Only added two books to the stack this month. Which is fine, but it’s not as much as I’d have liked.
Dead Silence
Take a haunted house scenario: If we can stay in this place for a night, we get the payout. This is the rough framework of this book, just embellished: If this salvage crew can be in a haunted, hall of gore-filled horrors cruise liner long enough for it to get back into comms range, they’ll be rich.
And it’s all told primarily from a past point of view where we know exactly how it turned out. The main character, Claire, (allegedly the only survivor) explains to the suits what happened. After being found floating in an escape pod in deep space. Strangely, it works. Barnes can spoil the book from the first page and yet, the dread she crafts can carry the whole thing on its back.
And then, about two-thirds through the book, things go terribly wrong. That’s a qualitative, not a plotting, wrong. Imagine a cut of Aliens where when Ripley explains to the Weyland-Yutani execs what happened on the Nostromo, we slap in the full cut of Alien. And once the recap is over, we have only thirty minutes left to wrap up Aliens.
Going back to this cruise liner, the Aurora, it’s such an immense tonal shift, going from haunted house horror to corporate-military thriller, rife with the stock 1980s big bad evil CEO giving not one, but two mustache-twirling dramatic speeches, it doesn’t really work. The non-explanation of Claire’s ability to see actual ghosts felt was something I could suspend my disbelief over, but the explanation to why the cruise liner is so haunted didn’t fall right.
It’s so eye-rolling predictable once they return to the Aurora. The love story feels hamfisted. Claire’s relationship to the company big wig, who raised her almost as a daughter, is shoehorned into a plot a size too small. Yet it gets so many points for atmosphere. It’s almost absurd that a book is this well written yet wrapped up so poorly. I’d rather Dead Silence covered the initial visit, and a follow-up did the military sci-fi thriller schtick. A duology could’ve handled the tonal shift, in the same way the Alien & Aliens series managed.
And yes, I didn’t quite go into the other references, because there’s a lot of stuff that feels like it could’ve inspired it. Titanic for a hubristic construction of a cruise liner where horrible things happened to the wealthy. Event Horizon for a spaceship that disappears and when it returns, it’s a blood-and-guts filled bucket that just won’t quit. The Signal, a movie about people becoming paranoid violent psychos after hearing a weird noise on the TV or on their phones. And something being so transparently inspired isn’t a criticism. I liked those movies, and naturally I enjoyed this book, flaws and all.
It’s also a lovely reminder to pantsers like me, sometimes just wing it.