The Bleeding Horizon, by Philipp Parrish

This book is labeled dystopian science fiction, which is such a contradiction of genres I immediately felt drawn to it and wanted to read it. Because let’s be honest – sci-fi stories often tend to be utopian, at least on certain fronts. Take Star Trek, for example (and I feel good using this example, because Philipp references Star Trek himself multiple times throughout the book): You don’t see anyone in these series starving or lamenting blackouts or their medical bills. Society, so it seems, has finally put its shit together. Now the problems arise from exploration and the unknown. To boldly go where no man has gone before!

That’s rather the opposite of the dystopian, where society often tends to be the problem itself. Homo homini lupus, man is a wolf to another man, as the old Romans said. So dystopian sci-fi is breaking the mold, which can be a great thing to do! And Bleeding Horizon delivers – it takes place on earth, somewhere in our rather dim-looking future.

It’s one of the strong points of Phillips storytelling, that he’s able to create this bleak atmosphere. The dystopian part is right on point! And Phillip wastes no time explaining stuff – he’s clearly following the “show, don’t tell” church of storytelling. Which, in the end, was what kind of broke the novel for me.

That’s my personal opinion, but I feel like Philipp is taking this approach to an almost dogmatic level, which confused me a lot. I was like, can I have some context told on the side with my main course of dystopian showing, please?

In all fairness, things are starting to make more sense and slowly coming together with the start of the third chapter. The prose is beautifully written, with an artistic style (sometimes contradicted by disturbing content), but at this point I had really trouble following the timelines and engaging with the book. In the end, I found that the story of Augusta Maars didn’t really resonate with me.

Recommended for fans of bleak atmosphere, but with a warning label that there’s a lot of jumping between points of view and timelines, so you need to engage every last bit of your brainpower. (Mine wasn’t strong enough, sadly.)