New Arrival: Dead Silence by S. A. Barnes

 People expect horror stories to be set in Gothic castles, rickety houses, and abandoned amusement parks, but one of the scariest settings for a horror story may be right above our heads. Space is the perfect setting for a horror story; it’s cold, it’s dark, and as the tagline for the movie Alien says, “In space, no one can hear you scream.” Perhaps it is science fiction’s use of space as a place of limitless boundaries and optimism, there seems to be a dearth of horror stories set in the final frontier. S. A. Barnes’s newest book Dead Silence creates a different kind of horror story by setting the classic ghost story in outer space.

Claire Kovalik’s uneventful career leading a beacon repair crew is coming to an end. She’s staring down the barrel of forced retirement and her prospects are as dim as the endless cosmos outside her window. Then her crew comes across the luxury spaceliner Aurora, which was declared lost more than twenty years ago. She and her crew see this as a golden opportunity to make some quick money but exploring the ship reveals something bad is waiting for them in the Aurora. Claire and the rest of her crewmates are hearing strange whispers and seeing words scrawled in blood. The crew and passengers of the Aurora all suffered in their final voyage and Claire and her crew may be next.

The book’s tagline calls it Titanic meets The Shining, but there are a lot of such combinations that can be made like Ghost Ship in space, or Alien meets The Haunting of Hill House. Barnes takes advantage of the Aurora’’s emptiness, employing description and background that give an idea of what the ship was, which makes what it now is all the more terrifying. And Barnes shows it to be a terrifying place, her descriptions serving to establish a claustrophobic, tension-wrought atmosphere. Like any good ghost story, she also has a protagonist with the right kind of psychic baggage that the ship can use against her. Add in some potentially expendable members of her crew and you have a by-the-numbers ghost story that shows space, the final frontier, can absolutely be the final frontier of fear.