Dead Silence by S. A. Barnes
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Dead Silence
By S. A. Barnes
Nightfire, 2022
Claire Kovalik and the crew of the LINA are on a long-haul assignment fixing communications satellites when they pick up a distress call. Looking for any excuse not to return to Earth just yet, Claire directs her team to find the origin of the signal. When they arrive, they find a missing ship, the Aurora. Designed, “‘…to mimic a leisure vessel, a cruise ship for the ocean on Earth. Back when you could do that,’” the Aurora disappeared twenty years ago, six months into its maiden voyage. All 200 passengers and crew are presumed dead. Claire and her team decide to board the Aurora in search of something they can bring back to Earth as proof of their discovery. Predictably, things quickly get out of hand.
From the initial discovery of the emergency signal to the first exploration of the ghost ship, author S. A. Barnes adeptly controls the rising tension as readers discover the fate of the Aurora alongside the characters. The choice to begin the book in the middle of the story, after the initial exploration of the Aurora, is a smart one. The source of tension becomes not just the question of what they will find on the ship, but how they will arrive at this point in the end, with Claire the only surviving member of her crew.
Claire and her team encounter an increasingly unsettling environment as they work their way through the ship. In the beginning, things are rather innocuous. When they first board Aurora, the characters are met with the floating detritus of an abandoned cargo bay. “Shockingly normal,” items like bits of wood and hardware as well as a piano floating upside down which, while not normal, isn’t exactly the stuff of nightmares. Things quickly get worse from there as the crew discover words, “…scrawled across the door and onto the wall, in sloppy, unsteady handwriting from a dying marker.” The gradual reveal of the fate of those onboard the ship adds to the tension and propels readers through the narrative as they wonder what new revelation lurks on the next floor.
S. A. Barnes excels in creating vivid and realistic settings. The main passenger area is full of details appropriate for the level of comfort and opulence provided to the passengers. “The floor is pale-veined marble. Expensive-looking couches and chairs, bolted into place and made out of what appears to be real leather, lounge together in conversational groups.” Everywhere the characters look they find marble, gold, and solid hardwood (grown especially for the Aurora, one character is quick to note). But the terror continues to grow as they move through the ship. It’s no accident that the descriptions of the setting are paired with descriptions of gruesome scenes such as when Claire notices that, “The marble floor is chipped and pitted in several places as though someone took a heavy object to it. One of the pale leather couches is adorned with a dark smear that might be another bloody handprint or just blood in general.” The luxury is in direct and unsettling contrast with the gruesome reality facing Claire and her team, making the scene before them even more horrific.
As much as Dead Silence is a story about a ghost ship in space it also touches briefly on societal issues. Earth in the year 2149 is still grappling with the same inequalities present in our society today. On the one hand we have the wealthy and famous members of society taking a year-long trip on the space Titanic. On the other we have the crew of the LINA, working long-haul jobs on their tiny metal ship with a galley so small that, “It’s just a slightly wider area of corridor with a sink and a food rehydrator and a suggestion of a table in a hinged flat surface that unlatches from the back wall.” There are no marble floors here. No custom-grown hardwood or real leather.
All of this—the carefully constructed tension, deftly described settings, and purposefully plotted story—is why it is so disappointing that two-thirds of the way through the novel the horror elements take a backseat as the book morphs from a horror story into more of a thriller. The change happens fast, in just a chapter or two, and it is easy to point to that section as the moment the genre shifts. This makes the book feel uneven. And since by this point readers are familiar with the condition of the ship, the tension generated by that mystery is also gone. The suspense then must come from other sources not involving the same clever use of ghosts and gruesome details as before. The story becomes not what happened to the ship and its passengers but whether Claire can stop what’s going to happen next. And the tension and pacing suffer for this decision as both are interrupted by the sudden genre shift and choice to let the horror elements play a smaller part in the narrative.
Though the latter third of the book may come as a disappointment to readers looking for a horror story, Dead Silence is still a fun ride. Even if it is frustrating considering the care and attention to detail that was obviously put into crafting the horror elements at work in the first two thirds of the book.
—Amberlee Venters is a freelance editor and writer living in Northern California.