"There's a reason we never went back to the moon

It was the supposed adventure of a lifetime.
Mia, Antoine, and Midori had different reason to
enter NASA's competition for a seat on the first
shuttle to go to the moon in over forty years.

But while they all wanted to escape earth,
they never realised there might not be a chance to come home ..."


Johan Harstad's novel "172 Hours on the Moon" is horribly amazing. A first warning for books in the horror genre is to confirm what genre it is before you start reading it - that's not quite what I did. I went into the book hoping for a science-fiction thriller. But that wasn't what I got.

This novel is most certainly a thriller, and it's a complete work of science-fiction, but it's horror. gruesome, horrifying horror (am I punny yet? A pun inside a pun, my head hurts). I definitely recommend this to you if you don't mind wetting yourself in the wee (another pun, my, oh my) hours of the morning.



The UK/Australian cover
of "172 Hours on the Moon"
It really is a YA horror story though. The style and quality of the writing is fairly juvenile but is well aimed at its age bracket. The youngest reader I'd recommend read this book would be about twelve, but if one is scared easily by what they read, only read this book if you are confident you can sleep at night.

I did quite like the characters. All three of them - Mia, Antoine and Midori - have personal problems in their lives that plague them, even whilst they are up on the Moon. But when Harstad attempts to introduce us to the characters - particularly Mia - he seems to overdo it. Mia really did love music, but the description used seems to be exaggerated and unbelievable.

I give this book a 3.8 stars out of 5. I really did enjoy the book, even though it scared the pants off of me, but there were serious lacks in his use of description and it wasn't enticing enough in places.