One of the benefits of having COVID-19, or something very similar to it, is that I found a few opportunities to lie down in a hot bath to read. One of the curses of having COVID is that my coughing woke me up at night a lot, the flipside of that being reading at the kitchen table over a hot toddy at five in the morning. The reason I mention this is that I had excuses to knock out books like this one in a day, but I have an abiding feeling that I would have found a way to devour 'Dead Silence' anyway.

If it helps to underline how much I liked this, I always share my reviews in a few places after they post at the Nameless Zine but I started pimping this book out in a Facebook group as soon as I'd finished it. Hey folks, this one's coming next month and you ought to buy it, especially if you're into books that are both sci-fi and horror! Thinking back, I do have a couple of concerns but, on the main, it grabs quickly and it grabs hard and it wraps up well, even if there's a growing cliché in some of the reasoning.

The elevator pitch that Nightfire are using to push this is ''Titanic' meets 'The Shining'' and that's a far too easy description that misleads just a little. For a start, don't think of 'Titanic' the movie here, but do think of Titanic the ship, because we end up in the space age equivalent, discovered not half buried in the ocean bed but adrift far out in space. 'The Shining' is much more appropriate a comparison, because what characters see is not necessarily what's happening; for good reason, and author S. A. Barnes nails the freakiness of that with aplomb.

What makes it genius, though, is that we're tasked with seeing all this unfold from the perspective of a lead character who can see things that aren't there, entirely separate to whatever's going on with the other characters, who don't expect that sort of thing in the slightest and so struggle more traditionally with it. With Claire Kovalik, there's no assurance that what she sees is there at any point and even less when we get onto the Aurora, when everyone else seems to acquire her dubious talent. For her, it isn't just a question of whether something is real or not but whether it's not in the way she's used to or in some completely different way that's new to her.

The Aurora is when that all seriously kicks in, and that's where both those comparisons start working out. The Titanic if not 'Titanic' comes into play because it's both the first and last luxury space-liner to be built, a one of a kind ship that was lost in mysterious fashion on its maiden voyage around the solar system a couple of decades and change ago. No, it wasn't a space iceberg. In fact, the largest difference between the Titanic and the Aurora is that the latter clearly didn't fall prey to any external disaster. While we have no idea what happened, something did and it happened on board.

'The Shining' is applicable once people board to explore because they start to discover freaky stuff, from the messages scrawled in blood to the constant hallucinations that plague everyone via the fact that the passengers are mostly floating around because the gravity is off, frozen bodies in a decades long slow dance of death. What's more, it isn't as simple as an environmental shift, because many of these corpses show obvious signs of violent death. Clearly the ship, whose mysterious loss conjured up a thousand conspiracy theories, still has much in the way of mystery left for those who explore her and there lies our story.

I adored this book and for many reasons. The first was definitely its protagonist, as the background given Claire meant that I felt for her early. She used to live on Mars, on a colony called Ferris Station, but everyone died except her, for reasons that I refuse to spoil, and the experience has haunted her ever since. We understand that when we're working from basic information and we understand it all the more when we learn what really happened. All this resonates considerably when she appears to be a sole survivor yet again, this time from the floating relic that is the Aurora.

What's more, she's in a unique position that resonated with me. Because she can see what might be ghosts, being in populated places is troublesome and she escapes into a job that's perfect for her, leading a small crew around the back of beyond to repair the beacons further out in space. However, she's on her last trip because the work is about to be shifted into the hands of robots, so she's facing a very uncertain future before an almost inaudible distress signal appears that leads her to the Aurora and what might be the largest salvage haul in history.

We know she makes it off again because the novel unfolds in two timelines, one before the craziest stuff happens while she's trying to obtain the black box of the Aurora as a means of firming up her claim, and one after, with her mysteriously back on Earth and under a great deal of suspicion, given that her crew aren't with her. The two converge to explain what truly happened on the Aurora and what's still happening.

There are a number of other characters in play, but none of them come close to Claire in depth. They're varied and they're well defined and they do what they need to do. It's just that this isn't their story the way it is Claire's on so many levels. This is about PTSD and obsolescence and guilt and estrangement, all of those deep feelings indeed to put into play in what is effectively a haunted house mystery in space, ready and waiting to prompt hallucinations aplenty and make every characters an unreliable narrator even to themselves, Claire included.

Her characterisation is the biggest success here but nipping on its heels is the tone on the Aurora, which is undeniably freaky in ways that most horror writers would give an arm or a leg for, even one of their own. Partly because of that, this is that rarest of all sci-fi horror novels: something that works independently as a horror novel and a sci-fi novel, as well as a combination of the two. It ought to do very well indeed and I expect some sort of cinematic adaptation sooner rather than later.

I should add here that this is currently the only novel with the name of S. A. Barnes on it but it's not the first book that this author has published. She's known for a plethora of YA novels as Stacey Kade, including 'The Ghost and the Goth' series and the 'Project Paper Doll' series. I doubt I'll seek those out but I'm eager to read the next book that she'll publish as S. A. Barnes. ~~ Hal C F Astell

For more titles by S.A. Barnes click here