Psst. Hey, kid. Ya like ghosts? Ya like space? Ya like ghosts in space? Well, do I have the nightmare fuel for you.
Dead Silence by S.A. Barnes is phenomenal. Let me just get that out of the way. It’s one of the best sci-fi horror books I’ve read in a good long while, and I’m definitely going to be reading it again soon. That’s mostly because I derive my life force from going back through books I already read to find the foreshadowing I missed, and boy oh boy, is there ever a lot here. This book has more why-didn’t-I-see-that-coming-style plot twists than you can shake a stick at, along with a healthy dose of blood and gore, an adorable, touching romance, a dramatic villain monologue at the end that actually works, and so much more.
One small caveat before we get into the meat of this review: this book deals with some very heavy mental-illness-related topics, including suicide and suicidal thoughts. If that’s hard for you to read about, this is your warning: this book may not be for you.
With that, on with all the reasons I’m obsessed with Dead Silence.
The Premise
Before we dive in, allow me to set the scene.
The year is 2149. Our main character is Claire Kovalik, the leader of a repair crew in space who are all about to be laid off and replaced by robots. As they wrap up their final mission, they pick up a distress call that turns out to be from the starship Aurora: a luxury starliner that went missing on her maiden voyage twenty years ago. Hoping to make a fortune by salvaging her, Claire and her crew board the ship. Unfortunately, it’s full of dead people and creepy messages written in blood on the walls. Sanity-warping space horror shenanigans ensue as they struggle to get themselves and the Aurora home safely without losing their minds.
The Good
Unreliable narration at its finest
I love me a good unreliable narrator, folks. I really do. And this book absolutely delivers. It only takes about a third of the book before you are completely convinced that you can’t trust anything Claire says, and any shred of trust you recover is utterly demolished by a string of fabulously-done little moments in the lead-up to the climax (Vera!!!! Y’all, I gasped). The upshot is that by the time you get to the highest-tension, highest-stakes moments of the book, you have exactly zero confidence that any of what Claire is telling you about her surroundings is true. Moments you might have seen coming a mile away become shocking twists simply because you had accidentally filed that particular datapoint away in the Probably BS drawer, and moments of safety and relief are tainted with a delicious garnish of doubt, fear, or even heartbreak. Seriously, I’m at the point where S.A. Barnes could write an entire series of novels that are just Claire trying to figure out where she left her keys, and I’d be on the edge of my seat.
Not only is the narration unreliable, but the up-close, zoomed-in style of Claire’s point of view is absolutely perfect for this kind of story. It’s so immersive and even cinematic at times. I can confidently say there was not a single dull moment in this entire book, and a lot of that was down to the excellent choices the author made in terms of POV and narration style.
Foreshadowing x1000
As I have passionately argued in the past, the balance of setup and payoff is one of the key elements of a good plot structure. You gotta pay off what you set up, and set up what you want to pay off. Now, does this mean that every single tiny detail you put into your book has to be leading up to something? Usually I’d say no, but S.A. Barnes may have just proved me wrong.
When I tell you that every single thing in this book has a purpose, I really do mean every single thing. There is not a single object or throwaway line or scrap of information that does not come back to (often literally) haunt you in some form down the line. The result is a collection of the best kinds of plot twists on the face of the earth: the ones you didn’t see coming but know you should have. The first half of this book is the author showing you a collection of bricks one at a time and then placing them out of sight, only to step out of the way in the second half and reveal that she was stacking them into a skyscraper the whole time. Every single brick has a place in the structure, down to the very tiniest clue. So much love and care went into crafting this story, and it really, really shows.
Basically, this whole story was a masterclass in foreshadowing, and a large part of the reason I’m posting this review now and not after I’ve re-read the book again is that I’m sure I’ll have the urge to make the entire post about just the foreshadowing, and I have other stuff I want to talk about too. For now, suffice it to say: it’s good. Very good.
That villain speech, though
I don’t want to spoil it, but there’s a scene at the end that’s simply too ridiculously good not to talk about. More specifically, I want to talk about why it worked, because it’s something that’s extremely hard to get right, to the point that some authors will tell you to avoid writing something like this altogether (terrible advice, by the way). As I mentioned earlier, what we are dealing with is a Dramatic Villain Monologue of the highest order, specifically of the we’re not so different, you and I species.
Is it exposition-dump-y? Yeah! But by that point, both Claire and I were boiling alive in our respective puddles of fury thinking, Yeah, you BETTER explain yourself. Could some lines have read as cliché? Absolutely, but they didn’t – not even a little bit. Not only is this kind of solemn, formal speech demonstrably in character for this villain, but it also makes perfect sense in context why this person would wish to offer Claire a detailed explanation before killing her. The classic, “But why are they wasting time arguing with the protagonist about good and evil?” plot hole is also rendered a complete non-issue by the circumstances under which the monologue is delivered.
And most importantly of all, when it comes to the we’re not so different, you and I part, Claire is the one to make that realization, rather than having it pointed out to her by the villain. And it’s completely in character. It’s so in character it hurts. We’ve just spent the entire book establishing the fact that this woman is primed by trauma to see even the most minor inconveniences and setbacks as one-way tickets to I’m A Terrible Person Town. Of course she’s going to hear all this and go, “Well, I guess that means I suck.” I would expect no less from her at this point. In fact, if she had instead turned around and gone, “Oh, you worm! I would never do something so morally bankrupt, not to mention rude,” it would have been wildly untrue to her character, even for this relatively late point in her arc. In fact, I’d argue that this scene is a huge step forward in her character arc, because just minutes after having that thought, she takes real, concrete steps to save herself. Because despite her guilt and the feelings of self-hatred that come from this realization, she also knows she still wants to live.
Anyway, TL;DR: very good villain monologue. 10/10 would shake my fist at in rage again.
Mental illness
As you’d expect from a book where all the characters descend into madness, mental illness is a heavily present theme in this book. And I think it’s handled really well! As someone who has struggled with mental illness myself, I completely bought what’s going on in Claire’s head. I get it. These are not healthy ways of thinking, but they are accurate in terms of how it feels to wrestle with that level of depression, guilt, and trauma. The way she defaults to the worst possible explanation of events – the one that allows her to maximize the blame she places on herself, even if there’s a more logical explanation to fall back on – is pretty on the nose. Likewise, her friends’ attempts to help her heal and see these situations for what they are rather than the depression-and-trauma-warped picture she has in her mind is quite a relatable journey as well. It’s a struggle anyone who has ever watched a loved one suffer from mental illness will be able to relate to.
Another aspect of this plot thread that I really liked was its resolution. Claire does not completely overcome the trauma of her past, but learns to live in spite of it, and to want to live in spite of it. To me, that’s a far more uplifting and realistic journey than one of complete and total recovery could ever be. This all forms a large part of the reason this book, despite all the blood and gore and ghosts and other miscellaneous nightmares it holds, left me feeling so weirdly happy and fulfilled.
About that romance subplot
After a lot of doom and gloom, I figured I’d finish off my list of good things on a high note.
Let’s have a show of hands: who here was expecting this creepy, dark, horrifying, gory ghost ship extravaganza of a book to have an adorable, touching, heartfelt romance subplot that moved me almost to tears on multiple occasions? Nobody? Yeah, me either, but damn!
There’s really not a whole lot I can say here without spoiling it, so I’ll just tell you: there’s a couple, and they’re really cute. And I think it was a really, really smart decision to add this in, because when the going got rough, it added an extra layer of stakes to the mix that solidified the feeling of pure, unadulterated terror you get from certain parts of this book. Again, I’m very hesitant to say anything else, because a large part of the tension in the mid-section of this book is of the “is the cute guy dead or nah?” variety, and it would be a genuine crime to spoil that for you. But I didn’t want this beautifully done element of the story to go un-acknowledged.
I’m not sure what else to say beyond the fact if this book had come out circa 2012, 15-year-old me would absolutely have started a Tumblr entirely dedicated to shipping them. Is there any higher praise than that? I don’t think so.
The Bad(-ish? But like, not really)
In all honesty, I don’t think anything about this book is bad. If anything bothered me even the slightest, tiniest bit, it’s that some of the dialogue was a little… stiff. Don’t get me wrong, there are places where it’s great, but there were definitely more than a few lines that didn’t quite sound like things a normal person would say. It felt like it needed one extra editing pass where you just read all the dialogue out loud and check whether it rolls off the tongue.
That being said, this did not ruin the experience for me in any way, shape, or form, and I was actually kind of tempted to redact this criticism altogether near the end of the book because of some lines of dialogue that Got me with a capital G. I’m not a big crier, but I will admit I came perilously close during one little group of scenes in particular. Tortured facial expressions and sad whimpering were aplenty. (If you’ve read it already and are wondering, it was the stuff said by a certain person who is hallucinating during/immediately after the part with the mattresses. If you know, you know.)
(Ok, fine – it was the line, “I see her right now.” It absolutely wrecked me, and I may never recover. If I don’t post on Thursday, someone come find me and save me from drowning in my own tears.)
The final verdict
I am giving this book 4.5/5 space ghosts, with that 0.5 deducted for dialogue-related nitpicking. I would have only taken off 0.25 space ghosts, but the thought of putting that many significant figures in a book review rating made my head hurt, so here we are. Overall, this book is amazing, and if it sounds like your cup of tea, you should pick up a copy immediately. It’s definitely going to be one of my new favorites.
By the way, I’d like to start doing book reviews like this approximately once a month, so if you have any recommendations, leave me a comment and let me know! I’m especially interested in sci-fi horror, especially works by indie or self-published authors, since that’s the route I’m eventually hoping to go down myself. But I’ll read just about anything. If you have a recommendation (whether you loved it or hated it!) let me know.
Happy reading!