Every now and then, I come across a book of such immense significance that it is not only meant to be read, but also to be experienced. Books like this pull me right into the narrative, and the world the author creates becomes my world until the last page.

Andrew Salmon’s The Light of Men is such a book.

The Light of Men, a product of Cornerstone Book Publishers and Airship 27, is a science-fiction novel set in a German death camp during the last days of World War II. It is a work of grim power, and it plunges the reader deeply into this quintessential example of the horrors that humanity is capable of inflicting upon itself.

If this novel did nothing more than convey the death-in-life prisoners endured at these camps, that would in itself be a remarkable literary feat. The Light of Men does it in a manner second only to a first-hand account from a survivor of one of those hell-holes. The Gutundbose camp is a society in itself – a society reduced to the lowest Hobbesian denominator, where life is “brutal, nasty and short,” with inmates incinerated either immediately, or after they’ve been worked to their limit. Indeed, the camp itself’s life is destined to be short, for the war is winding down and the defeat of Nazi Germany is inevitable.

But how soon? And will anyone held at Gutundbose be alive when the war ends? Is it better to do everything possible to survive until that hoped-for day? Or has life become so unbearable that it is preferable to go “up the chimney,” the bleak euphemism the prisoners use to describe their ultimate fate?

Those themes alone would make The Light of Men an outstanding novel. But there’s more to it than that – much more. As mentioned before, this is not only a Holocaust novel; it’s also an SF novel.

The central character in The Light of Men is a Jew named Aaron Dieter – Prisoner #96432. We meet him as he is herded off the cattle cars with another fresh harvest of the damned. For all the others in Gutundbose – Jews, criminals, homosexuals, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and even the guards – that camp is an end that is either mercifully short or agonizingly long. Aaron is different. For him, the camp is the beginning.

Aaron has a mission. He single-mindedly protects one of his fellow prisoners, at all costs and against all odds. Who Aaron is, and what his reasons for keeping this particular prisoner alive are, constitute the science-fiction element of The Light of Men.

To say more about that element would amount to an unconscionable spoiler. The SF factor is introduced subtly, then builds to an explosion as bright and blinding as an incendiary bomb.

In the meantime, even as Aaron pursues his own mysterious agenda, a group of prisoners as Allied forces advance. To the plotters, Aaron is either a potential leader, or a possible traitor. Some in the ranks of prisoners and guards would like to see Aaron dead. But he remains alive, and enigmatic.

Salmon is able to make readers think deeply even while clinging to the edges of their seats in anticipation of what the next page will bring. The ending is unexpected – but no less so than the events that lead up to it.

Cover and interior art by Rob Davis provide an excellent complement to Salmon’s words. Salmon is to be commended for undertaking a particularly difficult task, and carrying it out in such a memorable manner. The Light of Men is a sobering, wrenching read – but, in the end, an uplifting experience even under circumstances of setting that render the possibility unlikely.

If you can only afford to buy one book, The Light of Men should be the one.