Claire Kovalik is days away from being unemployed—made obsolete—when her beacon repair crew picks up a strange distress signal. With nothing to lose and no desire to return to Earth, Claire and her team decide to investigate.
What they find at the other end of the signal is a shock: the Aurora, a famous luxury space-liner that vanished on its maiden tour of the solar system more than twenty years ago. A salvage claim like this could set Claire and her crew up for life. But a quick trip through the Aurora reveals something isn’t right.
Whispers in the dark. Flickers of movement. Words scrawled in blood. Claire must fight to hold onto her sanity and find out what really happened on the Aurora, before she and her crew meet the same ghastly fate.
Rather a novel of two halves, this one. The story is remarkably creepy in spots, but the very nature of it means that we're never quite sure what's going on.
First of all; this is really, really creepy, especially in the first half. I read this over a couple of sessions, and on the night in between, I had to keep checking that nothing was floating above me (if you've read it, you know what I mean.) The author does an amazing job with the creepiness, and all the physics seemed right to me, as an extreme amateur (I watch a lot of Star Trek, mostly.) Speaking of, this would be a fantastic, completely terrifying TV show or movie...maybe a mini series, to give it space to breath but still have an ending point?
However. Because Claire, our narrator and sole POV character, is never 100% sure what's going on, it means we can't be sure either. I'm still not 100% what happened on Ferris, which is a big part of Claire's backstory; it's given to us in such tiny bits that I'd say I missed something that would have tied it all together. And later, when things go to hell as they inevitably were going to, it gets even harder to tell what's going on at any given point. (There's also a brief moment where she wakes up in the Tower, notes that the restraints are gone, and a few minutes later the nurses come in to remove the restraints? Huh?)
Overall, though, I really enjoyed this. The characters are amazing, the whole thing is really well thought out, the descriptions are fabulous. As I said, I think this would be a brilliant, if terrifying and hard to film, TV show. I can't wait for it to be available so I can terrify other readers with it!
Dead Silence publishes on the 24th February, 2022. I received a free copy and am giving an honest review.
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