A review by thereadingrambler
Ghost Station by S.A. Barnes

fast-paced

2.5

One-sentence review: If you’ve read Dead Silence then you’ve read this book, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing. 

Ghost Station demonstrates that Barnes knows how to write one specific plot and write that plot in an engaging way, but I’m not sure if there is much depth otherwise to her writing. The same things I loved and the same problems I had with Dead Silence are also present in this book. I’ve been sick for like two weeks, so something predictable and easy to consume was exactly the thing I needed. So I’m not faulting the book for being what it is, but if you’re expecting something mind-blowing or terrifying, this is not that book. 

The main character is Ophelia, a psychologist who has recently witnessed the suicide of one of her patients. Both unable to cope with what she saw and the guilt she feels and wanting to escape the pressures of her wealthy family, she takes an assignment with a space exploration team that recently lost a member. Her purpose is to test new preventative therapies for a space illness that can cause the sufferer to experience a potentially violent psychotic break. The crew she is joining is not welcoming of her presence, but their problems with her are quickly overtaken by the weirdness on the planet they’re surveying.

If you read this book, I would highly recommend not reading the blurb first because the front flap makes it seem like a specific event will happen fairly early on in the book, but it actually doesn’t happen until around the halfway mark. So I spent a lot of the book just waiting for that thing to happen which took a lot of the suspense out of the experience.