Hell’s Heart

Hall (Audrey Lane Stirs the Pot) makes an ambitious pivot from witty romance to epic space opera in this dazzling retelling of Moby Dick set in the gaseous miasma above Jupiter after humanity’s exodus from Earth. The plot follows the original beat for beat as Captain A of the hunter-barque Pequod’s obsession with the Mobius Beast puts his crew in danger, but almost every aspect of the world has been cleverly reimagined. The spermaceti from the Leviathan is a psychoactive cerebrospinal fluid, processed by the Olympus Extraction State to power everything in the solar system; the narrator’s harpooner friend Q hails from Old Earth; captain A’s replacement leg comes from the predatory Venusian pharma-state; and the narrator’s relationships with both Q and A turn sexual. Hall’s prose is mostly modern, but he retains some of Melville’s grandiose lyricism and pays homage to his famous fact-filled tangents. The narrator, a schoolmistress turned monster hunter who opens by instructing readers to call her “whatever the fuck you like,” provides detailed technical exposition about the spaceship’s functions and the process of hunting the alien creatures called Leviathans, which she muses about as both biological creatures and mystical quasi-gods. Along the way, she serves up whole chapters of philosophical asides and jokes of dubious relevance. Most impressively, Hall captures a breathtaking sense of adventure throughout. This thrills. (Mar.)