Science Fiction & Horror, two genres that don’t mix often. It is impossible to discuss stories of this nature without mentioning the film Alien and in S.A. Barnes’s Dead Silence, that same blend of space-based science fiction and horror come together elegantly. A ragtag repair crew, a deserted ship that went missing twenty years ago, a protagonist who brings a great deal of baggage to the endeavor. Barnes writes under the Stacey Kade name across a breadth of genres.
Titanic meets The Shining in this SF horror 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.
Claire Kovalik is days away from being unemployed—made obsolete—when her beacon repair crew picks up a strange distress signal. With nothing to lose and no desire to return to Earth, Claire and her team decide to investigate.
What they find at the other end of the signal is a shock: the Aurora, a famous luxury space-liner that vanished on its maiden tour of the solar system more than twenty years ago. A salvage claim like this could set Claire and her crew up for life. But a quick trip through the Aurora reveals something isn’t right.
Whispers in the dark. Flickers of movement. Words scrawled in blood. Claire must fight to hold onto her sanity and find out what really happened on the Aurora, before she and her crew meet the same ghastly fate.
Claire Kovalik is leading a team responsible for repairing beacons in the farthest reaches of the galaxy, they are nearing the end of their job when their sensors pick up a distress call. It turns out to be the Aurora, thought to have disappeared twenty years prior (and 650 occupants presumed dead) when communication came to an abrupt halt, including the “reality tv show.” It was the first of its kind, a luxury space vessel for the richest of the rich, not unlike the Titanic. Claire convinces her crew, Kane, Lourdes, Voller, and Nysus, to board the suddenly found vessel in the hopes of capturing some of the riches aboard so she can start her own company. Voller, in particular, continually butts heads with Claire and the decisions she makes. Lourdes isn’t exactly trusting in Claire’s leadership and the only real ally Claire has is Kane. So you might saw this crew isn’t exactly a family in the same way, for example, the crew of the Rocinate or Serenity are.
What they encounter once they board the Aurora, the dread factor increases significantly. Tensions rise, strange noises are heard, things are seen. Claire and her crew question their sanity. Claire has been questioning her sanity for many years, ever since she was the sole survivor of a disaster on a Martian colony, and the abandoned ship is dredging up ghosts and old memories. That’s before she and her crew start to see the dead bodies that have been on the Aurora for twenty years. All systems are offline and it seems like the ship itself is as dead as its occupants. Then the crew begins to feel a dark presence on the ship they can’t quite explain.
Told in Claire’s first-person point of view, the story unfolds in two timelines. One timeline is the present with Claire being interrogated by the Verux Corporation, who employs her (and her crew), as the sole survivor returning from her ship and the Aurora. The other timeline, also through Claire’s point of view, is her recollection of the experience aboard the Aurora, how she managed to survive. Part of what I typically enjoy about novels told with some form of parallel narratives is to try to figure out if those narratives will intersect. That pull of the two narratives and that question comes to a rather interesting “answer.”
Tension and dread…two key elements of a horror novel and Barnes nails these two elements powerfully and perfectly. There’s a simmering sense of unease from the opening of the novel through to the conclusion. One of the more prevalent tropes in Haunted House stories – and this is a Haunted House story, just set in space like Alien – is that the characters are haunted before they enter the haunted house. Claire fits that trope perfectly, but what makes her standout so much is Barnes ability to infuse the character with raw emotions and believability. She’s an unreliable narrator, but I as the reader, wanted to believe what she was saying largely because Barnes put in some great foundational character work early on in the novel and added to that empathy as the novel’s pages continued to turn rather quickly.
S.A. Barnes has pulled off a fantastically thrilling space-horror novel that has echoes of some of the best horror novels and movies, Alien, The Shining, and A Head Full of Ghosts immediately come to mind. I also think readers who enjoyed Mur Lafferty’s Six Wakes will enjoy Dead Silence. Much like her character Claire is much more than the trope of her character type, Dead Silence is much more than the novels/stories it echoes.
Another winner from Tor’s Nighfire imprint.
Highly recommended
© 2022 Rob H. Bedford
Hardcover | February 2022 | 343 pages
Excerpt: https://tornightfire.com/read-the-first-two-chapters-of-dead-silence-by-s-a-barnes/
Author Web site: https://www.staceykade.com/
Review copy courtesy of the publisher
