A review by unlikelyplaces
Dead Silence by S.A. Barnes

3.0

Dead Silence - S.A. Barnes 

⭐ - 3 

🎧 

I was just looking back at my Q1 reads and realised that I’ve had such an underwhelming reading year so far and this book continues that trend… I have really mixed feelings about this. 

Dead Silence follows a crew out in the depths of space who stumble across The Aurora, a luxury space cruise that mysteriously disappeared over 20 years ago. When the crew decide to investigate, they find unspeakable horrors inside. 

Ok so I really don’t read a lot of horror/thriller but, when I do, I like it to be sort of equal parts tension and mystery. I need some element of “trying to figure it out” to keep me interested and this book almost had that. 

I absolutely love this concept, I always think that space is a great setting for something like this because of the claustrophobic nature of it. I also, for the most part, really liked the protagonist, Claire. She reminded me a lot of Ripley from Alien if she had a bit more backstory (which I love). She did, however, keep making stupid decisions but I could forgive that if that was my only issue with this book. 

My problem with this was mostly the pacing. If we were to split the book into thirds, I really loved the beginning third, and I would have loved the last third if I hadn’t been so bored for the whole middle section. I honestly don’t know how you make such an interesting concept so boring but it felt like the characters had mostly figured out what was going on pretty quickly and then it was just gory description after gory description with no real purpose and you just kind of get desensitised to them. From about 30% until about 70% of the way through I just wanted the book to end and I almost DNF’ed it but I enjoyed the beginning so much that did care enough to see what the ending was. 

So, I feel quite conflicted about this… if the description sounds interesting to you and you like horror for the gore rather than the mystery then you might like this. For me, it had the set up to be a high 4 star but just dropped off so much in the middle so I levelled it out to a 3. 

Content warnings: Extreme gore, v!olence, parent d3ath, su!c!de, self h@rm, pandemic 


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