Clever, ambitious, and only a little bit confusing.

Fear of the Dark follows two men with names that end in “-er,” an android with poor communication skills, a spaceship crew, a few medics, "-er"'s sister, an alien woman with two hearts and strong arms, and some goopy aliens.

Upon entering the story, you can immediately feel the intimacy that the author has with this world. It’s clearly well-developed and intricately thought out. There are so many layers to many of the characters, their pasts, their relationships, and the spaces they occupy. As someone who hasn’t read the companion novels, I felt a little bit out of the loop, but the expansiveness of this world is still palpable after only reading this entry to the Nexus universe.

While there were a fair share of times when I felt more than a little stupid, the reveals left me with “ooh” moments and the redemption of my reading comprehension skills. I would recommend going into this book with either a) familiarity with the Nexus universe or b) a flexible ego.

But I do think that at times the structure could have been simplified, even for those who have read Harrison’s previous novels. There’s a lot going on here with previous contextual elements, timeline jumps, perspective shifts, and mistaken identities. As I said, ambitious.

There were also too many characters. While some were very well fleshed out, others were superfluous. I'm guessing they exist because they were necessary in previous Nexus books, but in this case I often found myself being confused by who people were and what their role was in the story. It felt like some of the crew members could have been merged together and nothing would have been lost.

But I think it was, overall, well done. Fear of the Dark is entertaining, fast-paced, and offers interesting settings bordering on Vandermeer-esque. Harrison is witty and sentimental, and this comes across in his prose and the relationships between (a few of) his characters.

Recommended for: fans of Star Wars and Ditto the Pokémon.