This had a cool premise and a good plot. Once I started reading, I just kept turning the pages to see what would happen. I think the downside for me was the characters, I wasn’t really invested in any of them enough to be concerned about whether or not they would make it. I also think there should have been a little more to the wrap up, like how they were able to cure everyone.

I love any book about space travel so I was thrilled to get this ARC. The first 2/3 of the book was so much fun, freeze pods and a different planet and the business of disease as a result of sleep and light deprivation - we’ve all felt that in our lives. The wrap up was too fast, convenient and a tad bit disappointing. I will still recommend to all readers.

GHOST STATION is a chilling, highly atmospheric sci-fi horror mashup that had me racing to the last page. While the payoff was satisfying enough, too many questions were left unanswered and where most of the novel was a slow build, the ending felt rushed and unfinished.

Let's see, to say I struggled with this book is an understatement. Taking over a week to finish a book us unheard of for me. However, that's exactly what happened. I started and finished 3 other books prior to finishing this one. The synopsis was great! I was expecting a horror story in space, what I received was a waste of my time that I can't get back. With that being said, that's the end of the review.

Have you ever watched a movie - or even read a book - and when you finished it your initial impression was "Meh...that was ok but I didn't love it". Then as time went by and you thought about it more your rating slowly climbed. This was exactly my experience with Ghost Station. The protagonist is initially hard to like. However, if you stick with the story she becomes more sympathetic and you understand her far greater. The story simmers with a slow-developing plot that is far more sci-fi than horror. This will be a book I can't keep on the shelf!

This was a riveting read from start to finish. Every bit as good as her previous sci fi adventure "Dead Silence" with some added family drama and personal trauma just to keep things interesting. With a terrific heroine, a little low key romance and stakes about as high as they can get this book does not let up for a second.

Ghost Station by S.A. Barnes is a space horror tale of isolation, cold, and inner turmoil set on a planet with many secrets. But it’s not just the planet itself that has a story to tell, it’s each of the crewmates as well. But will they share or will the secrets ruin them all?

Content Warnings:
Mental health, Suicide, Injury description, Death, Domestic abuse, Violence, Blood, and Murder.

Let’s dive in!

My Thoughts on Ghost Station by S.A. Barnes –
After the death of a crewmate, Ophelia is sent to treat a team in space as their on-site psychologist. But there’s something fishy about the assignment itself and when she arrives, she sees very clearly that the crew doesn’t want her there. They only want to continue their mission of documenting three more planets and then go home.

Struggling with her own very raw traumas, Ophelia is disturbed to find that various things on this mission trigger even more trauma from her childhood. Fighting her inner demons while struggling to remain calm and collected on the surface to do her job, Ophelia just can’t catch a break.

This tale starts with a scene that brings a deep unease into the reader’s mind. That unease only gets worse and worse as the story progresses. The author does an amazing job setting us up to distrust the main character while still hoping all will turn out well. I absolutely loved how readers are in the dark when it comes to various secrets. While it’s easy to see that everyone is acting strangely, it could be chalked up to their collected recent trauma. However, over time we get to slowly learn about everything that’s being hidden and with each thing learned, the tale only gets more and more twisted.

SO many scenes here had me holding my breath! I don’t think I took a solid breath in or out during my entire time reading, however, as the anxiety this tale spiked in me had me so tense!

My Favorite Passages from Ghost Station –
Ophelia grips her safety restraints tighter, teeth rattling in her head so hard she’s not sure she’ll have any left by the time they land. Her chest aches with the pressure of increasing gravity, and her palms are sweaty inside her envirosuit gloves. Correction: all of her is sweaty.

An enormous, enclosed environment with nowhere to run and thousands of places to hide.

The howl of wind around her rises to an unearthly shriek, an eerie, goose bump-inducing sound. From low to high, deep to shrill, like an animalistic moan of pain transforming into a scream. And it’s coming from the city ruins to her left.

No. Ophelia shakes her head. Not here.
But the back of her neck prickles with a chill of awareness, as if someone is just behind her, looming in the threshold, breathing just hard enough to ruffle the tiny hairs there.
Goose bumps spring up on her arms, and she whips around, hands up to defend herself from … something.
But no one is there.

There’s something—or someone—here. That’s what it feels like. As if she and Severin have just missed someone sweeping through, removing all signs of themselves and anyone else. It’s not a scent left hanging in the air, obviously; even if that were so, she wouldn’t be able to smell it. It’s not even a noise, echoing in the distance. Just a sense of not being alone.

For the thousandth time since the start of this experience, she feels she’s missing something important. Unspoken information that would make all of this make sense. It’s like feeling the breeze of a near miss but never learning what danger you just dodged or what to look out for next time.

Humans have been operating like they have the universe to themselves just because they haven’t found any other living civilizations. Doesn’t mean they aren’t out there.

This isn’t a bear or a saber-toothed tiger or even the sound of rushing footsteps behind her on a darkened street. But that primal part of her brain certainly recognizes it as a danger and wants nothing the fuck to do with it.

My Final Thoughts on Ghost Station –
Horror fans who enjoy claustrophobia-inducing tales, you gotta check this one out! I was so uncomfortable during my time reading this, but I was also totally captivated by the tale and couldn’t wait to see what horrors were to come next! This is such an amazing blend of isolation and the need for connection and approval.

Thank you you to NetGalley and the publisher for the ARC in exchange for an honest review!

This was one of my most highly anticipated novels of 2024, so I was SO happy to see that I received the ARC! This book was almost a perfect for me. Some of my favorite subgenres of horror are space horror and isolation horror, and this title falls under both of those! We follow a psychologist with a mysterious past joining an exploration team to a dead and desolate planet. They are sent there to retrieve samples after the planet was sold by a competitive company and it's clear pretty quickly that something bigger is happening to them. To refrain from any spoilers, there was a lot of very squirmy imagery in this novel that really got to me, and I LOVED it. I read SA Barnes first novel, Dead Silence, and thought that it was just okay, so I was thrilled to see that I enjoyed this book much more. The only thing that kept this book from being a 5 star read for me was that the ending felt a little rushed and ambiguous. I know that ambiguity is something that author's commonly do when ending a story, but in this case I felt like I was left with more questions than answers, and I would have liked a little more of a wrap up in the end. Besides that qualm, I adored this book! I cannot wait to get my hands on a physical copy, and I look forward to more written by Barnes!

I'm a bit torn on how to rate this - there were things I really enjoyed and things I really, really didn't. I feel like this book had SO many interesting concepts but focused on the things I didn't care about and abandoned the cooler things that were pulling me in.

The overall tone of this was good! I love space horror, and this definitely gave the creepy, "oh shit" feeling that I was looking for. The first half of this was almost unbearably slow, but thankfully it picked up and I was able to get through the last half much faster.

There are elements of this that feel underdeveloped and forgotten. Some characters feel like their backstory is just overly convenient and Too Much (one character in particular feels like they should have been two separate characters).

I am a firm believer in the idea that not every book needs a romance element. This was one of those books that did not need a weird "crush" subplot - it felt way, way too fast and not developed and just took me out every time it came up.

The ending felt very lackluster and actually frustrated me. The epilogue felt unnecessary and didn't add anything.

Now, what I did like: the overall feeling of the novel. The concept itself! The idea of long term planetary exploration missions was neat and I would have liked more of that! Alien stuff - the whole "humans exploring abandoned alien planets" thing was a winner for me! The discussion about psychology in space missions was intriguing but fell a bit short (developing this a bit more would have been great).

Honestly, I think I would have liked a novel about the Bledsoe massacre more - this felt like it was doing too much and not enough at the same time.

This wasn't a bad read, but it wasn't as good as Dead Silence.

This book is advertised as a quicker burn than it actually is.

If you're expecting a by the numbers horror experience then you're not going to find it here.

The actual interesting plot relevant moment that is in the blurb for this book does not happen until more than halfway through it- readers are not going to like that!

I enjoyed the central premise of this novel, I find the side-effects of going into space for an extended period of time a tad mortifying. Add the psychological aspects into the equation and you have a plausible awful effect on people's mental health.

The other issue is that there are too many factors, too many possibilities for the actions happening, and the initially scary muddled meaning of everything that's happening gets frustrating.

I absolutely LOVED this book!!

It’s a slow burn, but piles on the dread! If you love scifi horror, movies like “Alien” or “Prometheus”, check out “Ghost Station”.

A Reclamation & Exploration team touches down on planet Lyria 393-C. The planet and the team members hold deadly secrets… with lives in the balance… truths come flooding out. Will anyone make it off the planet alive?

The characters were so interesting: each had their own backstories leading to their present morals and motivations. I really felt like I knew the crew, which makes the plot that much more horrific.

Can’t wait to see wait Barnes thinks of next!!

Thank you to NetGalley, the author, and Tor Publishing for a copy!!

You guys, I was sooo close to DNFing this around the 30% mark... it was really slow and kinda boring and not meeting my expectations at all. But I had read and loved Dead Silence... so I talked myself into giving it more time to wow me. And I'm glad I did.

Ophelia is a psychologist who travels with space teams that have experienced trauma, with the intent of getting them to open up about their grief, help them process their feelings, and assess them for potential risk of ERS - a space based mental illness that, when left unchecked, could cause the sufferer to inflict severe harm on themselves and others. Ophelia is also running away from a past that continues to haunt her no matter where she goes.

The team to which she is assigned is headed out to a planet that used to belong to Pinnacle, her uncle's company, but has been abandoned for the past six years. All scans showed no sign of life. Their mission is to collect some samples and get the hab back up and running. But once on site, she can't help but feel there is something is very 'off' about the place. Bad memories start to resurface, she finds unsettling objects left behind in the debris, and one of the crew members is starting to act strange...

Once the weird stuff starts up, the book really gets rolling, and the last third, gosh, it just flies by at whiplash speed. More psychological terror than actual horror, it'll definitely scratch your claustrophic stuck-in-space itch!!

SA Barnes does it again with this atmospheric sci-fi horror. This time Dr. Ophelia Bray, running from her family name, is assigned to a small exploration crew sent to an abandoned planet, Ophelia is quick to realize that she can depend on no one but herself and that she is surrounded by secrets.
Soon a gruesome murder takes place and Ophelia's fears the worst and together with the crew they work together what is happening.
It was a little slow to start but built in tension quickly. Barnes does a great job of building that tension and creepy vibe that you need with a sci-fi horror and managed to keep my attention the entire time.

Thank you to NetGalley and Tor Nightfire for the eARC.

As I patiently waited for my Libby book of Dead Silence to become available, I saw the opportunity to review the new S.A. Barnes book on Netgalley. I was most definitely not disappointed and could not put this book down. We meet Dr. Ophelia Bray, as she accepts a job with a small expedition crew, in an attempt to make a difference, as well as escape her family name. When landing on an abandoned planet, things go from not great to even worse as Ophelia realizes the only person she can rely on is herself. She slowly begins to unravel the secrets that those around her have been hiding in the hopes of making it home. I am looking forward to publishing day to get a physical copy for my bookshelf!

Wow! SA Barnes first book, Dead Silence, is one of my favorite books and a favorite at my library. I wondered if she could do it again or maybe Dead Silence was a one-off. Oh, she did it again. Ghost Station is killer. Although I didn't particularly like the main character, the main character isn't particularly likeable. That usually has me not finishing the book. I couldn't put Ghost Station down. It sucked me in and kept me up late. SA Barnes has proven that she can write fantastic science fiction and I look forward to reading whatever she publishes in the future.

This atmospheric sci-fi horror novel had me from the beginning. Ophelia Bray, estranged from her rich powerful family, is trying to make up for the harm her family has caused by dedicating her life to helping people suffering with mental health conditions from deep space travel. After losing a patient to suicide she volunteers for a deep space mission as mental health specialist. That part seemed a bit strange to me. A bare bones recon crew would not have the space and resources for a psychiatric professional. But as a fan of sci fi I’m always willing to suspend my disbelief!
This novel was good and creepy and characters were likable. I loved the concept of ‘cold sleep’ technology for long trips!

S.A. Barnes is back at it again with another fun space-horror. The first half was a bit slow but it really picked up for me part way through. The tension and creepy feelings were consistent throughout. There was A LOT of baggage with the main character that I know was necessary to the story but it felt like it took up more of plot than was needed- I just wanted a bit more action, a bit more history of the planet and more explanation about the “alien forces” and their motives.

Well this was another interesting space “horror.”
While not the most thrilling book to read I did like the idea behind the concept.

I struggled to get into this one. Which I felt the same with the last book by this author and I feel like it has to do with the characters (mostly the protagonists) and the pacing. To me this was not as creepy or thrilling as I expected it to be. I feel like there is too much build up with not enough tension for the conclusion we get. But the story did keep me interested.

Overall it was an ok book that I think most sci fi lovers will enjoy.

Title: Ghost Station
By: S.A. Barnes
☆☆☆☆
Release date: April 9, 2024.

Dead Silence was the first book Ive read from author S.A. Barnes and I really liked it. Others have come after and they didnt hit the spot.

Now we get Ghost Station, it was a slow burn and very atmospheric. I liked it. I think space horror will be my new thing. Dr. Ophelia Bray is working for her families rival space exploration company. Things seem off and then all the weird stuff begins.

Couldn't put it down. Lots of little hidden things that are easily missed (that seriously up the creepy factor once noticed!), but also the suspense running through it all was some of the best I've read in a while. Very well structured and crafted, even if it took A WHOLE 200 PAGES to get to any substantial horror. It also hit a nice spot of suspenseful horror without being gory or overly violent, and it didn't fall into the trap of Scooby-Dooing the boogeyman. In fact, most questions are left unanswered which is always a nice touch in suspense/horror novels.

However, I did not actually like the writing style. So many commas! And there were far too many clunky internal monologues. The info they gave was important, but I often had to jump back a whole page to follow the dialogue bookending them - they could probably be edited down a lot. The protag was also just a terrible and unbelievable therapist - incredibly ill-adjusted person who's extremely reactive (all of her emotions are dialed up to 100, always) who somehow manages to address every single one of her lifelong traumas and character flaws during the course of this book, mostly with the unwitting help of the mysterious and forbidden love interest.

There was a lot of eye rolling, but I still blasted through it and enjoyed the plot, and I'd be interested in more stories exploring this universe, the characters, or even a prequel about the planet or Ava!

Once again, this would be great in a visual format - the helmet HUD in particular is begging to be a visual novel game or similar.