HUMANS WITH RHESUS-NEGATIVE BLOOD are descended from aliens. Or reptiles, or dragons. Or so we’ve been told. For years we’ve been ignoring those crazy YouTube videos about Merovingians among us, and by “we,” I mean the intelligent, well-informed readers of Perihelion Science Fiction. Still. How fun is it to imagine that an alien race left their bloodline here on Earth, and now they’re back, collecting blood from the RhNeg populace for some nefarious purpose?
Tons of fun!
Tons of horror, too, but I’ll get to that later.
This story opens with a lovable and unlucky Everyman telling us how little sympathy he gets, and the more he confesses, the harder I was laughing. “I know this guy,” you will think. Or, I’d like to know this guy. He’s a hoot!
It all starts when the wife and kids leave him home unattended. Perfect chance to take that bike of his out for a short spin. They will never know! Except, oops, he ends up in the hospital with stitches in his scalp and something about a blood transfusion, with a mean doctor acting like it’s Richie’s fault they’re low on his blood type.
You guessed it: Rhesus negative.
The nurses keep going on about this awesome Virtual Reality game, which makes Richie want to buy himself a VR game. He deserves it, after the sympathy he *didn’t* get for his injuries. Richie also gets the notion he and his wife should get away from the kids and the mother-in-law, her mother, the awful Irene, but this snowballs into a long drive, with the mother-in-law and kids, to the cottage from hell.
From the moment the hapless Richie sets off, we know the destination is going to be even worse than the road trip, and sure enough, that cottage is creepy. The windows look like eyeballs, and something about the place just feels wrong. Richie heads out to the local pub, and it isn’t the escape he was looking for.
Meanwhile, we meet some locals: Martha, the snoopy spinster/hoarder/cat-lady hired to clean the cottage before the guests arrive. And Reggie, the repairman, who is always broke and angling to get free drinks and free anything.
By now, we haven’t met a single character we’d like to hang out with in real life, not even Richie, because his luck really sucks and he just can’t keep his mouth shut around Irene, the impossibly awful mother-in-law. By Chapter 11, I had a revelation about the horror genre. We are not supposed to like the characters. We may even start anticipating, eagerly, their demise. I didn’t want to see Richie or the kids die, or even Leila, the good daughter to the horrible mother, but I was more than ready to see Irene sucked dry by blood-thirsty aliens in some dark, dank cave.
The cave. Oh, the cave. The VR headsets. Which, suddenly, all the characters seem to be acquiring, often as a gift. The headset never works as intended. Everyone who tries it ends up in a cave. Must be a programming glitch, every one of them mistakenly surmises. They all had opted to play some other game that didn’t involve a cave, space aliens, or a mysterious Mr. Ben.
The worst of the horror scenes involve dental chairs. If you are the least bit dental phobic, skip the scenes in which the character with the broken teeth is being treated by a “dentist.”
Richie has terrifying hallucinations even after he stops using the VR headset, to the point that everyone notices he’s not quite right. He worries it’s that head injury, some unforeseen consequence of the accident on his bike. He has more and more of these “time slips” that he can’t explain. Now he remembers the hospital nurses whispering together, a conversation that made no sense at the time, “something about his blood type matching exactly what was needed to create Rhesus X. Had he been singled out, given a blood transfusion containing an alien life form that had mingled with his own, the platelets combining to create Rhesus X, the rarest combination of Rhesus Y and Rhesus Z?”
And what does the landlord Wesley, the pub, the strange noises in the attic of the cottage, and alien sightings have to do with Rhesus X and VR headsets?
The plot thickens. Horrors multiply. Certain characters will die, and you will not be sad to see them go.
I cannot resist delivering one spoiler because it is a major complaint: Irene does not die. She does not lighten up, either. There is no character arc in any of these characters. Some are on the side of the aliens, and some are working against them, and in the end, I just wanted to see all the Rhesus X aliens blow up and go extinct. But we don’t get that kind of closure. We never do, in the horror genre. And that is my grievance. I read science fiction for fun and escapism, and I dodge the horror genre at all costs, but here, I was tricked into reading a NetGalley ARC labeled “Science Fiction” with no clue whatsoever that I would get more horror than science.
Roger David Francis is a talented young writer with an engaging narrative voice and the kind of wit we expect (stereotypically or not) of a Brit. His prose could use another round of tightening and trimming. (Let's blame his editor, not the author.) True, I’ve been around Sam Bellotto Jr for so long, I’ve lost patience with novels and prefer the “cut to the chase” succinctness of the short story. But even discounting that, I can only take so many repetitions of Irene and her whining and meddling and narcissism. You just don’t get to subject me to someone like that in a horror story where people will (oh, yes, they will!) blow up, and she doesn’t. No slack, Roger! I will cut you no slack for denying me the satisfaction of seeing Irene silenced for good!
Ok, I’m not sure if people from North Wales are considered “Brits.” Checking the author bio, I see Roger David Francis grew up in “the Midlands,” always fascinated by the supernatural, Sci-fi and Fantasy, haunted houses and mystical monsters. Ooh, and this: “He supports several local animal charities and regularly sends donations to help with the upkeep of abandoned donkeys and horses.” Good on you, Roger! He also works with Independent Local Filmmakers “to make fun, exciting and entertaining films.”
The humor alone makes the e-book a bargain at 99 cents. Buy with confidence!

After reading, I'm still not sure exactly how I feel about this. It reads more like a horror novel, but does contain VR headsets and aliens. Overall, a good read. The ending seemed almost rushed, although I guess that's understandable, since the main character's holiday was almost over.

I really enjoyed the book. Richie, the main character just recovered from a motorcycle accident and wanted to take his family away for a long weekend. He discovered in the hospital he had blood type rhesus x. They rent a cottage in the countryside. Then strange things start happening. Richie whenever he puts on his VR headset is transferred to a cave. Other people in the countryside get VR headsets and the same thing happens to them. Everyone in the cave runs into aliens who genetically engineered rhesus x blood. Now they want to harvest it for the trip back to their planet. Plot is original and the story is a fast and entertaining read.