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Ghost Station - S.A. Barnes
Jun. 7th, 2024 01:14 amSpace 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!
( Spoilers )
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!
( Spoilers )