Reviews tagging 'Terminal illness'

Dead Silence by S.A. Barnes

1 review

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dark emotional tense medium-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? A mix
  • Strong character development? It's complicated
  • Loveable characters? It's complicated
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

3.75

It’s a rare horror book that can start the story two months after the protagonist gets rescued, say in the first few paragraphs that the protagonist survives and everyone else dies, and still be interesting. And yet Dead Silence manages it. 

I am slowly realizing that I don’t actually hate horror. I especially love the horror of big, dark, long-abandoned spaces, and the Aurora is that combined with “something horrible happened here and it could still get us.” Since it’s a spaceship, you also have the cosmic horror of the cold void of outer space, which doesn’t hate you because that would imply you were big enough to notice but will still kill you quickly and painfully just by its nature. 

It’s intense, emotional, and terrifying. Claire is wrestling with an ugly combination of shame, regret, and survivor’s guilt that she can’t seem to escape, but she’s still doing her best to wrench an okay life from the wreckage of her past. She sees things that no one else sees that can give her information that she wouldn’t otherwise know, but can she actually see ghosts or is she severely mentally ill? Psychiatrists tell her it’s just hallucinations, but she is not confident of either explanation, and it makes her an unintentionally unreliable narrator. If she can’t trust that what she’s experiencing is actually happening, how can we the reader tell if it is or not? I’m not usually much for unreliable narrators, but an unintentionally unreliable narrator was fascinating. 

I am glad I read this in broad daylight, because there were several spots where I had to yank my imagination out of the story and remind myself that it’s just a story, nothing is after me, and even if this is real it won’t get Claire because the book already told me she survives. It’s intense, emotional, and terrifying. I loved trying to piece together what happened on the Aurora from the bizarre, gruesome clues and trying to separate reality from unreality in Claire’s perception. My husband got to read this book vicariously as I told him each new revelation like it was hot gossip and sent multi-paragraph texts with my theories for how it went down. I started making a list in my head of all my friends who like scifi and/or horror who I could tell about this book. 

Then about 80% in I finally got the reveal of what was really going on in the Aurora, and the whole glorious, vibrant, terrifying story fell apart. 

I think I would have been less upset about it if I hadn’t already guessed the answer. Not only did I guess it less than a third of the way in, I immediately dismissed the guess because, as I told my husband, “It would be a really cheap answer.” And once I knew the answer and found it lacking, I found myself forcefully ejected from the magic of the story. Where the first 80% was deliciously nerve-wracking and vividly emotional, the last 20% felt predictable and melodramatic. The emotions felt less realistically overwhelming and more repetitive and overdone. The atmosphere of dread and the urgency of the very real threat to Claire’s life completely dissipated once I knew the ordinary, boring reason behind it, and once I wasn’t caught up in the volatile emotions of the story, I could see every plot point coming. And to top it all off, the two questions that kept me reading through that last 20% never get answered. 

I don’t regret the read – at least now that I’ve had some time to let my rage at that ending simmer down. The atmospheric horror and the bizarre and gruesome mystery of the first 80% of the story were absolutely worth the time, and for as frustrated as I am with the answer to that mystery, I enjoyed the first 80% so much that I’m willing to overlook the sins of the last 20%. And let’s be honest here, my opinion that the answer was a cheap cop-out is just my opinion. Maybe I know too much about the relevant science to find it believable, or maybe I’m just mad that I guessed it so early. You may find it engrossing and thrilling all the way through. Personally, I’m glad I read it, but I don’t know that I’ll be recommending it to all my friends anytime soon – at least not the ones who know a lot about the real-world science behind this story. 
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