Dead Silence

Product Information

With a compelling haunted-house-in-space frame, excellent worldbuilding, vivid imagery, biting social commentary, sustained tension, and a storytelling style that seamlessly moves between the mortal danger of the present and Kovalik's unsettling past, this sf-horror blend will resonate loudly with readers. I wish that I wasn’t such a chicken because this sounds really good and I’m kinda tempted to try but also… I’m just The Ultimate Chicken™️?

They were complex and very real, making them easy to associate with, even as they all existed across various shades of gray. I’m not going to spoil it, as my reviews are always spoiler free but when you get to the bit where it explains what happened and why certain characters are experiencing certain things I just felt like it wasn’t explained in a great amount of depth and was accepted too quickly. I was enthralled during the first half of the book, loving the haunted ship and how it was messing with Claire and her crew, as well as how Barnes slowly reveals Claire’s backstory and why she is already perhaps a little unreliable in her own mind in terms of what she thinks she is, or isn’t seeing. Kate’s Rating 7: Pretty serviceable space horror with some good scary moments, but also pretty familiar in terms of plot points.However, there is also a dash of humor and a blossoming love, both of which work to balance out the constant sense of dread and impending doom as well as the presence of bloody ghosts, including some from each crew member’s own past. We’ve been living on other planets and moons for a hundred years and visiting space for even longer than that, and still, a tiny piece of metal with misaligned grooves can fuck everything up.

My biggest issue though was the narrator SHOUTING every time the story had emotional or scary dialog! Soon those things take the backseat as the crew hear things they’re not supposed to hear and start having powerful hallucinations as they work to crack the mystery.Expertly paced, this novel is full of old ghosts in every way possible, and will haunt you long after the last page. First let me just say I enjoyed Dead Silence, though perhaps not as much as the majority, so I also want to preface this review with a confession: I am extremely picky when it comes to sci-fi horror. I’ve read a few good horror fantasies last year, but this is the first horror sci-fi book I’ve read in quite some time. A. Barnes being chatted about on Twitter and Goodreads, I couldn’t help but have my interest piqued.

Granted, that's a challenge with a self-absorbed narrator; I just note that that can be an element that can bring the psych in psychodrama to the forefront. From there, it shifts gears, and while the story does build to a different sort of tension, we never regain the jittery creepiness of the first half. Tony previously spent five years writing The Greatest Scrum That Ever Was, a history book very few people bought. Adding to the overall atmospheric tension is that you don’t know if you are dealing with an unreliable narrator or not. Some of the side characters aren't developed very much, but I felt like that was very in keeping with Claire's antisocial personality.Resource-limitations and gravity are not really a concern and are deal with a hand-wavy 'gravity generator' type scenario. It’s not difficult to do these days, but with Reed, a junior investigator from Verux’s QA Department, I’m almost always clear. 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.

She had fractured her skull while trying to stop him, resulting in her retaining no memory beyond a vision of seeing Lourdes's ghost hovering over Claire and Lourdes's corpse.Their salvage claim could solve the entire team’s problems and take away all worries about the future. to be fair, it's a pretty exciting opportunity: the discovery of The Aurora; a luxury spacecraft that went missing on its maiden voyage twenty years ago carrying hundreds of passengers—the rich, the famous, and the infamous—whose disappearance became the stuff of legend, speculation, a bermuda-triangle-grade mysteeeeerious phenomenon, and here it is—the chance to make history, solve the mystery, or—for the less noble crew members—fill their pockets with bling. 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! They're surprised to find that the signal is being sent from the famous luxury liner, Aurora, missing since its maiden voyage more than 20-years ago. In the end, Claire’s part in the story holds up well, but the ultimate reason for the Aurora’s plight is slightly anticlimactic and rather low-key, even if it does fit with the overall mood of the book.