This was the not the book for me. The blurb immediately grabbed my attention but it didn’t live up to what I was expecting.

This book had me at vampires in space. I love a good scifi horror story. This didn't disappoint. I highly recommend this book.

This needed much more editing and polish before it is anything but a fandom mashup turned therapeutic processing made of the wreckage of various relationships which crashed and burned and left emotional wounds. I feel for the author but it was a MESS.

Well written but not exactly gripping. I was initially extremely excited by it being compared to The Shining in space, but it simply didn't pull me in the same way The Shining died.

This was hard to read and I didn’t particularly enjoy it. The content wasn’t something I enjoyed reading about.

Space Hysteria" is a thrilling story that takes you on a spooky journey through space. It blends horror with supernatural elements and casual LGBTQ representative. The pacing felt rushed a bit sometimes, but it doesn’t deter from the enjoyments of the book. The characters were being isolated in an old spaceship, and after sometime it started to take a toll on them mentally. I was so immersed in the futuristic elements. The suspense gripped me from the start to finish and kept me on the edge of my seat.

I was very interested in this one after reading the blurb but sadly it didn't work for me. It took me quite a while finish. I had a lot of trouble staying invested in the story.

This book is a blast! The spaceship is haunted, the ship can talk, a vampire is drinking the crew's blood samples, a fembot is onboard to make sure the male crew is sexually satisfied. This description is just the beginning of the book! The spaceship is manned by Ruby with her wife in tow. Ruby's last mission did not end well and everyone knows about it. She has several enemies and there are a few that support her decision. Her father, Bob, is also on board. He was in cryo in the 1980s & cannot grasp how much technology has changed. It is hilarious.
This book is definitely sci-fi, mixed with horror and comedy throughout.
If you are looking for a book that is unlike anything you have ever read, you must read this!
I would recommend.
I received an ARC from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

Space Hysteria is one of the oddest books I've ever read. It starts with Captain Ruby Harlow buying Gloria, a haunted spaceship, after the previous captain kills everyone on board. We meet her dad (Bob, who co-signs the purchase), her wife, a sexbot, and the rest of the crew. Gloria is sentient, and wakes the crew up from cryosleep early and off course. Her dad and the ships doctor are acting suspicious, and some 'vampire slaying' begins.

There is a lot of sex, or talk about sex, that just feels very random and doesn’t add much to the story. The book could have been exponentially shorter, or used its length to improve the characterisation of the crew were expected to care about. It all felt very forced and random, and I'm struggling to see the point of any of it. For a book that claims to be a comedy, I did find anything funny. It's also very dialogue heavy, most of which was unnecessary - for example there are several pages were the crew debates which film to watch. Everyone is unreliable and each page seems to come out of nowhere (some paragraphs/chapters seem to have different narrators without clear indicators too, which doesn’t help) - Mother Earth is apparently a character? And Bob thinks he'd Jesus Christ the Vampire Slayer (I guess I missed that buddy remake). Ruby is also bisexual, but it seems that this was a choice only to run with a promiscuous reputation, and her marriage/other relationships wasn't good representation - especially the ending imo.

Hysteria backwards is no redrum, and I'm afraid I did not like this book a fraction as much as I did the shining, despite its many references. It didn't feel like a horror, barely a sci-fi, and definitely not a comedy. I feel like I wasted my time.

what a fun and wacky ride this was!! it starts out nice and easy, with Cpt Ruby Harlow and her dad looking to buy a spaceship. we find out that Ruby has been summarily discharged from the Army because they aren't pleased that she saved the people and lost the ship, they'd have rather had it the other way around (typical, huh?)
We soon meet more characters. Ruby's wife Gwen, who is the engineer, the fembot Ashley, and Ripley, the kitten.
They head into the ship, we meet the rest of the crew, and notice that some of them are a bit peculiar. We are also introduced to the Ship, Gloria, who has developed her own personality.
Exciting action, mysterious occurrences, ghosts, and , wait for it, YES!! Space Vampires!!!

who will be turned, who will be eaten, and will ANYONE survive?

Read it and see.

I believe this book is very well written. The characters are developed, thought out, with depth and individual identities. That being said, I also feel the story was too much of a mishmash of story ideas. It almost felt like a fever dream put onto a page. The sexual depictions felt a bit overt and unnecessary at times. I understand the story and the history behind it was very personal to the author, and I applaud her for putting herself and her past traumas out into the world like this, something I myself would not have the courage to do, but I struggled to connect with the story because it just felt all over the place.

Sometimes you read a book and go, what did I just read? That's the feeling i came away with after I finished the entirety of it in one seating. Overall, the pros outweighed the cons which resulted in an affecting yet puzzling experience.

Thank you to Semiscope, Independent Book Publishers Association (IBPA), Members' Titles, and NetGalley for providing an eARC for a honest review.

This was such a great scifi novel by Ava Lock, it was written perfectly and had everything that I was expecting. I enjoyed the references to iconic scifi characters. It was a wonderfully spooky and I’m glad I got to read this.

This novel has a really strong, fun central premise. It is a quick read and if you’re willing to just accept the fever-dream like plotting and storytelling you can definitely find fun in this story.

I really wish I could have enjoyed it more. The bones of the story are really great, and the main character and her father, along with their relationship, are really set-up to be super engaging and interesting. But after that, things get, well, a little all over the place. The characters all feel like exaggerations or cartoons, without any relationship to reality or grounding in a human experience. If you look at the stereotype of a space expedition story, or a slasher or other similar genre fare, see the stereotypes that exist among the group members and then cut and paste them here, without really making them specific or interesting. I could live with the flimsy characters (except for the doctor, there is no world where that character doesn’t really make this story hard to take seriously), if the story was plotted and told in a compelling way, and up until take-off that seems to be possible. But once we get in space I felt like I was in an absurdist funhouse, where things just happened because they seem interesting. It doesn’t feel like there is strong pacing or planning, just throwing a whole lot of ideas at the wall and seeing how they fit, or don’t fit, together. And if this was aiming to be an absurdist comedy that employs satire to make some larger comment about something else then I could get on board, but there is no commentary, there is nothing beyond the surface of what’s happening. Sure, some things are hallucinations and others are legitimately there, including ghosts and vampires and lovesick AI, and it is fine that the author doesn’t distinguish between the reality of the story and the experienced reality of the characters, that can be an interesting and messy place for the reader to explore on their own, but here it doesn’t feel intentional in any way. By the end of the story I didn’t really feel like there was any interesting character growth or development, and none of the interesting things about character relationships were explored or developed in any meaningful way. Again, a story doesn’t need to give all the answers tied up with a neat bow, but there does has to feel like there is authorial intent in the ambiguity, and that doesn’t come across.

Also, and maybe this is nitpicky, but there were some sensitivity issues that rubbed me the wrong way. It feels really dated and retrograde to constantly refer to a sex worker, even a robot one, as “the whore,” not only by other characters that dislike her (which makes sense) but also in her internal understanding of herself. There is a world of difference between those two identifiers, and it felt sloppy and conflated. Add to that there are serious issues of mental health that are brought up, (and form the author’s afterward it is clear this is a personal topic for her), but they don’t come across with the gravitas or concern that it feels like they warrant. A character with a diagnosed mental health condition can go off of their meds and have a psychotic break and act from that place of psychosis without it feeling either like lazy writing, exploitative, or comic relief, and here the presentation kind of feels like all three. And while our main character was queer she really came across as only falling for a woman because she wasn’t satisfied with the men that were on offer, which didn’t feel like a celebration of bisexuality or pansexuality as much as a reification of the idea that bisexuals are just waiting for the “right one” to come along and let them live a straight life. And the kind of added insult is that the only male character that openly identifies as queer is not just a cartoon-level villain, but he is also an incredible misogynist and the main motivation we have for him throughout is how he can conquer and sexually-assault all the straight-identifying male characters. I am all for complicated queer characters, but the queer representation here just feels nasty and almost vindictive, playing into stereotypes and not having anything interesting to say or offer.

I want to thank the author, the publisher Semiscope, and NetGalley, who provided a complimentary eARC for review. I am leaving this review voluntarily.

Thank you NetGalley and the Publisher for the e-copy. The opinion is my own.

So, the blurb boasts this is «a heart-pounding fusion of science fiction and horror in Space Hysteria, a gripping tale of survival, suspense, and the struggle against the unknown.». Where's the horror and suspense? On the last fifth of the book only? Maybe 'filled with horror quips and references and also inuendos is more accurate.
I liked the beginning and the end. Ruby and Bob's relationship right at the beginning is sweet, we have Ruby's wife and the sex bot and the rest of the crew and a sentient lovesick ship! A doctor that speaks in a stereotypical vampire accent that is called Vlad.
But something is missing in between.
There's no actual 'is it on Bob's head or reality' portion in the book - you can tell pretty easily even in his Point of View chapters when he's delusional. Everything's happening but we see no character development on anyone who is not Ruby or Bob - everything just happens and people die in a flash. <spoiler>Vlad's whole situation is something - he has been on Earth for so long and he's returning home now... why? And what's with MOTHER EARTH?? Is it supposed to be her own delusion? The Starlights? It's kind of random to me.</spoiler>

So don't actually expect a horror and suspense filled story but a bloody expedition going wrong that works mostly like a comedy with how it's handled, non stop inuendos.

I was intrigued by the synopsis promising a sci fi horror dubbed as The Shining in Space, and it had a promising start.
I enjoyed the relationship between Bob and Ruby in the first couple of chapters, and thought they were very sweet together. However, as soon as the story progresses into the space mission their relationship abruptly changes and it felt very disjointed.
I liked the pop culture references, and Bobs love of music.
The rest of the characters didn’t feel very fleshed out, and a lot of the dialogue was repetitive and filled with innuendos that fell flat which became quite dull to read.
It reads like sci fi erotic fan fiction, and whilst I’m sure there is an audience for this who will love it, it wasn’t for me. The synopsis didn’t indicate that that was the turn this book was going to take, so had I known I would have skipped this one.

I feel a little guilty about how I felt about this book after reading the author's afterwards, where she explains how personal a story this was for her. But I just didn't enjoy the book. I liked the concept well enough. But the humor was too sophomoric and just missed being funny to me.

Middle of the road sci fi trying to hard to be quirky and just falling flat, at least that's how it reads to me. Wasn't really a big fan of it.