Dead Silence

Product Information

And when your synopsis touts something as irresistible as “Titanic meets The Shining” then heck yeah, my expectations are going to be somewhere in the stratosphere. Mind you, I have never read a Harlequin novel, but if a cheesy romance in space sounds good to you, party on. Dead Silence gives you the suffocating claustrophobia of 2001: A Space Odyssey mixed with the horrors of Alien. Successful science fiction horror is not easy to pull off and this novel achieves it in some style and has the potential to pick up a wider readership beyond the horror genre. Knowing some of the things that happened on the ship is awful, but the things we don’t know and the things that the fragments the crew find hint at are worse, and those things are the ones that truly build a creepy, immersive atmosphere.

and what harm could there be in boarding a ship that, despite being top of the line in every way, abruptly and inexplicably went dark and has been floating through places unknown full of whatever's left of whatever fate its passengers met, undisturbed and unprovoked for decades? I have to say up until that point, Dead Silence was pretty much exactly what I’d expected and wanted, as Claire and her crew explored the haunted ship filled with the dead. Although I did enjoy these sequences, they go on for just a tad too long and perhaps another edit would have moved the story on at a slightly speedier pace. Overall, Dead Silence is an impressive read where the positives heavily outweigh the slight gripes I have already mentioned. In short, the vast majority of this book is self-deprecating internal monologues by a character that hates herself so much you as a reader can’t possibly help but feel the same.Even negative characters that can often cause a disconnect from the story did quite the opposite, adding depth to the story because of how well they were created.

Cemetery Dance also posted a review, stating that it was "A genre mash-up that easily captivates its audience but struggles to utilize that up-front investment to maintain interest. Barnes’s Dead Silence is a creepy and incredibly at­mospheric horror novel that bridges the gap between Gothic horror and extreme horror while simultaneously exploring the role that past trauma and PTSD can play when someone who suffers from them is exposed to fresh trauma.

Not to mention all the “exploratory” diagnostics and procedures over the last three weeks in the Tower.