Dead Silence

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I got so tired of being in her head and having the constant message of self loathing and being broken as a reminder of what type of person she was.

We know she survived, because she is here, but Claire is the first to admit she's an unreliable narrator, so everyone is having trouble believing her recollections. Authors always take a risk when they do things like that, whether the shift is in time, geography, characters, whatever. I like SciFy horror usually (horror is one of those genres I can sometimes handle but other times is just too much for me) and this book is asking to be put on my TBR. I think it worked because seeing only from her perspective really adds to the believability of all that’s going on. It’s always so satisfying when a book you’ve been highly anticipating lives up to your expectations.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. While it’s not very heavy on the ‘horror’ element, it definitely has some very scary sections that will keep you up at night (or for a few nights if you’re a scaredy-cat like me).

now act like a teenage girl, then woman up be brave, conquer all, until she needs a hug, but don't touch her, unless she wants you too, but run away once you do. p>Read about how we’ll protect and use your data in our Privacy Notice. While those similarities are there, and they’re obvious from the start, Dead Silence is its own unique monster full of great writing and well-developed characters. His work has been nominated to the Bram Stoker and Locus Awards and won the Wonderland Book Award for Best Novel in 2019.Boarding the ship, it quickly becomes evident that something had gone horribly wrong aboard the Aurora. The important thing about Dead Silence is that it never felt like it was ripping off another story, but it paid clear homage in many places, and I loved that element of it so much! Claire must fight to hold on to her sanity and find out what really happened on the Aurora before she and her crew meet the same ghastly fate. Plot was straight-forward, and if there was an expected Big Reveal, Barnes still left an additional trick up her sleeve.

She was unreliable and unlikable in all the ways that I enjoy most, and I loved the depictions of her PTSD and social anxiety (the latter of which hit very close to home! Although I did enjoy these sequences, they go on for just a tad too long and perhaps another edit would have moved the story on at a slightly speedier pace.For now, however, she is still the boss of a beacon repair crew floating in space and doing work she feels is already useless, given recent technological advances. Barnes clearly knows the rules of characters; evil is not enough to build tension; an author needs character foils as well. The vibe I was getting reminded me very much of Event Horizon—creepy, atmospheric, and tense as all hell.

I went into this novel expecting something to completely blow me away as the description was definitely hyping me up with excitement to sit back and read this from start to finish. It’s one of those stories where, every time I hear criticism for it, I’m thinking, “Okay, sure, I get where you’re coming from… but I liked that about it! Set in 2149, it's very much the beginning days of space exploration and there isn't a lot of futuristic tech that one needs to worry about. A second later, he leans out of his favorite hidey-hole, the “server maintenance bay,” which is little more than a nook with a door, near the engine room.A lot of this had to do with the way the story was structured, split into two separate timelines, the past and the present. The two timeline stories come neatly together and the author keeps the reader hanging on with the million-dollar question bubbling under the surface: ‘what did happen to the Aurora?