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Ghost Station - S.A. Barnes
Space horror about a team of explorers investigating an abandoned research station on an ice planet with alien ruins and trying to figure out what happened to the previous team. This is a book that could have benefited by having less buildup, because I found the first half draggy and the characters insufferable, but things picked up considerably once the horror aspects kicked in, and the back half was very engaging and strong.
The protagonist, Ophelia, is the team's therapist. In this setting, humans living or working in space are extremely prone to developing a particular mental illness that causes hallucinations, delusions, paranoia, and eventually can lead them to kill their teammates and/or themselves. Ophelia is dropped into an existing team who are reeling from the loss of one of their teammates to this syndrome ~or something else~. Ophelia is a terrible, terrible therapist: she alternates between trying to convince everyone around her to open up and talk about their feelings, and semi-deliberately antagonizing them; she is testing an experimental form of dream therapy tech on them; and she's also just generally kind of a weepy, clingy mess. Everyone else is moody and aggro and spend most of their time bullying Ophelia and/or fighting with each other. Literally EVERYONE clearly expects their teammates to go off the deep end at any minute. (When one person fails to check in and goes missing, everyone's immediate assumption is that he's probably gone insane. To be fair, this isn't unreasonable.)
They're also just weirdly incurious about everything, including the alien ruins right next door, or things like properly exploring the research station that they're all living in. I spent the first half of the book thinking that all of these people deserved to be eaten by space yeti or whatever was going on here.
But the creepy aspects turned out to be well developed, the bleak alien planet is a great setting for space horror, and once the horror aspects kicked in, they were great!
The plot itself was kind of ... hmm. Things which never actually turned out to be relevant to the actual horror plot included:
- All of Ophelia's relatives that we met in the first chapter and then never saw again.
- The disappearance of Ophelia's predecessor on the team.
- The fact that almost everyone who goes to space goes off the deep end eventually.
- Experimental dream therapy technology that gives people mysterious headaches.
The last two things existed basically to be red herrings once everyone in the research facility starts having headaches and delusions and nosebleeds and finding the bodies of the people who were there before.
What is *actually* going on is that everyone is suffering from a mysterious contagion from the alien city that's slowly taking them over and giving them an almost uncontrollable urge to go out into the perpetually storming outdoors and walk towards the ruins of the city. It can take them over more easily while they're sleeping, which means that a lot of weirdness that Ophelia just kind of ignores (see above re: incurious characters) or assumes was other characters messing with her, like disappearing equipment, turns out to be things that she was doing while sleepwalking.
And there is a lot of genuinely fun creepiness associated with this, especially Ophelia having no way to know what she's been doing while she's asleep, including possibly trying (or succeeding!) at killing her teammates. There's also a deliciously creepy scene in which she's losing control over her body and can no longer speak anything except incomprehensible word salad, but still has control over most of the rest of it, but can't explain to her teammates that there's actually *not* an alien entity in control of her body (at least most of it), she knows what she's doing, she's just lost the verbal centers of her brain and can't tell them what her plan is. But she can't trust her own perceptions either, so she's not 100% sure that she *is* actually in control of her body after all. Fun times!
The last third of the book, in fact, is genuinely excellent. There's a great climax with everyone shooting themselves up with stimulants to try to prevent themselves from losing it totally, fighting with their possessed teammates, and trying to get off the planet during a storm. The contagion itself is also genuinely horrifying - it appears to be some kind of nanotech, it eludes probes or attempts to cut it out of infected body parts (but can also concentrate in large enough quantities to do a chestburster kind of thing to try to rejoin the rest of its mass), it's all connected into a hive mind and it's virtually indestructible, and once it starts taking someone over, they gradually lose control of their body and mind while being aware that it's happening to them and there's nothing they can do about it.
All of this being the case, their eventual solution is just "get to the ship, coldsleep will definitely kill it" which is .... I HAVE QUESTIONS!!! There's a brief epilogue post-coldsleep which suggests that it did work (I guess) and the survivors did not actually infect the rest of the galaxy with it (probably). We also never find out if the tendency of people to go insane in space (in the case of Ophelia's dad, suffering a delusional conviction that everyone around him was being taken over by space contagion, which caused him to go on a killing spree) is actually caused by this, or something like it, or if it really is just space madness brought on by coldsleep, loss of a day/night cycle, and separation from Earth. Who knows!! We also apparently will never know what this thing is and what actually kills it and where it came from in the first place.
While I'm complaining, there were a few technologically questionable aspects to the plot, such as a coring drill designed to penetrate through solid ice coming to a screeching halt when it got hung up on a body. And I'm still not over everyone having exactly zero interest in the alien city next door, including a pit full of alien bodies (of a kind of alien they know nothing about), which mainly just exists so the characters who found it can fail to tell anyone else about it because they're afraid that they'll drive the rest of their psychologically fragile coworkers insane!
But I loved the creepy horror aspects, and the eerie Arctic setting with ruined towers of an ancient city rising from the ice. Ophelia's ultimate character arc, figuring out how to separate herself from her parents (a homicidal, abusive dad and rich socialite mom) and find her own inner hero while up against alien body-hijacking nanotech was genuinely really fun and moving. I also enjoyed the survival of those characters who survived a lot more than I was expecting to when I was low-key rooting for space yeti to kill them early on.
The protagonist, Ophelia, is the team's therapist. In this setting, humans living or working in space are extremely prone to developing a particular mental illness that causes hallucinations, delusions, paranoia, and eventually can lead them to kill their teammates and/or themselves. Ophelia is dropped into an existing team who are reeling from the loss of one of their teammates to this syndrome ~or something else~. Ophelia is a terrible, terrible therapist: she alternates between trying to convince everyone around her to open up and talk about their feelings, and semi-deliberately antagonizing them; she is testing an experimental form of dream therapy tech on them; and she's also just generally kind of a weepy, clingy mess. Everyone else is moody and aggro and spend most of their time bullying Ophelia and/or fighting with each other. Literally EVERYONE clearly expects their teammates to go off the deep end at any minute. (When one person fails to check in and goes missing, everyone's immediate assumption is that he's probably gone insane. To be fair, this isn't unreasonable.)
They're also just weirdly incurious about everything, including the alien ruins right next door, or things like properly exploring the research station that they're all living in. I spent the first half of the book thinking that all of these people deserved to be eaten by space yeti or whatever was going on here.
But the creepy aspects turned out to be well developed, the bleak alien planet is a great setting for space horror, and once the horror aspects kicked in, they were great!
The plot itself was kind of ... hmm. Things which never actually turned out to be relevant to the actual horror plot included:
- All of Ophelia's relatives that we met in the first chapter and then never saw again.
- The disappearance of Ophelia's predecessor on the team.
- The fact that almost everyone who goes to space goes off the deep end eventually.
- Experimental dream therapy technology that gives people mysterious headaches.
The last two things existed basically to be red herrings once everyone in the research facility starts having headaches and delusions and nosebleeds and finding the bodies of the people who were there before.
What is *actually* going on is that everyone is suffering from a mysterious contagion from the alien city that's slowly taking them over and giving them an almost uncontrollable urge to go out into the perpetually storming outdoors and walk towards the ruins of the city. It can take them over more easily while they're sleeping, which means that a lot of weirdness that Ophelia just kind of ignores (see above re: incurious characters) or assumes was other characters messing with her, like disappearing equipment, turns out to be things that she was doing while sleepwalking.
And there is a lot of genuinely fun creepiness associated with this, especially Ophelia having no way to know what she's been doing while she's asleep, including possibly trying (or succeeding!) at killing her teammates. There's also a deliciously creepy scene in which she's losing control over her body and can no longer speak anything except incomprehensible word salad, but still has control over most of the rest of it, but can't explain to her teammates that there's actually *not* an alien entity in control of her body (at least most of it), she knows what she's doing, she's just lost the verbal centers of her brain and can't tell them what her plan is. But she can't trust her own perceptions either, so she's not 100% sure that she *is* actually in control of her body after all. Fun times!
The last third of the book, in fact, is genuinely excellent. There's a great climax with everyone shooting themselves up with stimulants to try to prevent themselves from losing it totally, fighting with their possessed teammates, and trying to get off the planet during a storm. The contagion itself is also genuinely horrifying - it appears to be some kind of nanotech, it eludes probes or attempts to cut it out of infected body parts (but can also concentrate in large enough quantities to do a chestburster kind of thing to try to rejoin the rest of its mass), it's all connected into a hive mind and it's virtually indestructible, and once it starts taking someone over, they gradually lose control of their body and mind while being aware that it's happening to them and there's nothing they can do about it.
All of this being the case, their eventual solution is just "get to the ship, coldsleep will definitely kill it" which is .... I HAVE QUESTIONS!!! There's a brief epilogue post-coldsleep which suggests that it did work (I guess) and the survivors did not actually infect the rest of the galaxy with it (probably). We also never find out if the tendency of people to go insane in space (in the case of Ophelia's dad, suffering a delusional conviction that everyone around him was being taken over by space contagion, which caused him to go on a killing spree) is actually caused by this, or something like it, or if it really is just space madness brought on by coldsleep, loss of a day/night cycle, and separation from Earth. Who knows!! We also apparently will never know what this thing is and what actually kills it and where it came from in the first place.
While I'm complaining, there were a few technologically questionable aspects to the plot, such as a coring drill designed to penetrate through solid ice coming to a screeching halt when it got hung up on a body. And I'm still not over everyone having exactly zero interest in the alien city next door, including a pit full of alien bodies (of a kind of alien they know nothing about), which mainly just exists so the characters who found it can fail to tell anyone else about it because they're afraid that they'll drive the rest of their psychologically fragile coworkers insane!
But I loved the creepy horror aspects, and the eerie Arctic setting with ruined towers of an ancient city rising from the ice. Ophelia's ultimate character arc, figuring out how to separate herself from her parents (a homicidal, abusive dad and rich socialite mom) and find her own inner hero while up against alien body-hijacking nanotech was genuinely really fun and moving. I also enjoyed the survival of those characters who survived a lot more than I was expecting to when I was low-key rooting for space yeti to kill them early on.
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I feel this should be relevant and possibly worth a book of its own!
We also apparently will never know what this thing is and what actually kills it and where it came from in the first place.
Oh, shoot. That was my main question. I assumed it was left over from the civilization the characters are investigating, but I also assumed it would have some original purpose beyond "creepily drive the plot." (It does sound extremely creepy.) The need to stay awake in order to fend it off feels like a direct inheritance from the 1956 Invasion of the Body Snatchers, plus the Arctic paranoia of John Carpenter's The Thing.
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Yeah, I don't really have an issue with not getting a full explanation (I mean, in a lot of the older horror it reminds me of, you don't really get an explanation beyond "it's creepy and alien"), but the problem is that there are several competing explanations the characters consider, but never have the data to choose between. It seems too advanced for the relative level of tech in the alien ruins and also doesn't really seem like anything else on the planet; it might have been what killed the aliens, but then again they might have died of environmental causes; and early on the characters find suggestions that someone else had gone around the alien ruins removing things after they all died - since objects are perfectly preserved in an Arctic environment and the ruins are weirdly empty - which doesn't really fit with either the "they made it themselves" or "it's a visiting space entity that needs hosts" explanations. I could have used another couple of chapters to at least give us more of a suggestion of the resolution to the book's various mysteries! Either that, or less mystery and more focus early on.
That being said, I would definitely read another book in this setting.
The need to stay awake in order to fend it off feels like a direct inheritance from the 1956 Invasion of the Body Snatchers, plus the Arctic paranoia of John Carpenter's The Thing.
It definitely feels like it was influenced by classic horror, especially The Thing (and also a touch of Alien and a few other things). That part, at least, was really excellent.
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I thought, 'After Covid, managing multiple projects, and getting on to 15 years of working as a public servant, none of these people are surprising.
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