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Book: “Ghost Station” by S.A. Barnes
Publishing Info: Tor Nightfire, April 2024
Where Did We Get This Book: NetGalley;
Where You Can Get This Book: WorldCat.org | Amazon | Indiebound
Book Description: A crew must try to survive on an ancient, abandoned planet in the latest space horror novel from S.A. Barnes, acclaimed author of Dead Silence.
Space exploration can be lonely and isolating.
Psychologist Dr. Ophelia Bray has dedicated her life to the study and prevention of ERS—a space-based condition most famous for a case that resulted in the brutal murders of twenty-nine people. When she’s assigned to a small exploration crew, she’s eager to make a difference. But as they begin to establish residency on an abandoned planet, it becomes clear that crew is hiding something.
While Ophelia focuses on her new role, her crewmates are far more interested in investigating the eerie, ancient planet and unraveling the mystery behind the previous colonizer’s hasty departure than opening up to her.
That is, until their pilot is discovered gruesomely murdered. Is this Ophelia’s worst nightmare starting—a wave of violence and mental deterioration from ERS? Or is it something more sinister?
Terrified that history will repeat itself, Ophelia and the crew must work together to figure out what’s happening. But trust is hard to come by… and the crew isn’t the only one keeping secrets.
Kate’s Thoughts
When Serena approached me asking if I’d be interested in doing another Joint Review of an S.A. Barnes book, I was game. I liked getting both our perspectives on “Dead Silence”, as it is both Sci-Fi and Space horror, and therefore in both our wheelhouses. I enjoyed “Dead Silence”, and reading up on “Ghost Station” was just as intriguing to me based on the description.
If I was mentally comparing “Dead Silence” to “Aliens” and “Event Horizon”, “Ghost Station” read like the sci-fi horror film “Prometheus” to me, with a crew getting in way over their head on a mysterious planet that has sinister secrets. In terms of the things I liked, I really enjoyed Ophelia as our protagonist, as she is both unreliable in a number of ways, but is also very driven for very personal reasons in connection to a dangerous mental disorder known as ERS. I liked not really knowing what her deal was beyond one straight forward incident, and an anxiety and shame about being a part of a notorious corporate family with immense wealth and unscrupulous morals. We slowly get to peel back her layers, and as she and the crew find themselves in a situation that keeps getting more tense and more dangerous, her secrets and their secrets combine to make for a good deal of suspense and mysteries revealed. There is also some nice space horror bits here, and some beats that really unsettled me. Particularly the way that Barnes shows a slow decay of various crew members sanity, for reasons that may not be as obvious as Ophelia would like it to be.
But all that said, this one felt like it was a bit heavier on the Sci-Fi elements this time around, and even though I enjoy Space Horror as a Sci-Fi sub-genre, if you tread a bit too far into the Sci-Fi, my brain just shuts off (this actually happened with “Prometheus” as well). There is no question that this book does have a lot of suspenseful and scary moments in it that worked for me, but they felt a little few and far between. This isn’t to be a criticism of this book because I imagine that this will work very well for the target audience of Sci-Fi aficionados (let’s see what Serena says!), but it just got into the Sci-Fi weeds a bit too much for me as a person who isn’t a fan of that genre.
“Ghost Station” will probably satisfy Sci-Fi fans who like space horror, but for this horror fan who doesn’t usually mess with that genre, it didn’t hit as hard as I’d hoped it would.
Serena’s Thoughts
While I liked this one more than Kate did (probably no surprise, as science fiction is a much-loved genre of mine on its own right, and the horror side of things was the more experimental thing), I also agree with many of her criticisms. For the most part, I enjoyed the science fiction elements we had here. Many of them are fairly standard fair as far as futuristic technology goes, but I thought they were presented and used in interesting ways.
I also thought the horror elements were good. There was definitely the slow build up of dread as Ophelia and the other members of the crew explore and piece together the mystery of what had happened before them. There were some legitimately creepy moments, but not enough to make the book unapproachable to more casual horror readers. That said, I think the horror aspects of the first by this author that we joint read, “Dead Silence,” hit me harder, some even popping up in my head at inconvenient times days later. Whereas with this book, moments were a bit freaky, but it didn’t stay with me in the same way.
I also struggled a bit with the pacing and character development in this one. While I think the slower nature of the building dread worked well on the spooky front, the pace overall seemed to drag, especially in the beginning. I kept wanting to rush ahead for things to start happening, and it seemed to take quite a long time to get to anything substantial. And, while I enjoyed discovering more about Ophelia, who she was and why she made the decisions she did, I also found myself more frustrated by some of her decisions and inner monologues than I did with the lead character in “Dead Silence.”
Overall, I thought this was was a serviceable science fiction horror story, though I don’t think it quite lived up to the high that was the author’s previous work.
Kate’s Rating 6: There are definitely solid horror moments, but this was a little too heavy on the Sci-Fi for me.
Serena’s Rating 7: A bit slow with regards to pacing, but an approachable book overall, especially for the more casual horror/science fiction readers.
Reader’s Advisory
“Ghost Station” is included on the Goodreads lists “Horror to Look Forward to in 2024”, and “Can’t Wait Sci-Fi/Fantasy of 2024”.
The Library Ladies 