DaughTers of forgoTTen LighT

released OUT NOW! 378 pages | paperback/ebook

Author sean Grigsby Publisher angry robot

If you’re a reader who finds tunes playing in your head as you inhale a story, then Daughters Of Forgotten Light will have John Carpenter’s theme for Escape From New York on constant repeat. The book’s lethal city is a spacedrifting snowglobe called Oubliette, to which luckless young women are dispatched from a resource-starved, war-torn Earth. (Unwanted men are sent to war, but this isn’t their story.)

A new batch of deportees arrive on Oubliette, to be devoured by an “Amazon” cannibal gang who might have named themselves better after Sawney Bean. One newcomer, Susan, comes under the protection of the titular Daughters, who ride their super-motorbikes after their harsh but not inhuman leader Lena. As Susan learns the ropes, an Earth-based subplot follows a female senator investigating what Oubliette’s become.

Almost all the characters are women, whom the book depicts as every bit as capable of brutality as men. The plot centres on maternal bonds – a baby turns up on Oubliette, and even the cannibals are smitten with it – and maternal betrayal. It’s absorbing for the first half, but the characters don’t feel fully served when the action set-pieces, battles and bloodbaths ramp up. Still, at least the end is (harshly) conclusive.