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A review by screamdogreads
Ghost Station by S.A. Barnes
4.0
"Panic chews at the drug-induced calmness still drifting through her veins. Her hands, her legs, don't seem to exist at all, for all that she can feel them. And when she tries to open her eyes again, her eyelids flutter but remain closed. It is a terrifying feeling, to not be in control of your body when your mind is awake. Like being buried alive, encased within your own flesh and bone."
Ghost Station is a slow moving but exceedingly entertaining and highly fun space thriller wrapped up in horror packaging. These sort of space disaster novels live and die by their atmospheric tension - With Ghost Station, not only has S.A. Barnes absolutely nailed the dread inducing atmosphere that these novels require, but she's delivered something so isolating and claustrophobic. It's a very linear kind of novel, adding a strange sense of intimacy to the setting, we're given much more time to focus on the soul-shattering events of the novel, and it's all so delightfully creepy and unsettling. Ghost Station is an immaculate example of a space thriller done right, highly tense, extremely suspenseful and so easily devourable, it makes for a hugely enjoyable experience.
While it never fully commits to being an all-out horror novel, Ghost Station does take every single thing that's brilliant about the sci-fi genre, and reskins it into something much more unnerving and disturbing. It's certainly scary enough to keep horror readers interested, everything is so vivid and grotesque. There's a harsh, inescapable sense of place to this novel, it becomes all too easy to lose yourself within it, all too easy to see yourself stood right next to the protagonists while the plot explodes. Space exploration, sci-fi, horror and thriller elements are so skillfully blended together to create one of this year's most inhalable novels.
Ghost Station is a slow moving but exceedingly entertaining and highly fun space thriller wrapped up in horror packaging. These sort of space disaster novels live and die by their atmospheric tension - With Ghost Station, not only has S.A. Barnes absolutely nailed the dread inducing atmosphere that these novels require, but she's delivered something so isolating and claustrophobic. It's a very linear kind of novel, adding a strange sense of intimacy to the setting, we're given much more time to focus on the soul-shattering events of the novel, and it's all so delightfully creepy and unsettling. Ghost Station is an immaculate example of a space thriller done right, highly tense, extremely suspenseful and so easily devourable, it makes for a hugely enjoyable experience.
While it never fully commits to being an all-out horror novel, Ghost Station does take every single thing that's brilliant about the sci-fi genre, and reskins it into something much more unnerving and disturbing. It's certainly scary enough to keep horror readers interested, everything is so vivid and grotesque. There's a harsh, inescapable sense of place to this novel, it becomes all too easy to lose yourself within it, all too easy to see yourself stood right next to the protagonists while the plot explodes. Space exploration, sci-fi, horror and thriller elements are so skillfully blended together to create one of this year's most inhalable novels.
"The blue-gray light paints everything in shadow, turning everything into muddy, indistinguishable versions of itself. Drifts of snow and chunks of ice take on an ominous quality, as if they're hiding something instead of just existing. Her helmet light, automatically triggered by the dim conditions, casts a bright halo around her, but every time she moves, or the wind moves her, jagged shadows dance in the periphery. It's enough to make her wish for a sunrise, one that's never going to come."
As a novel, Ghost Station is a skin-crawling, haunting, absolutely terrifying experience that will have you teetering on the edge of your seat. Every page is soaked in an eerie and sinister vibe, it's so damn cloying and choking. Although the pacing of this one is much closer to your typical horror novel than a thriller, it's so damn enjoyable that it's near impossible to be disappointed. The sprawling, consuming, pitch perfect descriptions of the locations make this novel so beautifully cinematic. At the best of times, the lines between horror and thriller, between sci-fi and horror, between thriller and action novel are blurred and really rather thin, Barnes uses this to her advantage, trampling over any perceived genre boundary to create a supernova of a story.
"The skin on his forearm is sliced and raised in flaps, dangling like loosened bits of bark on his namesake tree, revealing the pink marbled muscle and tendons. But worse than that? The ragged chunks, like hacking cuts or bites, missing from both."