Author Alexis Hall
Publisher Tor Books
DOP March 10, 2026
Quick Take
Hell’s Heart is Alexis Hall’s first science fiction novel and a queered retelling of Herman Melville’s Moby Dick, recasting Ishmael as a trans woman and dropping her into a neon-drenched, gritty space future where Earth is long dead and humanity survives on spermaceti harvested from the brains of enormous quasi-psychic space creatures swimming the atmosphere of Jupiter. It’s an audacious premise executed with genuine invention and a voice that crackles off the page. It is also, at times, a frustrating read for anyone who came to Hall expecting the emotional devastation of their romance work. This is not a romance, and it doesn’t entirely fill the gap that absence leaves.
About the Author
Alexis Hall is a USA Today bestselling British author whose romance novels, including Boyfriend Material, A Lady for a Duke, and Something Extraordinary, have earned them a devoted queer readership and a shelf full of starred reviews. Their gift for voice, banter, and emotionally intelligent character work has made them one of the most celebrated names in queer fiction. Hell’s Heart represents a genuine genre departure, and however you feel about the result, the willingness to take that risk at the height of their commercial success deserves acknowledgment.
What Is Hell’s Heart About?
The narrator, referred to only as “I,” takes a commission aboard the hunter-barque Pequod after finding herself with no money and little to occupy her groundside. Once aboard, she finds herself pulled inexorably into the orbit of the barque’s captain, a charismatic but fanatically driven woman she names only as “A.” As the Pequod plunges deeper into the monster-haunted atmosphere of the gas giant, the narrator begins to lose herself in the eerie world of Leviathan-hunting and the captain’s increasingly insistent delusions. The only thing that might keep her grounded is the bond she develops with Q, a woman from the wreck of Old Earth whose skin is marked with holographic light.
If that sounds familiar, it should. The bones are Melville’s, reassembled in neon.
Where Hell’s Heart Shines
The voice is the book’s greatest achievement, and it would be churlish not to say so clearly. Hall writes the narrator with a playful, self-aware quality that makes even the densest passages of worldbuilding feel like a conversation rather than an obligation. The fourth-wall breaks are deployed with enough restraint to feel like wit rather than gimmick, and there are passages in the opening act especially where the prose is so alive and specific that you understand completely why Hall’s editors were excited about this one.
The worldbuilding is super-saturated Fresh Fiction in the best sense. The solar system Hall builds here has texture and internal logic. The atmospheric domes, the class stratification of colony life, the quasi-religious reverence that has grown up around the Leviathans, all of it feels considered. This is not a writer gesturing vaguely at “space” and calling it science fiction. Hall has done the work of imagining a world, and that comes through.
The trans representation in the narrator also deserves recognition. Her identity is present and specific without becoming the primary lens through which every scene is filtered. She is a trans woman navigating a universe that has both evolved past some of our current cruelties and invented entirely new ones, and Hall renders that with the same nuance they bring to queerness in their historical fiction.
Where It Loses Its Grip
The honest difficulty with Hell’s Heart is one that Hall themselves seem aware of, given the note on their own website clarifying that this is not a romance. For readers who found their way to Hall through Boyfriend Material or A Lady for a Duke, the emotional architecture here is genuinely different, and the adjustment takes longer than expected.
Hall’s romance novels work because the reader is always anchored to a character whose inner life feels urgent and legible. The unnamed narrator here is engaging company but keeps the reader at a certain distance by design. That’s a defensible artistic choice in a Moby Dick retelling, where Ishmael has always been more witness than protagonist. But it means that when the emotional stakes are meant to peak, the investment isn’t quite there to meet them.
The relationship between the narrator and Q, which ought to be the emotional counterweight to the captain’s obsession, develops in ways that feel slightly rushed given how much narrative space the Leviathan-hunting receives. You want more of them together, and the book doesn’t always give it to you.
Is Hell’s Heart Worth Reading?
That depends on what you’re coming for. If you’re a Hall completist, or if you love Gideon the Ninth-style queer science fiction with a distinctive and irreverent voice, there is genuinely a lot here to enjoy. The prose is excellent, the world is vividly realised, and the ambition of the project is real.
If you’re a reader who comes to Hall primarily for the romance, the emotional pull that makes their best work so memorable, you may find this one harder going. It’s a book that commands admiration more readily than it commands feeling, which for an author whose greatest strength has always been making you feel things, registers as a gap.
That’s not a failure. It’s the natural tension of a talented writer testing new limits, and the limits they’re pushing against here are real and interesting ones. But it does mean Hell’s Heart sits somewhat apart from the rest of Hall’s body of work, and readers should go in knowing that.
Final Verdict
Hell’s Heart is a solid, inventive science fiction debut from an author with an unmistakable voice and the creative courage to use it somewhere unfamiliar. It doesn’t hit the emotional heights of Hall’s best romance work, and the relationship at its centre needed more room to breathe. But as a statement of range and a willingness to experiment, it matters. Alexis Hall is clearly not interested in writing the same book twice, and even when that restlessness produces something uneven, it produces something worth reading.
This review is based on an advance reader copy. Hell’s Heart is available now.
Queer Book Club 