Hell's Heart

by Alexis Hall

Gideon the Ninth meets Moby Dick in USA Today bestselling author Alexis Hall's science fiction debut, Hell's Heart!

Earth is a ruin, and the scattered remnants of humanity scavenge what they can from the stars under the watchful auspices of a grab-bag of collectives, corporations, and churches which are all that remains of what we once called society. Having long exhausted any conventional sources of energy, life in the solar system is now sustained by a volatile, hallucinogenic substance called spermaceti, which is harvested from the brains of vast cetacean-like Leviathans that swim the atmospheric currents of Jupiter.

Finding herself with no money and little to occupy her groundside, the narrator (“I”) takes a commission aboard the hunter-barque Pequod as it sets out in pursuit of precious spermaceti. Once aboard, however, she finds herself pulled inexorably into the orbit of the barque’s captain, a charismatic but fanatically driven woman who the narrator names only as “A”. As the Pequod plunges ever deeper into the turbulent, monster-haunted atmosphere of the gas giant, the narrator begins to lose herself in the eerie word of Leviathan-hunting and the captain’s increasingly insistent delusions; the only thing that might keep her grounded is the bond she develops with Q, a woman from the wreck of Old Earth whose skin is marked with holographic light and who remembers things otherwise lost.

At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.

Genres: Science Fiction, LGBT, Queer, Fiction, Horror, Retellings, Lesbian

464 pages, Hardcover

Expected publication March 10, 2026

About the author

One of those intricate British queers.

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Reviews

[Jassmine]

This still doesn't sound like a real thing that's happening to me.

[Cee]

“Gideon the Ninth meets Murderbot”????
Well, I mean, flamin' sign me up!

[Anna · Rating 5 out of 5]

This took me longer than I thought it would to read but that’s because it reads like Moby dick: long, meandering, weird, horny, sad, silly.

It’s not a line for line rewrite but it feels not far off. It hits all the major beats of the story the minor ones too. The story translates really well to space and sad horny lesbians. I had a great time and probably need to re read Moby Dick again!

[Dawson Sprinkle · Rating 5 out of 5]

It took me a while to finish this one, but it was worth it! I should preface that I was not assigned Moby Dick in high school, as such, I have not read it. My limited and vague understanding of that novel comes mostly from cultural osmosis and a brief phase in sophomore year where I got really into the Mastodon album about it, which is to say that my knowledge of this story is limited so I don't know how much of this book was taken from that one. Honestly? I don't think that's a bad thing.

The best pieces of this book are its characters (which I suspect are similar to the characters from the original novel just a bit queerer) and its world building. The way the leviathans are described and the way the hunting process was described was super interesting. All of the different churches and beliefs and cultures from around the solar system, even if they were briefly mentioned, gave this world so much depth. I found especially the mystique and confusion about people from Earth to be particularly interesting.

Much like the original (I imagine at least) this book is slooooooow moving until the last ten percent or so. Much of what happens before the climax feels almost like a serial tv show because the in-universe author's memory isn't great, but most of it is very interesting. But man! That last ten percent is going to stick with me for a while.