REVIEW: Dead Silence (book) by S.A. Barnes

Dead Silence is sci-fi horror. I bought my copy new.

Review:

In this sci-fi horror novel, Claire Kovalik and her beacon-repair crew are doing one last job before their work is made obsolete. With no family or life to go back to, Claire isn't looking forward to finishing things up, so when her crew picks up a strange distress signal, she welcomes the chance to spend a little more time in space.

Shockingly, the distress signal seems to have come from the Aurora, a luxury spaceship that went missing more than 20 years ago. There's almost no chance that anyone on the ship is still alive, but the salvage claim could be extremely profitable for Claire and her crew, so they decide to check things out. Unfortunately, by the time they realize that whatever it is that killed the passengers and crew of the Aurora is affecting them as well, it's too late.

In the book's present, Claire has somehow escaped the Aurora and is considered the sole survivor. She has very little memory of what happened aboard the ship past a certain point, although she now suffers from near nonstop visions of her former crew members dying and/or killing themselves. The corporation that employed and rescued her has located the Aurora again and plans to go there, with Claire as a guide, the idea of which horrifies her, even if she can't remember all the reasons why.

This was such a good read. The setup and creepy atmosphere reminded me of the best aspects of sci-fi horror movies like Event Horizon. Even the characters had a sci-fi horror movie feel to them. There was Claire, trying to keep a grip on her authority while also keeping the details of her past history and potential mental instability from the rest of her crew. There was Voller, the stereotypical jerk character. Nysus was the techie geek, and Lourdes was the young and shiny one. Kane, the medic, knew the most about Claire's past, but even he didn't know everything. 

The ship itself was spooky enough on its own, filled with the frozen corpses of people who seemed to have gone crazy in their final moments. There was evidence that some of them had killed themselves and others. Claire was used to occasionally hallucinating people who weren't there, but when her crew members started to do so as well, it put everyone on edge.

As all the details came together, I started to resent whenever my reading was interrupted by things like having to go to work. I definitely didn't expect things to turn out quite the way they did. Overall, I really enjoyed this and plan to read more of Barnes' works.