A truncated novella set on an interstellar ghost ship. Clarity issues present but cool concepts. I wish it had been adapted to longer length - no real way to become involved with these characters lives to any real degree.

The Ghost Line starts out as scifi. Then becomes a ghost story. Or does it? Maybe that is just a reader grabbing onto a word from a title.

The evolution of the story was subtle. Maybe even a little insidious. First it is a simple reclamation story. Now, I knew it would not stay that way. No scifi reclamation story is ever simple. Next, the employer, Wei, has some very odd ideas and practices. This makes her a suspect, though I was not sure what I suspected her of doing.

Next, either the Martian Queen’s AI is doing unexpected things, or Saga is seeing things. Ghost time. When I say ‘ghost time’, I mean strange, unexplained events and sightings and if this books wasn’t labeled as scifi, I would call it paranormal. I like both genres, so combining them would be fine with me.

But I will not annoy the scifi readers with thoughts of ghosts. I will say that the explanation is pure scifi, intriguing and makes for an irresistible read. Saga’s actions are the most compelling and watching her solve the mystery was a pure joy. The ending was not what I was expecting, nor was it what I might have wanted, but it was exactly what it needed to be.

Through NetGalley, the publisher provided a copy of this book so that I could bring you this honest review.

'The Ghost Line' by Andrew Neil Gray and J.S. Herbison is a ghost story that takes place on an abandoned space liner.

The luxury cruise ship The Martian Queen floats abandoned in space. It was never used, and it's taking up a route that can't be claimed until the ship is shut down or sent into a new orbit. A crew heads out to salvage the ship and reclaim the lucrative route that it is on.

Michel and his wife Saga have been hired to reprogram the ship. Part of this includes turning the ships AI off in order to complete the mission. Before long, things on the ship claim the life of a crewmate of Michel and Saga, and one of the other crew may be planning a sabotage in order to hide a secret. Meanwhile, the ship offers hologram dinner parties and enticing food and alcohol.

It's moody and spooky in tone, and I really enjoyed it. Parts of it reminded me of The Shining, for just the sheer scariness of people at a party. At 145 pages, it feels like a tightly written story without a lot of excess.

I received a review copy of this ebook from Macmillan-Tor/Forge and NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. Thank you for allowing me to review this ebook.

The Martian Queen has been mothballed for a long time and a few people see this a gold mine waiting to be plundered. But all is not right with the ship that Saga has been hired to raid. Her boss knows secrets about the ship because she has been there before with another crew and has an agenda that she hasn’t shared with Saga or her husband. This is a tight story that goes from space piracy to something else in the end. A good story and possibly a nice setup to a future story but isn’t needed for closure to this one.


Digital review copy provided by the publisher through NetGalley

The Ghost Line by Andrew Neil Gray and J.S. Herbison

Saga is an explorer of abandoned starships and asteroids, regaling her fans with video of her discoveries. Conveniently, Saga is marriage to Michel, a renowned hacker, just the sort of person who can get Saga inside these ships. But the couple are finally ready to take a break and at last have the children that they long for. And then Wei shows up. Wei offers Saga and Michel (and their pilot, Gregor) a huge amount of money to do one last job. The Martian Queen is a luxurious spacefairing cruise liner that used to carry tourists between Mars and Earth. Twenty years ago she was mothballed but she continues to cruise between the two planets, bookmarking a lucrative tourist route and so, according to the law of space, preventing anyone else from taking it over.

It isn’t clear exactly what Wei wants with the ship but she has some strict rules for her team and the chief one is never, ever to remove their protective suits while on board The Martian Queen. But when Saga, Michel and Gregor roam the beautiful corridors and cabins of this enormous and eerily empty ship, it all feels completely harmless and the air is breathable. What harm can it do to take their helmets off? And yet there are moments when Saga could swear that somebody or something is watching her…

I love spooky tales of ghost ships, whether they’re floating on the seas or soaring through space, and so I was instantly drawn to The Ghost Line. It’s a novella, of about 100 pages, and so it’s a quick read but I soon found it to be immersive and pleasingly creepy. Links are made to the Titanic and in fact The Martian Queen seems modelled on that doomed vessel – only missing the funnels and an anchor. The ship has an elegance to it and an evocative nostalgia. It reminds me just as much of the empty grand hotel in The Shining. You just know that somewhere horror is waiting.

Saga and Michel are great characters, particularly Saga from whose perspective we see much of what happens. The short length of the story did leave me wanting. I would have liked many more pages filling out the characters of Saga, Michel and Wei. They’re such interesting and intriguing people – they deserve a full length novel. That way I might have understood a little more the reasons for the ways in which Saga acts. On one level, I can see why she acts as she does but I’d have liked more about what it meant to her and to her relationship with Michel. I definitely wanted to know more about Wei – there’s a story there very ready for telling.

The mood and the atmosphere is excellent and the setting of The Martian Queen is wonderful. For a short novel, the authors do a fine job of evoking its bygone splendour as well as the chilling isolation and loneliness of space. It’s not a bad thing to be left wanting more and The Ghost Line certainly achieved that. I read it as a late night read – the best time for spooky tales – and it was perfect for that.

Strangeness in the stars!

Abandoned star ships that are more than they seem. This premise has been played out before. At this stage I am not interested enough to pursue a future reading of a subsequent tale. The trouble was I felt somewhat abandoned by it all.
It looked like a straight forward job for Saga and her husband Michel. Break into The Martian Queen, a sealed mothballed ship, and help bring it back online. Then other factors enter including their employer and the ship itself. Life becomes something other. There was a reason this ship had been placed away from all.
This novella has great potential but I was not captured.

A NetGalley ARC
(August 2017)

This was a relatively easy read, though it was a bit dialogue-y (that's a thing) and I felt too much of the time the focus on characters took me out of the story. It took me a while to understand the atmosphere, and I didn't devour it like I do other books, but it was a cool read.

A review in spanish
https://dreamsofelvex.blogspot.com/2017/07/dos-novelas-breves-de-tor.html

An imaginative and gripping short story that had me from the get go!

The Ghost Line starts off reading a lot like every other space horror book. We have the crew, hired by a single person representing a large company who wants to recover'information' and 'salvage' an old abandoned luxury space liner. They arrive and the ship is, at first glance, eerily well kept. The crew itself is even a little bit on the expected side. A married couple planning on maybe starting a family after this, a pilot who would rather be drinking, and of course the creepy and aloof patron of the whole affair.

Once all that is out of the way and you get into the meat of the story, The Ghost Line starts to add little twists and spins and eventually changes the expected path of the story. It's not entirely new and original but the way the story is pieced and carefully sewn together is super enjoyable, and perfectly packaged in it's 73 pages.

The two main characters, Saga and Michel, only took this one last salvage job to get the last bit of money to help their soon to be family. Saga is also busy paying for the therapy she hopes will help her mother who is suffering from an unnamed neurosis. Wei, the woman who hired them is a creepy woman who keeps to herself and the pilot she picked Gregor is a almost cookie cutter Russian drunk. I liked everyone except for Gregor, even with the practiced and familar roles everyone was in he was the one that felt 'extra'. He felt tacked on for a story device which was a disappointment.

I really loved the premise of the ship they are sent to recover. It's a luxury liner, one formerly meant to shuttle people to and from certain places and it's made up like the Titanic. Very fancy, very upscale and all of it in perfect condition when the team arrives. Of course things go wrong, and the story becomes an almost Fairy like Horror. I won't say anything more than that but it did not go where I thought it would and for that I am exceptionally pleased with it.

For horror novella this one is the perfect length and though it doesn't knock your socks off I think it's worth reading. It's definitely on my list of 'comfy horror' books I'll return to when I want to scratch that itch.

Cover Thoughts : The cover art on this is done by John Harris who has also done beautiful covers for some Orson Scott Card, Ben Bova, Jack MacDevitt. He seems to focus on pastels and paintings. I really like this cover for this story, again this is a cover that the more you think about the ending on the book it fits perfectly. It's beautifully done and really gives a great image to the story.

I really enjoyed this and wished it had been longer (which isn't something I usually say – I almost always want books to be shorter). I loved all the characters, and the world-building is really impressive considering the small word count. Keeping the focus on one ship and having minimal flashbacks worked really well. As you can tell, I'm learning from this book as a writer, as well as enjoying it as a reader. I'd like to read more from these authors.

The Ghost Line is a novella I saw pass me by a few times when visiting other blogs and as the cover drew me in I decided to request it for myself. I was not left disappointed.

Despite the shortness of the book, about 70 pages, the necessary world building was done. But there was also some deepening out of the characters I was perhaps not expecting from such a short novella. The story follows four characters with only one point of view. Saga, and especially her husband Michel, know how to hack their way into all kinds of things, like ghost ships. Their pilot Gregor, an alcoholic, was also hired by their contractor, Wei, who wants to reclaim The Martian Queen. All our characters have something interesting to them. Gregor is more than just an alcoholic. Michel wants to start a family but how much does Saga truly want it? And Wei who doesn’t share her secrets regarding The Martian Queen but would like everyone to listen to her regardless regarding it.

The ship itself also plays its role of course. Having been dormant in space for so long, it is creepy and eerie to follow Saga through it. I think the authors captured that atmosphere reasonably well. The ending even tore open an emotional cord. I do think it missed its mark slightly due to the shortness of the story. Perhaps a bit more length and deepening in the feelings would have made it hit more.

Even so I found this a very enjoyable and possibly thought provoking read. Certainly worth a read if you like ghost stories and space ships.

The Ghost Line falls in a unique subset of sci-fi that is near and dear to my heart, sci-fi suspense that border on horror. It’s a genre that I love in books, movies and TV (although it is massively underrepresented on television), so I was really looking forward to reading this book.

I will start off by saying I generally liked most of what this book did. The characters are interesting, if not exactly unique to the genre, and I liked the fact that the main character was from Iceland. It added a bit extra to her characterization, especially when it casually dropped some lesser known Icelandic folklore into a random conversation. The authors also did a solid job of getting across the emotions of their characters, and from the outset, I felt the almost crazy sneakiness of Wei and the real affection Saga and Michel had for each other. Often in Sci-Fi books, characters are paired off but then don’t actually feel like a real couple, so the fact that the emotions of these two were so well written really worked for me.

This book hit it’s genre dead on, but unfortunately, a little too dead-on. If you’ve seen movies like Event Horizon, Ghost Ship, or The Haunting of Hill House, then you will be incredibly familiar with what is going to happen in this book. While different in the specifics, it follows the formula of the genre to such a degree that it is entirely predictable. Thankfully, while the book is a little derivative, it is written well enough to preserve the suspense it goes for despite seeing the twists coming a mile ahead of time.

The writing is good enough, in fact, that the predictability wasn’t sufficient to hurt my review of The Ghost Line. That is, right up until I got to the end.

The final decision that Saga makes at the end of the book feels so out of place with the character at that moment that it totally threw me out of the book. The authors did an excellent job making that work in the structure of the story, and the recovered somewhat in the final pages as Michel struggles against Saga’s decision, but I still felt the whole time like they should never have ended up where they did in the first place.

It didn’t ruin the book, mind you, and it’s still a relatively good read, but I was sad that my enjoyment of the title got hamstrung in its last lap.

Short, sweet and creepy sci-fi. Wish there had been more definitive answers, but it was a fun read all the same.

When I started reading The Ghost Line, it had been a while since I last read its summary and I didn’t remember a lot beside this being about a ghost ship. And going in pretty much blind, not knowing what these scavengers are going to expect and have to deal with, made this an excellent read. I was glued to the pages and read the whole thing in one sitting, not wanting to stop until I found out what was going on on this ship.

With Ghost Ship being on of my favorite horror movies, I couldn’t have been more excited about a story of the same idea, but set in space, and was all too happy to find out that The Ghost Line came close to my favorite movie, being less bloody but more weird and definitely on the same level of eerie.

This being a novella, I was impressed by how the authors were able to not only create a great atmosphere with the perfect amount of weird but also made room to get to know the characters with enough background story to get invested in their story and delivered more than just a horror story but also a story about love and sacrifices.

Having a character who knows a lot more about a situation than the POV character, one who is keeping secrets from them, isn’t usually my favorite way to be kept in suspense but in The Ghost Line it worked out for me. With the right amount of clues and the palpable tension, the authors did a great job on keeping me at the edge of my seat.

Last but not least, The Ghost Line totally got me with its ending. Besides finding out what exactly is happening on this ship, an idea that I was fascinated by and almost wished to explore more, I also didn’t expect it to end the way it did.

Andrew Neil Gray and J.S. Herbison wrote an atmospheric novella reminiscent of one of my favorite horror movies, Ghost Ship. The Ghost Line is a lot more than just a horror story though. It’s also a story about love and loss, perfectly integrated in this ominous adventure.

This was not at all what I expected. I picked The Ghost Line up because I was in the mood for a fun scifi read. And it was definitely fun to read. But it was also much stranger and more emotional than I expected. For such a short book, it packed quite the punch.

As I said, this was a short book (less than a hundred pages, I believe). So there wasn't a whole lot of time for world building . But, that being said, I was really impressed with how much  building was done in such a short period of time. I felt like I had a surprisingly good grasp of this universe.

The same could be said for the characters. Even though we only got a short glimpse into their lives, I feel like I got to know them all really well. I would have loved even more character development and exploration, but of course in a shorter book like this that's not really possible.

This book is short, but so interesting. I loved the interplay of the characters and it was so much fun to get to know this universe. I'd definitely check out more books by these authors. And to anyone who likes scifi, I'd recommend giving this a read!

A short and simple read. Featuring a dysfunctional married couple, a secretive crazy person, an alcoholic and a self-aware ship.

Pick this up if you're bored and don't know what else to do. Otherwise there are so many better reads.

It was OK. I was interested, but not involved. An early connection is made to Urban Exploration--the exploration and documentation of abandoned and decaying man-made structures. Saga, who evidently was involved in U E on earth now documents the exploration of structures in space. She and her husband Michel have been hired by a very reticent employer to hack the Martian Queen, the cruise ship for the wealthy that was abandoned in space twenty years earlier. The time spent on the luxurious abandoned ship is at first eerie, then more mysterious, then dangerous.

I'm not a big fan of novellas, so that influenced my opinion, and the characters didn't have time to become real for me. Love the premise of the ghostly ship, abandoned by humans, continuing its silent journey between Earth and Mars, but 73 pages felt like skimming the surface.

Beautifully written in classic abandoned ship salvage gone wrong style with solid characters. Quite an enjoyable read.

I didn't expect to find this so creepy, but wow, it ended up getting under my skin. I thought I'd just start it, see what it was like before bed... and then I read the whole thing. I loved the partnership between the husband and wife team, and the whole idea of a space-liner drifting on an old cruise path just to keep the rights to it. There's not much explanation for why what happens on the ship occurs, but it's almost better that way -- you don't understand why anymore than the characters do.

I loved the ending, too. It'd have been easy to give readers an easier, happier way out; to have some kind of compromise be reached. Instead -- well, I'd better not say too much. Suffice it to say that it works really well, and though it's not horror, it definitely has a heck of a creep factor in places.

Review link live from 6th June.