![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
A five-person spaceship crew hears a distress call from a long-lost luxury spaceship. They board it, hoping for salvage wealth, and discover that everyone onboard the ship died under violent and mysterious circumstances. It's basically a haunted house in space... and the only way to claim salvage rights is to get inside and pilot it back.
Despite the blatant similarities to Alien, Aliens, and Event Horizon, I love apocalypse logs and "stuck in a haunted house," so I was predisposed to like this. On the plus side, it has some haunting spooky images, like a mass of bodies floating in zero g above a ballroom floor, and enough creepiness and suspense that I actually finished it. On the minus side, everything else.
The writing is clunky. The science fiction setting doesn't feel likely or lived-in - it's full of references that are old-fashioned now. The most plausible part is the predatory corporations. The characters are barely characterized at all, and while we're told that the protagonist Claire's main trait is that she's emotionally closed off, what we mostly see is that she's miserable and insecure and bad at her job. The other four characters have about one trait each. There's an interminable framing device in which she's telling the story while being accused of murdering her crew. The explanation of what's going on is mildly clever yet somehow less interesting than "it's ghosts."
Claire has no memory of what happened after a certain point on the ship, until she showed up alone in an escape pod. I assumed that would be the really juicy stuff, to be revealed last. But when she's forced to return to the ship and finds one crew member still alive, he also has no memory of that same chunk of time. What happened in it is never revealed, nor is the reason they both have amnesia for it. The only narrative purpose this serves is to give Claire even more angst over whether or not she left everyone to save herself, but that comes up late and is quickly papered over with "Maybe she left on a mission to save the others."
What's going on is that the ship was sabotaged by a rival corporation with a sound-causing device intended to make everyone unsettled and nauseated and make the trip an expensive failure. But due to metallurgical properties of the ship, it made everyone hallucinate ghosts, go insane, and kill each other or commit suicide. This is kind of clever but also a bit disappointing - it instantly removes the scare factor of the ghosts themselves.
Claire really can see ghosts though, so some of the ghosts are real. This is just an unexplained gift she has. So maybe the ghosts were always there, but the sound enabled everyone to see them? That would have been excellently creepy had it actually been explored, but it wasn't.
Despite the blatant similarities to Alien, Aliens, and Event Horizon, I love apocalypse logs and "stuck in a haunted house," so I was predisposed to like this. On the plus side, it has some haunting spooky images, like a mass of bodies floating in zero g above a ballroom floor, and enough creepiness and suspense that I actually finished it. On the minus side, everything else.
The writing is clunky. The science fiction setting doesn't feel likely or lived-in - it's full of references that are old-fashioned now. The most plausible part is the predatory corporations. The characters are barely characterized at all, and while we're told that the protagonist Claire's main trait is that she's emotionally closed off, what we mostly see is that she's miserable and insecure and bad at her job. The other four characters have about one trait each. There's an interminable framing device in which she's telling the story while being accused of murdering her crew. The explanation of what's going on is mildly clever yet somehow less interesting than "it's ghosts."
Claire has no memory of what happened after a certain point on the ship, until she showed up alone in an escape pod. I assumed that would be the really juicy stuff, to be revealed last. But when she's forced to return to the ship and finds one crew member still alive, he also has no memory of that same chunk of time. What happened in it is never revealed, nor is the reason they both have amnesia for it. The only narrative purpose this serves is to give Claire even more angst over whether or not she left everyone to save herself, but that comes up late and is quickly papered over with "Maybe she left on a mission to save the others."
What's going on is that the ship was sabotaged by a rival corporation with a sound-causing device intended to make everyone unsettled and nauseated and make the trip an expensive failure. But due to metallurgical properties of the ship, it made everyone hallucinate ghosts, go insane, and kill each other or commit suicide. This is kind of clever but also a bit disappointing - it instantly removes the scare factor of the ghosts themselves.
Claire really can see ghosts though, so some of the ghosts are real. This is just an unexplained gift she has. So maybe the ghosts were always there, but the sound enabled everyone to see them? That would have been excellently creepy had it actually been explored, but it wasn't.
From:
no subject
With the caveat that I have still not read the book myself, the haunted salvage set-up makes me think of Darcy Coates' From Below (2022). I'm sorry this novel does nothing with the notion of tapping into a real haunting on top of hallucinations, which is always a nice mix of instabilities.
From:
no subject
From:
no subject
I hope it's as good as it sounds. It has a haunted shipwreck and I had missed it completely, too.
From:
no subject
Max was so over the top by the end....
From:
no subject
I'm currently reading Darcy Coates' From Below, with two timelines - a haunted ship and its wreck being explored by divers - and so far it's everything I wanted Dead Silence to be.