A traumatised woman with amnesia finds her own dead body and sets out to uncover the truth of her demise in a race against time, sanity, crumbling realities and the ever-present threat of the Silhouette.
Magpie is out of ideas. She’s desperate enough to try anything. Just when she thinks her life can get no worse, she discovers herself, or rather her own dead body, partially buried in the mudbank of a river. A man stands by, a familiar stranger. What does he want? And why can’t she remember getting here? Why can’t she remember anything?
Unbeknownst to her, two pairs of eyes watch from behind an observation screen, in a room filled with computers and sensors. An experiment is unfolding, but is Magpie the subject, or practitioner? Reality becomes a slippery concept. And beyond the glass is something worse a hint of an outline, shaped in darkness…
Magpie realises all too soon that her journey has transformed from healing to survival. She must become the hunter rather than the hunted, with her missing memories the prey.
In turn brutal, beautiful and absolutely terrifying, Full Immersion is the latest speculative horror from Gemma Amor.
My most personal book yet, FULL IMMERSION is a dark-VR-psychological-horror story unlike anything else I’ve written to date. Part autobiography, part exploration of what it means to overcome even the most persistent of demons, I’m tremendously proud and excited that this will be my traditionally published debut from the wonderful Angry Robot books.
~ from Gemma Amor’s website
My Take
I’ve been following this author online for a while. This is the first book I’ve read by her. It’s a gut-wrenching read. It’s really good, just really tough to read. And I’m not a parent. We get two very different points-of-view: the narrator, who is the subject of the experiment, and the techs monitoring the experiment. So it’s a contract between what’s going on in her head and what’s happening in reality. Except where does one end and the other begin? Fascinating. Not horror in a gasp/frightening way; more of a creeping dread.