Claustrophobic sci-fi horror with tiny casts of characters is a small niche, I have to admit, but S. A. Barnes is absolutely owning it and this, for me, is the best of the three she's written thus far. There is a detail I won't explain that may not work for some readers but that's the only reason I'd think they might prefer 'Dead Silence' or 'Ghost Station'. Both are excellent novels, but this is more claustrophobic than either, more overtly horror—once it gets past being more overtly science fiction—and with the tiniest cast of characters thus far.

After a few introductory chapters in which we learn that Halley Zwick has some sort of political position that's been caught up in a scandal, it becomes just her. She's beaten up by thugs who may well have been trying to kill her. She runs for safety. She changes her appearance and she changes her name. She gets a job somewhere isolated in space so that nobody can get to her, a job that both she and Karl, who hires her, are well-aware is not remotely legal. But hey, if she's not going to be honest about who she is and she can't provide legal paperwork, then that's all she's going to get and she knows it.

It turns out that she'll be working on the 'Elysian Fields', a sort of legend at this point. It was a hospital spaceship but was converted well over a century ago by Zale Winfeld, an insanely rich man who saw God, into a repository for the bodies of the almost dead. Think Alcor, except not just heads. The opportunity was to keep people alive until such time as technology moved on to a point where diseases could be cured and death could be conquered. The catch is that it took a different path. Winfield's Lie is that nobody believes that these bodies could be revived safely any more, even if the cure for what ails them has been found. Therefore 'Elysian Fields' hasn't been used in a century but the "residents" are all still there.

The job itself is nothing. Halley will be doing basic security in a huge ship that's entirely empty of living people except, we presume, for Karl, who she's only ever seen over video connections. She'll walk her rounds over a few floors of the ship and press a button every three hours so the board knows that someone's there taking care of business. It soon becomes clear that it's Karl who's being paid to do this but he's outsourcing to her, probably without the knowledge of the board. But hey, it's not like anyone ever comes on board while the 'Elysian Fields' wends a slow circuit through space. Who's gonna know?

For quite a while, this plays out as almost pure science fiction. There's a jump scare early on as Halley thinks she sees a naked body crawling down a corridor on a monitor but nothing comes of it. There's some psychological torment as the isolation and routine sets in and Halley starts to blur time and hate the button. Mostly, though, it's science fiction. We're on a huge but frankly fascinating ship and Halley has ample time to explore a little, sit and chat with movie stars and vice presidents, none of whom naturally answer back on account of being frozen.

If there's a secondary genre at this point, it's thriller not horror, because we were always going to learn eventually who Halley really is and what that scandal was. More importantly, when we find out, Karl is going to find out too and that sets up every opportunity for blackmail. However, by the time we reach that point—learning her job as late as page 72, her name on page 89 and the scandal on page 112—we and Halley have also learned a lot more about what Karl is doing, so the only two live characters for the majority of the book now have something on each other.

The horror kicks in after that. It's page 118 when the promise of that crawling body returns and the generally creepy vibe of a ship that's effectively a morgue floating through space finds its teeth. Someone's leaving finger bones outside her room and shambling through the corridors. The AI versions of Winfield's three children set up for a tourist display in the theatre know who she is, especially Aleyk, who seems to have substance behind his hologram. He wants her to get out now because "he consumes". Who, we don't know, but she's just had a nightmare about an animated corpse climbing over her, one that left real blood on her pillow.

Where it goes from here is very much a combination of sci-fi and horror, exactly what we expect from Barnes. While the most overt horror is in thoroughly visual form, the sort of thing we see in horror movies with jump scares and gross-out scenes, there's plenty more that's subtle. The very premise is creepy to begin with, but how it develops gets downright horrific. It's about the lengths to which we might go to get well, to stay alive, to keep those we love around us. And, of course, that applies not only to what's happening on the 'Elysian Fields' but off it in the halls of power, where ethics are often trampled by the cunning and the ambitious.

All in all, there's something here for any fan of sci-fi horror to enjoy. In fact, there may well be everything here for fans of sci-fi horror to enjoy. There's certainly some imagery that isn't easy to forget. Barnes isn't the only author writing in this vein, as evidenced by my Books of Horror Go To List selection for this month absolutely being claustrophobic sci-fi horror with a tiny cast of characters, namely Caitlin Starling's 'The Luminous Dead'. However, she's moved on to other genres with later books, while Barnes is doubling down on this particular niche and letting her alter ego, Stacey Kade, tackle those other genres.

All I know for sure is that I've enjoyed each of the three S. A. Barnes sci-fi horror novels thus far as they came out and I'm now looking forward even more to the fourth. ~~ Hal C F Astell

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