What haunts you when you can’t remember what you did? That question drives The Memory Shades, the latest sci-fi horror novel from Devon-based author David Watkins. In this The Memory Shades review, we examine a story that blends creature feature terror with psychological depth.
Prisoners on a distant planet, their crimes erased from memory, begin seeing ghosts of victims they cannot recall. Dr Hollie, who opposed the memory wiping programme from the start, investigates while something beneath the soil begins to stir. Watkins, known for The Exeter Incident and The Devil’s Inn, trades familiar British settings for an alien world and proves his instincts travel well. The result is lean, mean, and surprisingly thoughtful.
The Memory Shades Review
Some books make you wonder what version of yourself you’d be if the worst thing you ever did was simply erased.
Jon doesn’t wonder. He can’t. The worst thing he ever did, assuming he did it, sits locked inside a chip implanted in his skull. He’s on a distant planet, part of a workforce preparing a new colony for the people who will come later. Prisoners, all of them. Their memories were wiped clean in exchange for reduced sentences. A watch on each wrist counts down the days until their debt is paid and their pasts return.
Except Jon keeps seeing a woman. Dead. Wounds that tell their own story. She follows him. Stands at the edge of his vision. He thinks she might be the reason he’s here, the crime he can’t remember, but he can’t be sure. The chip won’t let him.
Watkins has been building toward something like this. His previous books, The Exeter Incident and The Devil’s Inn, planted flags in British horror ground. Monsters in familiar places. Evil wearing ordinary faces. Those novels worked because Watkins understood that horror lands harder when you recognise the setting. You believe in the terror because you believe in the pub, the town, the people who could be your neighbours.
The Memory Shades strips all that away. New planet. No landmarks. No comfort.
And yet.
The colony feels real. The work feels real. The dirt under their nails, the endless digging, the guards who range from indifferent to outright cruel. The military side is run by a cold commander, the kind of authority figure who enjoys the power more than he should. Dr Hollie runs the medical side. She opposed the memory wiping programme from the start, thought it was wrong then and thinks it’s wrong now, and when the prisoners start reporting visions, she’s the one who listens.
The book takes its time. That’s worth saying because a lot of modern horror forgets to breathe. Watkins lets us sit with these people. Learn their rhythms. Understand the weight of their days. The slow start isn’t a flaw. It’s the foundation.
Then the ground shifts.
Reports come in about creatures living below the surface. Worm-like things, big, staying near the coast, not a problem yet. A supply ship goes silent. Jon and a few others get sent out to investigate. What they find changes everything. The creatures have grown. Spread. They’re not staying near the coast anymore.
And the visions keep coming.
Watkins calls them memory shades. Ghosts of crimes the prisoners committed but cannot recall. For Jon it’s the woman. For others, it’s different faces, different wounds. The shades hover at the edges, reminders of a self they can’t access, debts they can’t repay. Hollie digs into the data. What she finds, the discovery that shifts everything, involves the chips themselves and what they’re really doing inside those prisoners’ heads.
The second half becomes a survival story. Prisoners and guards alike, trapped, outnumbered, running out of time and options. The creatures breach the perimeter. People die. The ones who live fight back with whatever they have. Watkins doesn’t flinch from the damage. Bodies break. Blood pools. The final act is all guns and teeth and people making choices they’ll never have time to regret.
Reading this prose is like watching someone build a fire with wet wood. Patient. Methodical. You think it might not catch, and then suddenly you’re warm, and you can’t look away.
Hollie drives the investigation. She’s not a fighter. No weapons training, no special skills beyond stubbornness and a refusal to look away. Those characters always interest me more than the ones who know how to throw a punch. Jon carries the weight of something he can’t name. The woman follows. He runs. He fights. He keeps going because stopping isn’t an option.
There’s a question underneath all of it. About whether the past owns you even when you can’t remember it. About whether wiping memories wipes the person too, or just leaves a hollow space where someone used to be. Watkins doesn’t answer. He just lets the question sit there, uncomfortable, unresolved, like the woman at the edge of Jon’s vision.
The genre needs books like this. Sci-fi horror can lean too hard on concepts and forget the people inside them. Watkins never forgets. The creatures matter because the people running from them matter. The shades matter because the people seeing them matter. It’s not complicated. It’s just rare.
There’s a moment near the end. Jon has to make a choice. Not between good and evil, those lines got smudged long ago, but between two kinds of wrong. Watkins lets him choose and then lets the consequences land. No tidy resolutions. No bows. Just the sense that these people will keep going because the alternative is worse.
This one will stick. Not because it reinvented anything. It didn’t. But because it remembered that horror, real horror, isn’t about the monsters. It’s about what the monsters force you to see in yourself.
The woman keeps watching.
Jon keeps running.
Sometimes that’s the whole story.
The Memory Shades by David Watkins
A brave new world…
Jon is being used as slave labour on a distant planet. The memory of his crimes has been wiped to help keep him compliant. But Jon has visions of a dead woman with horrific wounds. Who is she? Why is she haunting his thoughts?
Hollie was against the wiping of prisoners’ memories and is horrified they are seeing things. Determined to get to the bottom of the visions, she makes a startling discovery.
Neither of them are prepared for what comes next.
…as deadly as the old one.
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