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Dead Silence

by S A Barnes

A distress signal leads Claire Kovalik’s repair crew to the Aurora, a luxury spaceliner missing for decades. Bloodied messages and strange movements threaten their salvage mission.

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A Best Book of 2022 by the New York Public Library • One of the Best SFF Books of 2022 (Gizmodo) • One of the Best SF Mysteries of 2022 (CrimeReads) • A GoodReads Choice Award finalist for Best Science Fiction!

Titanic meets Event Horizon in this SF horror novel in which a woman and her crew board a decades-lost luxury cruiser and find the wreckage of a nightmare that hasn't yet ended.

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.

"Truly un-put-downable in its purest sense.” Chloe Gong, #1 New York Times bestselling author of These Violent Delights

Also by S.A. Barnes : Ghost Station Cold Eternity

First published: 2022
Publisher: Tor Trade
Pages: 352
Amazon reviews: Read reviews on Amazon

Book tags

Content warnings

No content warnings are recorded. Missing warnings do not mean the book is warning-free.

Horror profile

Scary: Not rated
Creepy: Not rated
Gore: Not rated
Disturbing: Not rated
Weird: Not rated

How we calculate this

These are editorial estimates of intensity, informed by reading and review evidence, then checked before publication. They aren't star ratings, reader-vote averages or a measure of quality.

Each dimension runs from 1 (low) to 5 (exceptionally intense). A 5 is reserved for strongly consistent evidence. People experience horror differently.

Scary: Fear, tension and immediate threat.
Creepy: Unease, dread and an uncanny atmosphere.
Gore: Graphic injury, blood and bodily detail.
Disturbing: Upsetting ideas and lingering psychological impact.
Weird: Surreal, strange and reality-bending elements.

We draw a filled profile only when all five scores have been reviewed. Unrated does not mean mild. Missing scores are not estimated from genre tags or your saved taste. This profile isn't a complete content-warning guide.