I would like to thank NetGalley and Tor Publishing Group for allowing me to read an ARC of this book.

Ghost Station is the author's follow-up novel to the 2022 hit Dead Silence, and fans of that one will find great pleasure in reading this one. Straddling the genres of Space Horror and Sc-Fi/Fantasy, Ghost Station is set on an ancient alien planet with a creepy and unsettling atmosphere and foreboding sense of dread and impending doom.

The story focuses on a psychologist, Dr. Ophelia Bray, who has been assigned to a team exploring an abandoned planet. Dr. Bray's specialty is the study and prevention of ERS (Eckhart-Reiser syndrome), which causes people to hallucinate, hear voices, and sometimes even go mad with violence and/or suicide. The crew doesn't seem to like Dr. Bray much and mostly ignore her attempts to help them, or her warnings that their work investigating the planet may increase their chances of ERS. The more the crew investigate, the stranger things start to get. The crew begins to show signs of ERS one by one, and they begin to think they may not be alone on the planet after all. They're going to have to work together and trust each other if they want to survive and escape alive.

This book is a slow burn, and the narrative is drawn out over the pages to an ending that really ramps up in the last few chapters and a satisfying epilogue. Fans of the author and space horror (and body horror) will love this book, and I will be recommending it to my horror book club and librarian friends.

This was absolutely chilling and creepy and I enjoyed it but it wasn’t perfect. This space horror story was engaging but a bit too slow for my taste. This was a tense sci-fi novel but I needed more. It picked up a bit towards the middle and I was satisfied with the ending, but I preferred this on audio vs physically reading it.

Thank you NetGalley and Tor Nightfire for this ARC.

I absolutely loved Dead Silence, I couldn't wait to read another book by this author and once I knew I got it as an arc was so excited! Her writing is very atmospheric like you are in the story yourself experiencing everything that is going on. I loved every second of this book! It did kind of feel like dead silence but different to where it was still so enjoyable. I can't wait to see what she has in store for us next!

This is my first S.A. Barnes novel and I am a fan.

In the unspecified future, space exploration is a huge money making endeavor and there are two corporations that basically own the market. ERS is a space base condition that can lead to disaster and is a death sentence for someone's career. There's a famous case that ended with the brutal murders of 29 people and since, it's something that nobody wants to be associated with. Dr. Ophelia Bray is a psychologist that specifically works in the study and prevention of ERS in those that work in the space exploration field. After Ophelia experiences a work-related tragedy she decides to take her expertise on site. She's assigned to a crew that also has had a tragedy among them and soon finds herself in space with a group of people that clearly don't trust her or want her there. As they get to the planet they will be exploring things start to get odd - the previous crew clearly made a hasty exit from the planet. Then a member of the crew is found dead in a gruesome way and things go from odd to a nightmare. The crew must work together to find out what is going on but when everyone has secrets it's hard to know who to trust - especially when you might not even be able to trust yourself.

This book has layers! Set in the future it immediately gets you acclimated to this futuristic world. Though it's futuristic there are a lot of parallels to present day so it's easy to connect to. Dr. Ophelia Bray is the FMC that has layers herself. As you get to know her background, family, and motivations you get more questions surrounding Ophelia. Not only has Ophelia experienced a tragedy, the team she is assigned to has as well. This has left the team on edge and even more reluctant to trust Ophelia since psychologists can end someone's career without even meaning to. Any mention of ERS or symptoms that could lead to ERS can easily put someone out of work in the space exploration field.

ERS itself is interesting. It reminds me of PTSD but stemming more from isolation instead of trauma. Which space would be pretty isolating I would think. How S.A. Barnes creates this whole mental illness into the book was so interesting and gave the book more tension. The motivation behind Ophelia's study of it is also so intriguing, though that's part of the mystery of Ophelia that you learn about as the book goes on. Every character is interesting; there are things that make you like them or hate them but every one of them had me wondering what they're hiding.

Overall the book is a great blending of sci-fi and horror. There's some body horror along with thriller vibes. Also, if you don't trust big corporations and those that run it this book won't make you feel hopeful for the future.

The premise of this book seems so coo! I usually enjoy Sci-Fi and horror is my preferred genre so perhaps My expectations were too high going in. Overall I found Ophelia to be juvenile and almost unbearable and the plot to drag on. This book is so long and could’ve been condensed significantly. Thank you to NetGalley for an advanced copy of this book.

3.25 stars

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

I am sad to say that I was disappointed! I have loved this authors previous book, Dead Silence, so when I saw the cover and description for Ghost Station, I was so excited. Unfortunately, it was just too slow and repetitive for me. I had a hard time staying focused.

I will read other works by this author even though this one was not my favorite.

Spoilers ahead.

Billed as scif-fi horror, Ghost Station is set in ye hyper-capitalist, space-faring future, you know the drill. The rich live in luxury, the poor are but fodder for vast corporations, as they labour on the outskirts of space, where the danger, isolation and poor working conditions make them susceptible to Eckhart-Reiser syndrome. Basically, contagious PTSD. Our heroine is Dr Ophelia Bray, a scion of the rich and powerful Bray family, albeit one with a mysterious past, who works as a psychologist for one of her family's competitors. Her specialty is helping spacers who have been diagnosed with ERS but when one of her clients commits suicide unexpectedly she inveigles her way onto an active exploration vessel in the hope of being able to treat ERS in the field.

Needless to say the crew of said vessel, who have recently suffered a loss in the field, are less than receptive to having a psychologist on board, still less one with the surname Bray. But then their mission takes them to a previously abandoned planet--a ghost planet, do you see--and once strange things began to happen upon it Ophelia, her name and her history, are the last thing the crew needs to worry about.

So, Ghost Planet is a slow, slow burn which, for me, mostly worked, although I've seen some reviews where the reader grew a little impatient with the pacing and I can, in fairness, see that too. If, however, you like your horror creeping and your dread burgeoning, the book really pulls off an ever-escalating sense of unease, as questions about the crew--their interpersonal dynamics, what happened with their dead comrade--and Ophelia herself keep piling up. For at least the first half of the story, I was genuinely gripped, caught up in the succession of mini-mysteries, and appreciative of way the narrative spins out the tensions inherent in its various themes: from the personal and abstract (like identity, family, mental health, grief and guilt) to the more political (like capitalism and commodification) to the very literal (being isolated on alien world where strange shit is going down).

It's ambitious and intriguing but, in the end--and, as ever, my judgement is subjective--I wasn't wholly sure it pulled it all together in a way that paid off the intensity of the build up. I think perhaps part of the, well, I hesitate to call it a problem because it's clearly a deliberate choice and may well work better for other readers, but something I struggled to balance for myself was the weight of more abstract horror themes with the whole scary alien planet side of things. Ophelia, for example, is the walking embodiment of this. She's a very vulnerable, very flawed character, and her training as a psychologist gives her a degree of self-awareness that allows her to articulate those vulnerabilities and flaws very directly (and, even, to be fair, relatably)

<blockquote>Wanting— needing— to be needed, relied on by authority, is her weak spot. It’s what both motivates and terrifies her, which, in psychotherapy world, makes her double the mess.</blockquote>

Or

<blockquote>She wants to be respected, needed, but at the same time she’s so fucking soft for the slightest display of affection. She despises that about herself. Being aware of it doesn’t help, either.</blockquote>

And while this, from a certain perspective, makes her the perfect protagonist of a horror novel (i.e. constantly falling apart at the seams, questioning her own mind a la the governess in The Turn of the Screw) it also makes her a slightly frustrating one, constantly locked in cycle of self-doubt, and solipsistically obsessed with her own insecurities. What's extra difficult about this, is that this is sort of the plot? Or at least the major emotional arc of the book: yes, it's about a weird empty alien planet, but it's also, in a more meaningful sense, about recovery from abuse. It's easy enough to guess Ophelia's history, from almost the second a Dark Event of the Past is mentioned, but there are interesting nuances to it. In this context, the Ophelia we're stuck with for three hundred pages makes a lot of sense, and I feel uncomfortable about my impatience with her.

By a similar token, I feel uncomfortable discussing Ophelia as ... I guess ... a professional being, because I feel that intersects with gender in really complicated, potentially problematic ways. Like, I think "professionalism" is mostly an arbitrary standard we apply to people who don't behave how we think we should, without really ever interrogating the why of those expectations. And in the context of a female character (or, y'know, an actual woman living in the world) it can often boil down to gender-coded things like emotion = bad, or self-doubt is weakness, or talking < action.

For very good reasons, and as already discussed, Ophelia is very in her feels for basically the whole book, the downside of which we never really see her do very much actual therapy or actually help anyone ever. To be fair, she doesn't get much opportunity (the crew are openly hostile to her initially and then shit hits the fan, so therapy kind of naturally becomes a low priority) but we also see her continually make choices driven by selfishness and guilt, choices that often directly the people around her, like going on the mission in the first place (since she's not qualified or experienced in space exploration type stuff), and hiding her past from the crew when it turns out her past might be very, very relevant to what's happening. Again, these choices are understandable, and driven by trauma, but that doesn't make them right. And while I absolutely do not expect fictional characters to always do the "right" thing, nor do I see a character's choices as reflective of the author in any way, I do wish I'd seen Ophelia maybe considering the whole life-or-deathness of the situation a bit more?

And, again, it gets complicated because the protagonist being a hot mess is a trope of certain kinds of horror, and Ghost Station, even though it's firmly in SF space, also has some gothic vibes to it. Plus, off the top of my head, I can list reams of fictional therapists who happen to be men who are fucking dreadful at their job (the guy from In Treatment, Shrinking, Hannibal, the last goes on): therapist overwhelmed by their own frail humanity is ALSO a trope. With Ophelia, however, I kept struggling. And, y'know, maybe that's, um misogyny which I am, at least, currently trying to examine. But I also felt that, between her history, her trauma, the mission being a disaster, and her last patient having committed suicide, the book had, maybe circumstantially more than anything, stacked the deck against her.

It doesn't help that she is the also the, err, victim of an extremely juvenile-feeling romance arc. Well, arc might be too strong a word, since it's mostly Ophelia staring dreamily at the mission captain (a sexy-gruff bloke called Ethan Severin) and then chiding herself for being unprofessional. As attraction-dynamics go, it's not my favourite, especially because it starts off with Severin being fairly harsh and impatient with Ophelia (for understandable reasons--he doesn't want a shrink on the mission, and she's kind of a liability since she isn't trained for the work they do) and she continues to think he's the sex. Like most of the emotional themes of the novel, this is tied into her trauma (she has daddy issues and wants to be approved of by people in positions of authority) but it still grated on me.

Of course, I'm a romance reader, so I probably want more from a romance arc than is necessarily accommodated by non-romance genres, but I genuinely felt that this brought nothing to the book, or to either character. We have enough examples of Ophelia being compromised in her priorities/decision-making, it undermines Ethan coming to respect and understand her because maybe he doesn't, in fact, respect and understand her, maybe he just fancies her, and is only going out of his way for her because of that, and basically substitutes what feels like a relatively clichéd romance-ish dynamic for what could have been a more meaningful platonic/collegiate one. I think part of the reason I'm grumbling about this was that, by the time we reach a point that Ethan and Ophelia are being honest with each other, I felt the book--and the characters--had some interesting things to say about trauma and privilege and survival. It's just it was over-shadowed by all the "he's so mean to me but he's so sexy" that had preceded it.

And this maybe brings me round to why Ghost Station didn't hit for me quite as hard as perhaps it could have? There's such a lot going on that all it ended up feeling quite abbreviated--like there isn't time for Ophelia to establish herself as, um, useful? good at her job? before they're at alien planet panic stations, the attraction between Ophelia and Severin feels surface-level and fairly dull, and we barely have time to meet the crew (there's the hot captain, the nice one, the annoying one, the angry one, the dead one, and the other one) before things are going wrong and everyone is falling apart. Which feels like a weird thing to be complaining about in a story that is also such a slow burn. But I think I would have been more engaged in the second half of the book, if I'd been given more space to care in the first half. I mean Birch (the angry one) is probably the most significant character outside of Ophelia and Severin. He has genuine reason to hate Ophelia, or at least Ophelia's family, and his backstory is important thematically as well as just as a means of conveying information about the setting. But he and Ophelia have maybe two private conversations and, while I'm definitely not saying she should have been able to win him over with her leet therapy skillz, it makes it hard to differentiate between Birch Is Furious For Legitimate Reasons That Could Maybe Be Acknowledged In Some Way and Birch Is Furious Because Creepy Shit Is Going Down And Everyone Is Losing Their Marbles.

I feel a little bad for having spent so long picking at this book; in all honesty, some of it is me trying to figure why I didn't, end up, responding to Ghost Station as positively as I wanted to. This doesn't mean there isn't a lot to admire here, though. Ophelia, irrespective of my personal feelings, genuinely came across as a complex and nuanced portrait of a person living with trauma both acknowledged and unacknowledged. The writing, in general, is crisp, clean and engaging. The atmosphere is deliciously ominous and the world, with its corporations and space PTSD, fascinating. Just to dive fully into spoiler territory, this is ultimately one of those situations where capitalism is the true horror, ah do you see, and the ways the book goes about exploring that--the consequence of reducing people to a resource--felt both plausible and genuinely chilling. In light of this, I still haven't decided if, for me, the ending was a bit of a cop-out. But then again, perhaps not. After all, those most capable of exploiting capitalist systems to their own advantage--or on this occasion to save their arses--are those already benefiting from them. Which, for all her guilt and trauma, Ophelia is.

This is a space horror and very futuristic.
Our main character Dr. Ophelia Bray is a psychologist who has spent her life studying and preventing ERS. Which is a space condition that overtakes their reality. They can become highly paranoid and unpredictable.

The story starts with Ophelia getting a new job with a space crew. She is to fly out with them to an uninhabited planet to survey and grab samples. It’s a pretty routine mission. However Ophelia is unwanted on this mission because her main reason for being there is to prevent ERS and help the crew with their mental health while they grieve a lost crew member from their last mission.
They think she’s there to spy on them and paranoia seems to be setting in.

Cons: there is a big part of the story that stays pretty mysterious and I wish we could’ve had some answers about it.
Pros: I loved the creepy atmosphere. It had an ick factor that involves creepy crawly things. Another plus in my opinion.
I did enjoy this novel and if you liked the other book by this author I think you’ll like this too.

This was one of my most anticipated books of the year and it did not disappoint! I really enjoyed this author's previous novel, but it was just missing ~something~ and this book has that ~something~! Everytime I sat down to read this book I had a hard time stopping because every single chapter left me wanting more. Space horror is something that will always scare me, not knowing what or who is out there just leaves my skin crawling, and this author does that so well. I just loved this book and I know I will keep thinking about it for a very long time!

A big thank you to to Tor and NetGalley for the advanced copy!

I was a huge fan of S.A. Barnes' DEAD SILENCE, so I was incredibly eager to pick up their next book. And it didn't disappoint! Barnes draws perfectly on the things that freak me out about space--the isolation, the sense of being so small in such a vast place. There is a great build-up to the spooky parts and I really appreciated the way mental health is discussed (something I also loved about DEAD SILENCE).

A very quick, fun read that kept me turning the pages. Can't wait to see what Barnes has up their sleeve next!

- Whew, GHOST STATION had me on the edge of my seat. Space horror is a new favorite genre for me.
- I loved the setup of this world. There was just enough to make it feel real without getting bogged down in the details of the corporate and social politics. I’d totally read more books set in this universe.
- The threat in this story was deeply terrifying, and I was genuinely right there with the characters as they tried to think their way out of the situation.

Very cool and unique story. This is my first read by S.A. Barnes and they are a great writer and storyteller. I am particularly interested in the horror/scifi genre and this book fits the bill just right. Barnes adds some major creepy crawlies in the mix making this one is a winner!

Thank you Netgalley for my copy of this book. This review is my own and unbiased.

Book Review | GHOST STATION by S.A. BARNES

4/5 ⭐’s |  ARC Review | PUB DATE: 9 April 2024

Read if you're looking for:
* A sci-fi & horror novel
* A female main character with a checkered past
* A mysteriously abandoned station on a frozen planet
* Body horror: something moving under the skin
* Psychological horror: can’t trust what you’re seeing & hearing
* Greedy corporations doing something shady
* Alien ruins

This is the second sci-fi, horror novel from S.A. Barnes, and I really enjoyed it. Our main character, Ophelia, is a psychologist with some terrible incidents in her past, so in order to escape she signs on to an exploration team who are tasked with surveying a far planet that has ancient alien ruins in order to determine if it has valuable resources. The team she joins also has a recent tragedy in their past, and are not friendly to having a corporate psychologist delving into their business. After they arrive at the planet and start to use the abandoned station that a previous survey team has established, very strange and terrifying events begin to occur. The team can no longer trust their own minds, unsure if they are seeing and hearing things that aren’t there. And, the black alien ruins seem to be calling to them.

Barnes does a great job of building the suspense and the creepy atmosphere of the station and the planet. The body horror is real in this one, so look into the content warnings a little more if that is something that bothers you. I enjoyed how the story also delved into corporate greed and corruption, and how that harms workers and average folks. The main character does have a traumatic past, and seems to have anxiety and some anger issues. As we are in her head in this book, sometimes it did become a little repetitive to hear her continuously trying to control here emotions. Overall, this was a super creepy and fun read if you enjoy space horror, or S.A. Barnes’ previous novel, Dead Silence.

CW: Death, Blood, Violence, Gun violence, Medical content, Suicide, Domestic abuse, Dementia, Child death

3.5 stars - While this one was a bit of a let down from Barnes' previous work Dead Silence, I think this is purely because I was anticipating it just a little too much because overall, I still found this to be quite the solid read. You can definitely tell the Barnes has improved with this book; her characters have more depth and the story, while still focusing on one specific character, Ophelia, took the time to develop the side crew that she travels with. I really enjoyed the planet this book was set on; the snowstorm ravaging our characters made it feel as though our characters began to develop cabin fever, which is one of my favourite tropes. I love when characters begin to imagine things and the twist that Barnes pulled on this familiar trope was so fun (and spooky, of course)! Without going into spoilers, the issues I have with this one fall more onto our main character and the decisions she would make that felt really immature to me? I did not feel as though a psychologist assigned to a space crew whom have already dealt with the death of a crew member would behave the way she did and it really pulled me out of the story. But! This was still really spooky and still a really fun read.

I liked the overall concept of this book but I think that the execution didn't work. The beginning was slow, repetitive and I struggled to stay interested in the plot. I stuck with the story and the last few chapters were good. Overall, the writing was solid and I would have liked the book a lot more if it had gotten to the action a little sooner.

I got an ARC of this book.

This book was weird. It wasn’t weird enough to be like notably weird, but it was weird nonetheless.

The horror built very slowly. It was quick things, would have made decent jump scares. The true horror though was the slow loss of sanity through invasion of the body. This is much harder to really comprehend, but it was also much more traumatizing that just losing control. They knew they were losing control and couldn’t stop it. They were on their own. It was delicious.

The characters were pretty distinct, though there was not a lot of growth. The focus was on destruction, not building. That is fair, but it feels worth mentioning. It is a very character led horror, so the character devolvement being the key feature is interesting. There were some plots that felt thrown on and then not addressed, like some hints at romance. The romance wasn’t really adding anything and never developed beyond some thrown away lines here and there.

The background of the characters was fascinating. I wanted more. It was wonderful. I wanted to know exactly how hiding in a hole, hoping to not die felt. It felt like it didn’t give quite enough horror from the past, but it was horrific enough to still build the intensity of the current horror. It sort of felt like the past was being drafted along with the story so the build up never really hit the same level of high notes.

I will for sure be tracking down Barnes’ other book. I loved reading this one. I didn’t know I needed sci-fi horror, but I really did.

It had a similar horror feel to possession movies mixed with The Blair Witch Project. That slow descent into madness mixed with watching it happen. It is far more deliberate than the Blair Witch Project and the descent into madness being the similarities. This book goes much further and is much scarier.

I absolutely loved DEAD SILENCE and was so excited to receive an arc for GHOST STATION, as I'd been looking forward to reading this book since it was announced. And boy did it live up to expectations—and surpass them. So creepy and so unsettling in the way you want a horror book to be, this book kept me entranced from minute one. It's my humble opinion that there needs to be more horror/sci-fi in the world and SA Barnes is doing an excellent job supplying it.

Huge thanks to the publisher for providing me an advance reader copy in return for an honest review!

Ghost Station had all the markings of a fascinating sci-fi horror book, but fell flat in trying to be scary. With too many intertwined mystery elements trying to throw off the reader, I left this wanting more.

Dr. Ophelia Bray has taken an assignment as the team psychologist for a small mining team tasked with gathering samples from a former corporate planet known for having harbored intelligent life millennia ago. This team is being assigned a psychologist after the death of one of their team members from a suspected mental illness that affects members of such teams. But Ophelia is not going purely out of the goodness of her heart, but in part to escape a controversy in which a former patient of hers committed suicide despite her treatment. This is further complicated by the fact that she is part of the extremely wealthy and powerful Bray family who owns Pinnacle, one of the massive mega corporations and former owner of the planet Ophelia is headed to. The moment she is awoken from cryosleep and introduced to the team, Liana, Birch, Suresh, Kate, and team commander Ethan, suspicions arise and tensions flare. Immediately Ophelia starts to question what really happened to their former teammate as she clashes with some members about her own identity and past. Ophelia also has to reconcile with her own traumatic past while keeping her own secrets from this new team. But as mysterious symptoms and behaviors among team members start to manifest, the team has to try to put their differences aside to survive, unless it is someone on this very team that they need to try to survive against..

That blurb made this out to be more interesting than it ended up being. I say it for every horror book I read: the primary objective is to scare/horrify/disturb me. If you don’t do that, even if you do everything else right, you can’t consider yourself a successful horror book. And unfortunately this fell into that category. While thrilling and psychological at times, at no point was I ever scared or on the edge of my seat while reading this.

Firstly, there were just too many story threads trying to resolve themselves here. We have the mystery behind the former teammate, the mystery of Ophelia’s former patient, the mystery of Ophelia being the child of a immensely wealthy family, the mystery of Ophelia’s childhood, the mystery of the sleeping headsets, the mystery of why one team mate seems to know who she is, the mystery of the planet they are on, the mystery of why the reports of the former habitat they’re staying in aren’t matching up to reality, the mystery sickness that is infecting them one by one… there’s just too much going on that the narrative tries to incorporate. It was never going to be a clean execution. Add to this the completely out of left field attempt at a romance? Why was that at all incorporated?

Secondly, the character work leaves a lot to be desired. Ophelia is the worst psychologist I’ve ever seen, and she should never have become one. While she often worked well under pressure and was a half-decent trauma doctor, at no point was she a competent psychologist. Constantly second guessing herself, riddled with unresolved trauma and PTSD, a consistent emotional punching bag for the rest of the team, subject to anger issues yet an utter pushover.. she could literally have been any other profession, yet it was decided that she would be the galaxy’s worst psychologist? Why not just make her like a replacement crew mate for the one that died? I have no idea.

The actual, real mystery of the book ended up being underwhelming. Undeveloped enough to be unsatisfactory for a mystery thriller, but not enough to be, well, mysterious and unpredictable in a Lovecraftian sense. After the first half, there’s a decent bit of action, but none of it is really interesting, just running around the station screaming at each other.

If I were reviewing this as a thriller rather than a horror, I think I’d be more forgiving, but I just wish it was scarier. I’m not really sure what to compare this to, but it seems like the author’s first book was similar, so I guess if you really enjoyed that one you could pick up this one. That or if you want like a worse version of Alien or Prometheus.

This book solidified S. A. Barnes as an author I definitely want to keep tabs on. I really enjoyed their debut, Dead Silence, and Ghost Station provides a strong follow up. All the wonder and advanced tech of a sci-fi novel blended with the tension and anxiety of a good thriller. I enjoyed the characters and felt the plot moved along at a good pace. Ophelia is an especially interesting character and her twisted backstory adds a lot more depth to the overarching story. Barnes does a great job building so much paranoia into this book - I constantly found myself second guessing the things happening on the page, which played really well with the primary storyline. The body horror was top notch and it was difficult not to itch while reading!

Added bonus: some great conversations surrounding mental health and trauma. Very unexpected in this context, but ended up being a very well-executed surprise.

The only thing keeping this from being a solid five stars is that I did want a little more from the ending. It felt a bit rushed at the very end and I wasn't entirely settled afterwards. I'll be eager to see what other reviewers think about this.

4.5 stars! Top tier creepy things happening in space - highly recommend!

Special thanks to Tor and NetGalley for an ARC in exchange for review.

I received a copy of this from NetGalley in return for an honest review.

I would best describe this as fleeting moments of truly suspenseful events that were overshadowed by a rather bland story. I absolutely loved Dead Silence, and this was one of my most anticipated books of 2024. To say I was disappointed would be an understatement. Without taking account for the last book, and how good it was, this one was just sort of forgettable with a story I feel like I've read before. Not horrible, not fantastic, just middle of the road book. There were a few chilling parts, but a majority of the book was not spent on those aspects.