Dead Silence is one of my favorite books, so I was dying to read another space horror from SA Barnes. Ghost Station started off as more of a slow-burn suspense, but the creeping, slowly escalating sense of unease and dread was excellently done. Combined with tension from the friction Ophelia experiences with the team as she tries to get them to trust her, as well as Ophelia's own mysterious past, I was on the edge of my seat. As with Dead Silence, there's an anti-capitalist undercurrent throughout the story that I enjoyed, and there was also a deeply compelling section on guilt and moving the goalposts for oneself that I really appreciated.

However, around the 75% mark, the story took a direction that I wasn't fully on board with, so that made the rest of the book fall a bit flat for me. Maybe it's just because I can't stop comparing it to Dead Silence, which I thought had a much more powerful message at the end, but I wasn't quite satisfied with how the book wrapped up.

Audiobook rating: 5/5 stars. The narrator, Zura Johnson, had a voice perfectly suited for a therapist character and made the scenes full of tension and dread really come to life.

Thank you to NetGalley and Macmillan audio for this ALC!

I read Dead Silence by Barnes a few weeks back and I liked it, but didn’t love it.

I felt the same way with Ghost Station. I was slightly confused through the first half, but by the second half I was fully invested! Unfortunately I was let down by the ending. That being said, I found this story to be very interesting and I liked the narrator!

I’m not a huge sci-fi reader but I think fans of it will like this one.

I found this one to be significantly more enjoyable (though also significantly less scary / less “special”) than Barnes’s previous work DEAD SILENCE - I mean, let’s be real, nothing tops an ocean of frozen human corpses just floating near the ceiling of an abandoned shopping mall. I think again that Barnes spent way too long trying to make the MC “unreliable” and not letting the true terror of the situation speak for itself - however, I did really like the way the characters interacted with each other and the dynamic that Ophelia creates coming into the mix after a tragedy.

There are a lot of moments where the attention to detail that was present in Dead Silence could really have elevated Ghost Station if we weren’t being dragged along with Ophelia’s distractions: namely whenever we’re exploring a space or in a high-tension confrontation in what is essentially a pitch-black maze. Really settling into the details would have done so much for me personally to elevate the horror.