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julian_greystoke 's review for:
Dead Silence
by S.A. Barnes
I had high hopes. Such high hopes.
Titanic meets The Shining in space? Fuck. Yes. And technically it wasn't false advertising. All the elements were there. The spooks, the mystery, a cruise ship dead in the middle of nowhere, and a potentially mentally unstable person in the middle of it all. The problem? This author wasn't the right person to make this happen. Her style left me feeling detached. The characters were not people, they were architypes. There was the sweet one, the romantic interest one, the mean one, and the nerd one. They never strayed from these thinly defined roles that should have been a jumping off point, but instead remained their entire personalities. Don't get me started on our MC who is a crabby loner type with Trauma (TM) and a potentially harmful mental illness trope to go with it Made me feel icky.
Well, you might be saying, it's the scares we're really here for. Too bad that the writing that left us with shallow characters also left us with shallow everything else. This book, in better hands, would have piled on the foreboding and dread to have me biting my nails in terrified glee. Instead I felt like I was reading a users manual with ghosts in it. It was dry, it was emotionless, it was flat as a pancake.
I'll have a video review coming for this one. Two stars because it wasn't objectively bad, just so disappointing. Maybe if this was your first horror ever, but if you've read/seen any horror before I think you're going to struggle to get into this one too.
Titanic meets The Shining in space? Fuck. Yes. And technically it wasn't false advertising. All the elements were there. The spooks, the mystery, a cruise ship dead in the middle of nowhere, and a potentially mentally unstable person in the middle of it all. The problem? This author wasn't the right person to make this happen. Her style left me feeling detached. The characters were not people, they were architypes. There was the sweet one, the romantic interest one, the mean one, and the nerd one. They never strayed from these thinly defined roles that should have been a jumping off point, but instead remained their entire personalities. Don't get me started on our MC who is a crabby loner type with Trauma (TM) and a potentially harmful mental illness trope to go with it
Spoiler
in the form of "ah, thank goodness I have this debilitating mental illness because it makes me more able to deal with the situation!"Well, you might be saying, it's the scares we're really here for. Too bad that the writing that left us with shallow characters also left us with shallow everything else. This book, in better hands, would have piled on the foreboding and dread to have me biting my nails in terrified glee. Instead I felt like I was reading a users manual with ghosts in it. It was dry, it was emotionless, it was flat as a pancake.
I'll have a video review coming for this one. Two stars because it wasn't objectively bad, just so disappointing. Maybe if this was your first horror ever, but if you've read/seen any horror before I think you're going to struggle to get into this one too.