To Hell You Ride by Carissa Hardcastle is a science fiction creature feature. As an SF novel, it’s pretty tame—I guarantee that you won’t get lost in a swirl of Greg Egan-like technical dupery. To paraphrase the author herself, To Hell You Ride is a science fiction novel only if you squint really hard. 

The SFnal details may be slight in Hardcastle’s book, but it’s definitely a whopper of a creature feature. I especially recommend it to anyone who grew up reading Ace double novels and watching mid-century monster movies (like me).

The story starts when Effie Blake sees something unusual fall from the sky. The gigantic, oblong shape is dark in color but shimmers in the early morning light. With the help of complicated physics and geometric calculations (and a cute astrophysicist named Kelvin Curtis) she navigates the San Miguel Mountains near Telluride to find the crash site. “These mountains are my home,” she says, “and I don’t like mysteries. I just want to find out one way or another what’s going on.”

What Effie discovers living in the Rocky Mountains of Colorado changes her life irrevocably. Standing before her is an impossibly large crab and mantid-like creature (later estimated to be about the size of a UH-72A Lakota helicopter). Its triangular head features a mouth that opens both vertically and horizontally. When it looks at Effie with its four eyes, the space alien emits a horrible hiss similar to the sound of ripping paper. 

As it turns out, the government is totally aware of the new-found creature. No surprise, right? In fact, Effie soon discovers a thriving hive community of aliens already on Earth building a subterranean tunnel system. Scientists call them Azathothlin, creators of the universe, a nod to H.P. Lovecraft’s infatuation with cosmic gods. 

While Effie and Kel are busy falling in love (the sex scenes in this book are very good btw. Gold star to the author), Azathoth decides to come down from its mountainside hideaway and destroy the town of Telluride. There’s no need to hide anymore, reasons the creature. There’s nothing on the planet that can harm it.

Azathoth moves through town reveling in the way the humans scatter before it. The tang of warm blood paired with the sour stench of fear overtakes its senses, and it is nothing short of electrifying. “This isn’t a hunt,” says Hardcastle; “this is a show of power.”

The novel ends with the promise of a sequel. Effie and her new boyfriend survive the destruction of Telluride, but the Azathothlin are not entirely eradicated. If this was a movie instead of a novel, it would certainly contain an ominous off-screen warning during the finale—probably something like this: “Man’s folly has always been that he thinks he is the master of his domain. But in truth, man is soft, unprotected and vulnerable to the caprice nature of the universe.” 

[ To Hell You Ride / By Carissa Hardcastle / First Printing: May 2024 / ISBN: 9798986615875 ]