Psychopomp by Maria Dong

I fell head over heels in love with Maria Dong’s genre-bending debut Liar, Dreamer, Thief, so when Ms Dong herself reached out asking if I’d like a copy of her follow-up novel, the more sci-fi Psychopomp, I was absolutely gasping to say yes.

Psychopomp has lots of the same themes that LDT did, tho set on a planet and moon far, far away in space and, presumably, time. There’s an unreliable narrator suffering from mental illness who feels as tho she’s been abandoned by her struggling parents. Employment is a precarious situation, and the threat of betrayal by others is harder to process when you can’t trust your own facilities. But whereas LDT stays firmly rooted in logic to present its gorgeously satisfying puzzle box of a story, Psychopomp leaves several important questions unanswered, and I’m not entirely sure why.

The story itself is narrated by Young, a prison laborer on the moon Hibiscus. She was caught stealing on the connected planet Ung-Nyeo, and sent to the lunar penal colony to work off her debt to society. The prison actually isn’t terrible as far as incarceration goes, tho it does have big company town energy. Everything is expensive, and everything is charged to the account that the prisoner eventually has to pay off, if they stand any chance of making it back planetside. It’s a very accurate portrayal of the trajectory of the prison-industrial complex under late-stage capitalism, as is the entire politico-economic setting.

When Young accidentally rips through her work glove while on a drilling assignment one day, she starts to have what she thinks are the same kinds of hallucination that drove her parents away from her down on Ung-Nyeo. But when she accepts a reassignment to the very same cushy program that she’d previously washed out from, she starts to wonder whether she’s actually at the heart of a conspiracy that could rewrite everything for everyone living on both Ung-Nyeo and Hibiscus. Someone is definitely out to get her, but who can she trust when she can’t even trust her own brain?

Young winds up doing a lot of strange and terrible things in her quest for both the truth and a way out of what she learns is most likely a death sentence. I was 100% along for the ride right until the end, when I felt that there were far too many unanswered questions about Cable and the tether that connected moon and planet. Overall, however, I thought that this was a worthy exploration of the themes that have occupied Ms Dong’s writing to date, even if I didn’t feel that the plot threads were tied up as neatly as in her earlier novel.

But even if we never get an answer on the tether and the voices — I’m okay with not knowing things that are unknowable to the protagonist — I think this book would have really benefited from a discussion regarding the aftermath of what happens, given that Young had specifically rejected the idea earlier in the book as being inhumane. I would’ve happily read thirty pages more of her reconciling her beliefs with her actions, especially since she’d done that quite a bit with other topics in the preceding narrative. Perhaps those questions will be answered in a sequel, tho I’m definitely holding out more hope for a follow-up to the superlative LDT.

Psychopomp by Maria Dong was published March 25 2025 by Dark Matter Ink and is available from all good booksellers, including