Dead Silence

Product Information

p>The data controller is Headline Publishing Group Limited. It reminds me of the movie Ghost Ship from 2002 that gave me nightmares for weeks except, you know, in space.

A. Barnes’ Dead Silence, a SF horror novel in which a woman and her crew board a decades-lost luxury cruiser and find the wreckage of a nightmare that hasn’t yet ended. After twenty-six months in close quarters, I’m ready to murder him for that as much as for the snoring that rumbles through the air vents into my quarters, keeping me awake. In fact, if I have any complaint, it is that at times the story feels like a cross between an unproductive therapy session and suspense story, with not enough forward momentum on the internal elements. I think it worked because seeing only from her perspective really adds to the believability of all that’s going on. Unfortunately, there’s not a single likable character, and the main character is so loathsome it ruins any chance of this being a good story for me.It reminded be too much of Event Horizon I would start thinking of scenes from that movie when I was reading this book at some scenes that were close. The novel flows well with split narratives of ‘present’ and ‘before’, keeping the readers on their toes, which nicely breaks up the sequences on the Aurora with Claire’s broken recollections.

Her last memories were of her and her crew discovering the Aurora, a luxury cruise spaceship that had gone missing twenty years previously, during its maiden voyage.

Things are tense from the start, but as the crew discover bodies under beds, people horri­bly mutilated, messages on the walls, and fragments of messages on the Aurora’s communications sys­tem, that tension increases tenfold and fear makes an appearance, and then stays for the duration of the novel. Barnes plays nicely on human fears of both madness and of ghosts, carefully blurring the line between science fiction and horror. i got an ARC of this book back in august 2021, put off reading it until spooktober 2021, and even though i was so excited to be, as this bookmark declares, one of the first readers of this book, and even though the pub date got moved a whole month back, here i sit on delayed-pub-date-eve and i still haven't reviewed it. We’re led to question her memories and what she sees, and to sympathize with her struggles against her own self-doubt.