ARC REVIEW: I received this ebook for free from the publisher in exchange for an honest review.
Title: Ghost Station
Series: N/A
Author: S.A. Barnes
Genres: Sci-fi, Horror
Publishing Date: 9 April 2024
CW: Death, Blood, Violence, Gun violence, Medical content, Suicide, Domestic abuse, Dementia, Child death
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Read if you’re looking for:
- A sci-fi & horror novel
- A female main character with a checkered past
- A mysteriously abandoned station on a frozen planet
- Body horror: something moving under the skin
- Psychological horror: can’t trust what you’re seeing & hearing
- Alien ruins
- Greedy corporations doing something shady
This is the second sci-fi, horror novel from S.A. Barnes, and I really enjoyed it. Our main character, Ophelia, is a psychologist with some terrible incidents in her past, so in order to escape she signs on to an exploration team who are tasked with surveying a far planet that has ancient alien ruins in order to determine if it has valuable resources. The team she joins also has a recent tragedy in their past, and are not friendly to having a corporate psychologist delving into their business. After they arrive at the planet and start to use the abandoned station that a previous survey team has established, very strange and terrifying events begin to occur. The team can no longer trust their own minds, unsure if they are seeing and hearing things that aren’t there. And, the black alien ruins seem to be calling to them.
Barnes does a great job of building the suspense and the creepy atmosphere of the station and the planet. The body horror is real in this one, so look into the content warnings a little more if that is something that bothers you. I enjoyed how the story also delved into corporate greed and corruption, and how that harms workers and average folks. The main character does have a traumatic past, and seems to have anxiety and some anger issues. As we are in her head in this book, sometimes it did become a little repetitive to hear her continuously trying to control here emotions. Overall, this was a super creepy and fun read if you enjoy space horror, or S.A. Barnes’ previous novel, Dead Silence.
