Dead Silence – Review

Hi everyone! January was such a great reading month for me, and I ended it with a bang with this great sci-fi horror novel! This book made me crave more books that are sci-fi/horror, so if you have any recommendations please leave them in the comments below! This book comes out today, and if you’re looking for a sci-fi/horror I think this is a great one to start with!

Dead Silence
by S.A. Barnes
Series: Standalone
Release date: February 8th 2021

Genre: Adult, Science Fiction, Horror
Rating: ★★★★☆.5

Titanic meets The Shining in S.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.

A GHOST SHIP.
A SALVAGE CREW.
UNSPEAKABLE HORRORS.

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.

Wow was this such a fun and creepy read! I devoured this so quickly and when I wasn’t actively reading it, I was thinking about reading it. I ended up not being able to read this at night before bed which is when I usually read because being in the dark while reading this was a little creepy, considering it takes place on an abandoned space luxury “cruise ship” that is mostly dark.

Claire and her team pick up a distress signal that’s much farther out than most people would be in space, but decide to go investigate it anyway to put off having to return to Earth. What they find is the very first luxury space liner called the Aurora which has been missing for over 20 years. No one knows what happened to the ship and it’s passengers, so the team figures that if they bring back proof that they found the ship they will get a nice enough reward to get what they all want.

Once they enter the ship though, unexplainable things start to happen to the crew. Claire herself has a pretty tragic backstory, and often sees things that aren’t there, which really contributed to the whole haunted ship thing. Were there actually ghosts or was it just Claire being an unreliable narrator? This story is also told in past and present, with the past being when they first discovered the ship, and the present being Claire in what is kind of like a mental facility after the discovery of the ship. That made it even harder to figure out if it was all in her head or not, but clearly something happened with her crew, but what was it?

The pacing was pretty good, there were a few parts where we really got into Claire’s head where it dragged just a little bit, but not so much that I was put off from the story. The action though was gruesome and the mystery was satisfying. The answer to what happened to the ship and it’s passengers was not at all something that I expected and surprised me, which was great!

The writing was also pretty seamless, it hit that sweet spot of not really noticing that you’re reading and you can really imagine the story instead of trying to interpret what is being said.

Honestly, I would love to see this as like a Netflix movie, I would 100% watch it because the visuals from this book were amazingly gory. If you needed one last reason to pick this book up, Titanic meets The Shining is a GREAT way to describe this book.

Dead Space comes out today, and I highly recommend picking it up!