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Title: Dead Silence
Series: ———-
Authors: Stacey Barnes
Rating: 1 of 5 Stars
Genre: SF
Pages: 319
Words: 109.5K
| Synopsis: |
From the Publisher & Me
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 is shocking: the Aurora, a famous luxury spaceliner 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 search of the ship reveals something isn’t right.
Whispers in the dark. Flickers of movement. Messages scrawled in blood. Claire must fight to hold on to her sanity and find out what really happened on the Aurora before she and her crew meet the same ghastly fate.
Turns out everything was caused by a machine put on board the ship by a rival company that was supposed to make everyone feel dread and uneasiness. The ship used a new alloy and the interactions between the machine and ship drove everyone insane.
Claire survives as does her loverboy and they get rich and own their own shipping company. The end.
| My Thoughts: |
I went into this with very high hopes. Both Mogsy and Maddalena had reviewed it and while there were some little things that niggled at me, what they wrote sounded fantastic.
Things started out really great. I’m talking Event Horizon levels of great in fact. Which is exactly what I wanted and was looking for. Then I find out the main character is insane, so I can’t trust a word coming out of her mouth, then the whole “scary” situation gets “scyenzesplained” to me and THEN romance right at the end where the man knows exactly what to do and what to say like he’d read the main character’s insane mind and was pretty much the perfectest man ever.
It blew my mind. In a bad way. I was pretty angry in fact. To go from people ripping their own eyeballs out to scyenze to romance was more than I could take. Stacey Barnes took a space elevator ride straight to my Authors to Avoid list with this book. What gets me is that it DID start out so fantastic. WHY did she have to go and change things and ruin everything? I could smell the hotdog. I could see the hotdog. Then the author gave me a celery stick and acts like it was that all along. GRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR.
So if you want a scary story that is ruined by scyenze and romance, this is definitely the book for you. If I cared more, I’d cross post this review to all sorts of other platforms just to give people fair warning. But in about 10 years nobody will ever remember this book, because it truly is that bad. I’ll step aside and let Time be the author’s executioner.
Bookstooge's Reviews on the Road 
This would have made much more sense if I hadn’t read the first sentence as “her bacon repair crew”. Then there were hotdogs after I discovered my error. This hasn’t gone well.
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Hahahahaa. Sounds like you had more fun reading the review than I had reading the book.
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Yes and it made me cook sausages for dinner.
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Ymmmm, sausages…
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They were yummy. 😋
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I had to fight to hold onto my sanity just reading the synopsis…
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I hope you don’t have any elder gods hiding out in your shed, cause that’ll guarantee insanity…
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This sounded so much like something I’d read that I had to check my review index, but it’s not there. So maybe it’s just a really common sort of story. In any event, I’m warned away so there’s that. Soldier on!
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It actually made me go re-watch Event Horizon, just to get the bad taste out of my mouth 🙂
Have you seen that movie?
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Oh yeah. That’s pure silliness.
https://alexonfilm.com/2020/03/19/event-horizon-1997/
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I see you made one of your famous spelling gaffe’s there.
I believe you meant “pure awesomeness”
😉
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lovely review !!
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Thank you.
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The explanations felt disappointingly mundane after the huge climatic buildup, but still I was able to enjoy the atmosphere of dread that the story sustained up to a certain point. Your comparison with Event Horizon is indeed spot on for the initial promise…
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And that is why I put up links to both your’s and Mogsy’s reviews, as you each had a different take than me.
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It sounds like the author ripped the premise straight from Event Horizon. Shame about the “Go Science!” ending. Now you’ve made me want to re-watch Paul W. S. Anderson’s best film. Love those Sam Neill screams!!
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I love Event Horizon. It’s just so much fun 😀
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I’d love to see your quote on the DVD cover! “Event Horizon is just so much fun.” -Bookstooge
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I tend to like Andersons movies
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I have to ask even though I am exposing my ignorance here. What the f… is “scyenze”. I even pasted the word into the urban dictionary without getting any wiser.
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No ignorance, as there’s no way you could know it.
It’s a word I made up to describe what I feel is religion transposed onto science. So if a character does or acts on something “because science says so” and it deal with hypotheticals or speculation, that’s “scyenze”.
So in this book I used it because a machine that is supposed to give people a feeling of dread interacts with a “new” unnamed alloy and voila, people scratching their own eyeballs out. The author took something scientific and extrapolated to the Nth degree.
If you can replace “science” with “organized religion” and it doesn’t change what is really going on, then I call that scyenze.
Hope that wasn’t too long winded.
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Oh no…. I have this on the shelf too still… still gonna give it a try. Or let Salty have a crack at it
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I thoroughly enjoyed at least 50-60% of the book. It was mainly that all the parts I didn’t enjoy were at the ending where it stuck in my mind.
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Oh god, to end on romance? That would’ve bludgeoned me… It did sound like you were having so much fun with this until it was too late to quite. 😦
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It was not a good ending, at all.
And it WAS fun at the beginning. Haunted space ships really work for me for some reason.
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This was the book where half the book felt like a different book than the second half. I didn’t have as strong a reaction as you, but that definitely didn’t sit right with me either and I think that was what prevented me from giving it a higher rating. The scary parts were really scary though, really reminded me of Event Horizon as well, such a shame that it didn’t go further with that.
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It made me sure to avoid the author in the future, that’s for sure 😦
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Ouch! This sounds so bad I feel like I should create an anti-TBR to put this book on if I ever forget you had such a bad time with it and be tempted to read it. The romance sounds just so uncool in all of this, like some form of abuse/exploitation scenario.
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Well, it is why I have an “authors to avoid” tag 😀
At least I won’t get burned again by this gal…
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