Review: Event Horizon (Novelization) by Stephen E McDonald
A Journey Through Hell and Back
Recently, readers of Incensepunk Magazine were treated to an interview with screenwriter Phillip Eisner. Eisner is best known to fans as the writer behind the 1997 cult classic film Event Horizon, directed by Paul WS Anderson. With its religious angle in a science fiction setting, the film is a foundational influence to the incensepunk genre. What most people don’t realize is that a novelization to the film was released to coincide with the film. I've managed to get my hands on a copy of the novel, my review of which follows below.
The author, Steven E McDonald, was a relatively unknown science fiction writer who wrote three other novels: a tie-in novel for Gene Roddenberry’s Andromeda, the novelization to the 1999 Walter Hill film Supernova, and an original novel The Janus Syndrome in 1981. His short story “Dragons of Light” appeared in the 1980 fantasy anthology Dragons of Light, edited by Orson Scott Card. The Event Horizon novelization makes me want to seek out McDonald’s other works, and saddens me that his career didn’t take off like the likes of Card.
Event Horizon is an entertaining read. The novel’s scope is on par with Alan Dean Foster’s Alien novelization, but whereas Alien was inspired by Lovecraftian lore, Event Horizon lies steeped in Christian eschatology, particularly Catholic. It is fairly faithful to the film, but is expansive in the worldbuilding set by Eisner and Paul WS Anderson. The characters are much richer, and the horrors of the ship’s doorway to hell are given more depth.
What sets both the film and McDonald’s novelization apart from typical science fiction horror is their unflinching embrace of Christian theological concepts as literal reality. Where most genre works treat religious imagery as metaphor or atmosphere, Event Horizon presents hell not as a psychological state or alien dimension, but as the actual Biblical underworld, complete with eternal torment, demonic possession, and divine judgment. The novelization expands on this foundation, giving McDonald space to explore the theological implications that the film could only hint at through visual horror.
The eponymous spaceship Event Horizon functions as a twisted inversion of Dante’s journey through the afterlife. Where Dante descended through hell with Virgil as his guide toward eventual redemption, the crew of the Lewis and Clark find themselves trapped in a purgatorial nightmare with no Beatrice waiting to lead them to paradise. McDonald’s prose captures this sense of theological entrapment beautifully, describing the ship’s corridors as having “the weight of centuries of sin pressing down upon them,” and the gravity drive’s sphere as emanating “the kind of darkness that existed before God said ‘let there be light’.”
The Catholic imagery runs deeper than surface-level crosses and Latin phrases, though the novel certainly doesn’t shy away from these elements. McDonald expands on Dr. Weir’s relationship with his deceased wife Claire, framing their separation not just as personal tragedy but as a crisis of faith that literally opens the door to damnation. In the book, Weir’s scientific hubris becomes a modern retelling of the Tower of Babel, man’s attempt to reach beyond his ordained place in creation, with predictably catastrophic results.
Perhaps most unsettling is how McDonald treats hell not as a medieval concept but as a cosmological constant. The novel suggests that what we call “hell” exists as a parallel dimension where the physical laws operate according to spiritual principles rather than scientific ones. Here, suffering has substance, despair has mass, and sin warps spacetime itself. This isn’t the sanitized spiritual realm of much contemporary Christian fiction, but rather a return to the visceral, corporeal hell of medieval Catholic teaching, complete with physical torment and bodily resurrection for the express purpose of eternal punishment.
The crew’s individual encounters with their personal demons take on the character of Catholic examination of conscience, but perverted into instruments of torture rather than paths to absolution. Captain Miller’s visions of his abandoned crew burning alive become a twisted form of the spiritual works of mercy–he is indeed visiting the imprisoned and comforting the afflicted, but in a realm where mercy has been inverted into cruelty.
McDonald’s expansion of the ship’s history reveals that the Event Horizon didn’t simply stumble into hell by accident, but was drawn there by the accumulated weight of human sin and ambition. The gravity drive, we learn, doesn’t bend space so much as it bends the moral fabric of reality itself, creating a tear through which divine justice can reach into the material world. This concept transforms the technological marvel into something closer to a theological instrument–less warp drive, more divine punishment.
Yet for all its commitment to damnation, the novel doesn’t abandon the possibility of redemption entirely. The climactic sequences, expanded significantly from the film, present genuine opportunities for sacrificial love to triumph over selfish fear. Miller’s final confrontation with the ship becomes less about destroying a haunted vessel and more about a man choosing to stand against the forces of hell itself, even at the cost of his own soul.
The novel’s ending, while maintaining the film’s essential bleakness, suggests that even in the face of cosmic horror, individual acts of courage and self-sacrifice retain their power to transform reality. McDonald seems to argue that hell’s greatest weapon isn’t its capacity to torture, but its ability to convince souls that redemption is impossible, making the crew’s moments of heroism not just dramatically satisfying, but theologically significant.
At a mere 218 pages, it is a brisk read that will take an evening or two and will leave you wanting for more. It’s a shame that the book isn’t as well known as the film, because it deserves to be discovered not just as a competent novelization, but as a serious work of theological horror. McDonald manages to create something rare in the genre: a story that takes religious concepts seriously enough to make them genuinely terrifying, while never descending into mere exploitation or cheap blasphemy.
The book succeeds where many religious horror stories fail because it understands that true theological terror comes not from mocking faith, but from taking it absolutely seriously. In McDonald’s hands, hell isn’t scary because it’s alien to human experience, it’s terrifying because it represents the logical extension of human choices, both individual and collective. The Event Horizon becomes a mirror reflecting not just what humanity might encounter in the depths of space, but what we carry within ourselves when we venture too far from the light.
I got my copy at my local library’s second-hand book store, but I recommend browsing eBay or used book stores if you’re looking for a copy (at time of writing, the paperback is over $100 on Amazon and no ebook version is available). For readers interested in how science fiction can engage seriously with religious themes, or for anyone seeking horror that operates on a genuinely cosmic scale, it's a worthy read that deserves rescue from obscurity.
Born in the closing months of the Reagan Administration, Thomas Hyland is a Southern California expat living on Hilton Head Island in South Carolina. A storyteller trying to master the art of writing. Support him at ko-fi. A YouTube channel is coming soon.
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I would love to get a copy of this book. Right now, I have other, more pressing expenses. but in couple or three months, I might just buy that one on Amazon. I had never really understood the movie until listening to the recent discussion. I had not even thought of it as religious, but Lovecraftian. Myself , I am hoping to write in the incensepunk genre, from the Orthodox Christian perspective.
What I like about the genre, or more specifically, the magazine, is that it wants 'light at the end of the tunnel', not 'everything ends' apocalypses with no hope.
The one thing that concerns me about this film is when we come to the hubris part of the gravity drive, and its purpose. If we look at it in terms of the effect of tearing a hole between our dimensions and the divine, then it is definitely a 'Thou shalt not'. But if we think of it as a simple attempt at FTL travel, with unintended consequences, then we run into a problem. Because God cannot have created an entire cosmos and forbidden us to explore it. Either we find a different mode of FTL space travel, or we use slower-than-light methods of travel, like an ion drive, etc., with cryosleep or something of that nature. I'm not good with anything that doesn't allow us to explore, or honestly, where no matter how dark, humanity eventually wins. Hear that, you Necrons and Tyrannids! Because from my chosen faith's world or universe-view, if humanity acts correctly (and maybe even if we don't), we will ultimately prevail; there is not someone who will be chosen over us.
Also, in the area of script novelizations, I have always thought - having read these about four and a half decades ago - that Alan Dean Foster's adaptations (and considerable expansions) of the scripts for the animated Star Trek series, the last few being book-length, were something not to miss out on.