a deadly outbreak ten years ago, with plans to cleanse, claim, and stake their claim on the massive, advanced, long distance exploration starship. You know what you are getting into - a few plucky characters alongside some cannon fodder, discovering horrible scenes from that outbreak, then running into their own set of problems - and Kali Wallace does not disappoint. Salvation Day is exactly what I was hoping for when I picked it up - a good old-fashioned crawl into a ship filled with horrors. It’s pulpy, fast-paced, and well-written.
What I didn’t expect from the blurb was the connection Zahra and her crew have to a cult back on earth. There is a reason they need this ship, but as Zahra uncovers the secrets of the outbreak and the event ten years before, she also begins to examine her relationship with her “family” and the motives behind her mission. This added an interesting extra element that added tension to the climax, but also said some interesting things about belief and choice. I was rooting for Zahra, Jas (Jaswinder) and his friend Baqir, despite knowing they were all headed for different destinations.
The first half of the book is more of my jam - claustrophobic space horror - and the second half is hard to discuss without spoilers, but it all comes together nicely with a tightly paced climax.
The world Wallace built here is interesting, rife with political maneuvering, immigration and segregation woes, and scratches a lot of the same itches for me as The Expanse series and Total Recall, as strange as that may sound. And, rather than dump all of it at the exposition airlock at the beginning, the world of Salvation Day is fed during the story in a way that built on it, without feeling tacked on.
Recommended! I’ll be picking up more of Kari Wallace’s books in the future and need to get this book in physical form for my shelf. (This would make an awesome module for Mothership RPG - Kari - Hit me up if you want to make one!)
Get a copy of the book:
Salvation Day is available on Amazon, Mysterious Galaxy, and Barnes & Noble
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