Of Monsters and Mainframes
Barbara Truelove
Trade Paperback / eBook
ISBN: 9781964721132
Bindery, June 2025, 416 pages

Greetings, readers, and welcome back to another book review! This month, we’re taking a look at a quirky, heartfelt story about a ship AI who wants nothing more than to safely shuttle its passengers between the stars but, after a series of unfortunate events, decides that it is time to hunt down and destroy Dracula, in Of Monsters and Mainframes.

Okay, so hopefully, right off the bat, you’ve already realized that Of Monsters and Mainframes is not going to be a traditional sci-fi spaceship book, because it is gloriously weird and charming in a way that really shouldn’t work, but it absolutely does. To sum up a bonkers plotline that hopefully avoids spoilers: Demeter, the ship AI for a passenger liner that travels between Earth and Alpha Centauri, quickly gains a reputation as a ghost ship after a voyage leaves all three hundred and twelve humans aboard deceased, and Demeter is convinced a vampire is responsible but has no idea how to report the truth in a way that is consistent with its core programming protocols.

Then things get strange!

Werewolves run amok, cultists of Cthulhu engage in some squamous behavior, an angsty Frankenstein (yes, he’s the monster; yes, that’s his name) rolls in with a robot spider pet/friend, and while Demeter is trying to navigate the appearance of almost every popular classic B-movie monster ever dreamt of during what should be routine passenger trips, the unlucky AI is also trying to figure out its relationship with Steward, the medical AI on board the ship who may or may not have some slightly questionable ethical modules tucked away in its code. Oh, and then there’s Steve. Steve’s kind of dead, slightly manic, and might be an unstoppable ghoul with a penchant for indiscriminate murder, but overall, he’s a swell guy/collective of alien organisms.

There are also occasionally some humans who appear as more than corpses, but we’re not here for them now, are we.

I think my favorite thing about what Barbara Truelove has managed to accomplish with Of Monsters and Mainframes, aside from the multiple times it made me laugh out loud at the sheer absurdity of certain situations, is how much heart this book has. While Demeter can be considered the protagonist, the story itself frequently swaps between multiple points of view, and each one does an excellent job of conveying both the character of whoever is currently being featured, as well as advancing the plot as a whole in a rambunctiously upbeat way. Reading this book felt like I was in the fever dream of someone who decided to mash all the toys in their playchest together just to see what would happen, but it all flows together so well that I found myself at the final pages in what felt like mere minutes after I had first started reading. More importantly, I cared about what happened to every single weird and slightly broken person in this novel in a way that only happens when I’m reading someone executing the craft of writing extremely well.

The other thing that I really enjoyed about Of Monsters and Mainframes was the glorious dichotomy between hard science fiction space travel (it’s very clear Truelove has more than done her research on stuff like gravity, inertia, the perils of cosmic radiation, and the inner workings of computer code) and the sheer cheesy fun of having a werewolf figure out how it’s going to make its way down a zero-G corridor to fight someone using ancient magical flying powers to completely ignore physics. In addition, the monsters are given the same level of concern as the sciencey stuff, which is awesome! What happens when a computer relying on reflected light entering its camera system tries to see a vampire? Well, obviously it can’t see the vampire, because vampires don’t have reflections! What happens when the captain brings everyone to the observation deck to observe a rare double moon spectacle on a nearby planet, and a werewolf happens to be on the passenger manifest? It’s certainly not going to end well for anyone involved, I can tell you that!

Overall, Of Monsters and Mainframes is one of those books that sings with narrative tension, bubbles with mischievous whimsy, and is just a lot of dang fun to read. I highly recommend it, and I really hope you’ll give it a chance.