Review: Dead Silence, by S.A. Barnes

Titanic meets Event Horizon in this 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.

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 is the Aurora, a famous luxury spaceliner 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 search of the ship reveals something isn’t right.

Whispers in the dark. Flickers of movement. Messages scrawled in blood. Claire must fight to hold on to her sanity and find out what really happened on the Aurora before she and her crew meet the same ghastly fate.

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My Review

I ordered this book after seeing it on one of the GoodReads challenge lists. I hadn’t heard of it before although the author’s name pinged something in my brain. I liked the description and thought it would be entertaining.

Oh boy! I read the hype at the beginning of the book when it arrived and thought it might be exaggeration, just a touch.

I was wrong! It’s really good!

I read this book in an evening. At one point I had to skip forward to find out what happened, and then I went back once I was reassured at least some people would be alright.

The story is told from the perspective of the traumatised and quite likely psychic Claire Kovalik, team lead for a maintenance crew. The five-person crew service the comms network that’s scattered across the solar system, they live for weeks at a time on a tiny space vessel, being picked up and dropped off by larger freighters. It’s Claire’s last rotation, at 33 she’s considered too old, and due to her history, too unstable, to carry on.

Then, they hear a beacon. After an argument, they head out into uncharted territory to find the source of the beacon. What they find is the first and only luxury space liner. Twenty years lost, the Aurora’s disappearance destroyed the company that built it, allowing Verux, the company Claire works for, to take over. It’s worth a fortune to those who find and salvage it. But there are secrets.

Claire and her crew go aboard the Aurora and find terrible things.

We swap to Claire in the mental hospital, some time after she boards the Aurora with her crew. She doesn’t remember much. Her old mentor, Max, and a bully from Verux, Reed, a nepo-hire, who is determined to prove she murdered her crew for money, are questioning her. Claire tells them everything she can remember, up to the point where her skull is fractured. The hallucinations, the violent deaths of her colleagues, the developing romantic relationship between her and Kane, her number two, and the plan to get the Aurora back to the comms network so they can call for help.

Reed fails and Max recruits Claire to go back to the Aurora with him – she’s the only person who survived. Her mental illness might actually have helped. When they get there, Claire finds the neatly wrapped bodies of three of her colleagues and the last hallucinating in a room padded with mattresses. She also finds a conspiracy that Verux really don’t want to get out.

There is madness. There are explosions.

I loved it!

Claire is a beautifully flawed character. She blames herself for everything when it’s clearly not her fault, she refuses to let people care for her and fears what will happen when they do – convinced she’ll cause their deaths somehow, and she’s severely traumatised by events of her childhood. Also, she can see ghosts.

The relationship between Claire and Kane is sweet and develops naturally as they go through difficult events. The resistance Claire feels about getting close to people is a response to her trauma, and Kane’s calming presence, knowing her past, slowly helps her build trust in herself and him.

The corporate evil of Varux is entirely believable – destroy a competitor and then try to clear up the mess by murdering people. I know this has happened in real life, although usually the firms involved distance themselves by saying it was rogue contractors – see VWs slave plantations in the Amazon during the 1980s, or mining companies that regularly allow their ‘security contractors’ to murder local activists – especially in the Amazon. Putting it in space makes it sound like fiction, but this shit is happening in the real world now. I direct you to Silent Coup: How Corporations Overthrew Democracy by Claire Provost and Matt Kennard ( I have a Left Book Club copy that I’m reading at the moment) for more information.

I was absolutely rivetted by this book, by the mystery of how the people went mad and what happened to Claire, allowing her to escape and return to rescue what was left of her crew. Definitely going on my favourites list for this year.