Ghost Station
Ghost Station, the second space horror book by S. A. Barnes, does a lot of good things. After reading her first book Dead Silence (also has some good stuff going for it, will write on that one too at some point) I preordered Ghost Station, and it left me a bit in the middle; more on that later.
We follow Doctor Ophelia Bray, a young woman with her own troubles and tribulations, as she signs up for a last-minute and last-ditch job with a recovery crew. It’s simple: go to a planet, get samples, document things, return.
Bray, however, has many secrets she’s holding close to her chest, and her crew do too. One of their own died on the mission prior, and as such tensions and emotions are still overexposed. The parts related to Ophelia, while understandable, feel a little bit off at times. Certain reveals and her dependence on others never quite feels like it matures or grows fully by the end of the story, and while I didn’t dislike any of the characters, I found some of them hard to like.
Bray’s team are alright, they bounce off of each other well at some points and fall flat at others, but I feel like (and this is just my opinion) this cast could’ve benefited from more than just one book’s-worth of interaction and growth -— a slower and steadier burn, so to speak.
This book also shares quite a few similarities to Barnes’ previous, Dead Silence, and (again in my opinion) shares some of that book’s flaws too.
But, and this is what takes the book from really good to meh for me, the ending section feels… like whiplash. It feels like a lot was missing or cut, like parts of the story that could’ve and should’ve been expanded upon were just dropped or shelved.
/ / / SPOILERS HERE — Read at your own risk / / /
So at the end of the book, after half of the crew is going mad and the other half is quite-brutally killed (Liana got Marker’d, holy shit) they manage to escape and put themselves back into cryosleep. Fair enough, except… then they wake up later and everything is fine. The looming alien/eldritch infection that overtook them is more or less dropped in the epilogue, and the status of the remaining crew (who, by this point have been beaten, shot, been partially liquefied, and mentally snapped respectively) is kind of just treated as “ O K ” and not checked up on again. What started as a really freaky, downright skin-crawling story ends with very little of anything happening. I enjoyed the first 2/3’s of Ghost Station, even it’s freaky Dead Space obelisk moments near the end (again, poor Liana), but it terminates so abruptly in a happy resolution that it feels like the ending was ripped from my hands. Dead Silence had some issues too, though they were smaller in scope than an out-of-place ending.
/ / / SPOILERS ENDED HERE — Continue on / / /
All in all, it’s hard to recommend the book. I don’t want to NOT recommend it, because I enjoyed most of it and even stayed up reading last night to finish it because it’d hooked me, but it’s somewhere in the middle with the ending as it stands. I’d be curious to know what Barnes was thinking, what she felt needed to stay versus what needed to be cut and altered, and I hope that her next book lands better than this one did. I don’t like making negative or middling write-ups, because I hate being all “here’s what’s wrong here, and there, and over here!” but at the same time, if there are issues in my books, I’d want someone to tell me. We can’t adjust or fix or improve things if we slap endless praise on them, y’know?
If you want to give this book a shot, go for it! You might end of liking or even loving it. I’m sitting close to the fence on this one. Onto the next!
