Review: Dead Silence

Dead Silence
By SA Barnes

Published By: Tor
Publication Date: February 8, 2022
Date Read: December 22, 2023
Genre: Adult – Sci-fi / Horror
Source: Bought
Format: Paperback
Pages: 343

From Goodreads:
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.

Dead Silence is not the kind of book I would typically pick up. If you’re been following me for a while, you’ll have noticed there is never any horror reviews on this blog. In my review categories, horror is not there… because I am an absolutely wimp! I’m a big baby… and I get scared about everything. However, when I undertook the ‘Read 12 Books Recommended by 12 Friends’ challenge in 2023 my goal was to broaden my horizons and read some books I wouldn’t typically read. And this was one of them. I have to say I’m glad I did as I really enjoyed Dead Silence.

Dead Silence is a sci-fi horror / mystery. I think I enjoyed it so much because it wasn’t real world horror. If something is super realistic and could happen to anyone in the real world that is where I get really scared and freak out. Because this book is set on a spaceship and it has a mystery of what actually happened to the people on this spaceship… I loved it. It was just the right level of creepy for me.

I really enjoyed the characters within this book, however one thing that I felt stopped me from connecting to some of them is the fact that while our main character is telling us this story there are a few ‘present day’ chapters which essentially tells us who lives and who dies… so that for me took away some of the mystery and it stopped me from connecting to certain characters because I knew what was going to happen. What’s the point emotionally connecting to someone you know doesn’t survive?

My other small gripe is I felt like the resolution fell a little bit flat. I’m not going to spoil it, as my reviews are always spoiler free but when you get to the bit where it explains what happened and why certain characters are experiencing certain things I just felt like it wasn’t explained in a great amount of depth and was accepted too quickly. I had so many more questions, that I didn’t get answers to.

Other than that, this book is fantastic. It’s creepy, fast paced and filled with jump scares. If you’re a horror reader this one will probably feel super mild to you and be more of a mystery book than a horror. But regardless, it’s definitely worth a read. If you’re a scaredy cat like me and want to try your hand at a horror book, this is definitely a great one to start with.

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