Jesse’s Reviews > Of Monsters and Mainframes > Status Update

It isn’t until the destruction of Steve the mummy that we get to the meat of the story. Demeter is of course scheduled to be scrapped, but I imagine that stowaway Frank and now presumed dead Agnus will commandeer the ship and crew it for what’s the now main focus of the story: destroying Dracula. I thought he was the one who deleted the werewolf video, but as it turns out, he wasn’t!

I was wondering about this Steve guy, but Steve is the fuckin’ Mummy. The emotional core of this section is Agnus, the girl who survived the werewolf attack. Agnus wasn’t a strongly defined character during the action as she spent most of it knocked out or dead. Whst little we got happened while Demeter watched her grow up and deal with the trauma of the werewolf attack.

Idk if it’s worth stressing about whether there is an overarching plot to this parade of Transylvanian follies. I am waiting for the Demeter AI to be brought back. At least, I’m hoping that it isn’t dead for good. It’s definitely more fun to read than Steward. After the Innsmouth aliens, it looks like we are moving on to Frankenstein’s monster of all things.

The segment where Demeter logs the kids’ activities over three or so years is heartbreakingly human. I’m highly bummed that it got “optimized” / lobotomized. This next peril is now from Steward’s POV. Steward is desperately avoiding contacting Demeter, I guess because of their poor working relationship, and the ship is being taken over by Deep Ones from Innsmouth. Is this going to be a parade of nasties???

I like this! Most of the book is from the ship’s main computer’s perspective, Demeter. It has subsystems as a literal representation of the subconscious and it isn’t very well-versed in directly handling humans for some reason. But, uh, it has no problem correlating the prologue nasty to Dracula, and also identifies the new cruise’s immediate threat as a werewolf.