Release Date: February 8th, 2022

Genre(s): Adult fiction, sci-fi, horror, space horror

Publisher: Tor Nightfire

Pages: 352

Rating:⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

Thank you to Tor Nightfire and Netgalley for providing me with an advanced finished copy in exchange for an honest review. All opinions are my own.

Synopsis

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.

Review

Space horror is one of those genres that I love, but don’t read as often as I’d like. So when I saw Dead Silence, I was so excited to pick it up – and I was not disappointed! 

The story takes off right away, while at the same time introducing all of the characters with ease. This book has one of my favorite beginnings, where you learn from the start that something’s gone wrong, but don’t know all of the details. And the questions introduced at the beginning combined with the fast pacing made it really hard to put this book down. 

I also really liked the way the larger corporations in this book play into setting the stage and some of the greater conflicts that exist in this story. Dead Silence feels like a great book for sci-fi readers that are intimidated by endless worldbuilding, as you get just enough to the setting to make the world feel real while also being able to follow the story easily. There’s no complex scientific explanations, and as much as I love these in books, I loved being able to take a backseat on that with this book and still feel like all of it was plausible. 

One of my favorite aspects of space horror is that it plays on our fears of the great unknown, and Dead Silence does this so well. There’s an infinite number of possibilities of what realistically could be happening on the Aurora, and that played into the suspense so well all the way to the end. 

I highly recommend Dead Silence to fiction readers that enjoy horror and are looking for a sci-fi setting that’s not too heavily detailed, and a book that’s hard to put down.

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