Review: Ghost Station

Ghost Station by S.A. Barnes
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I received this book for free, this does not affect my opinion of the book or the content of my review

Ghost Station was a chilling suspenseful space horror that pitted childhood traumas with and against extraterrestrial beings. This had a slow start with the story being told all from the character Dr. Olivia Bray's head. It's 2199 and she's a mental health specialist about to go into cold sleep to travel to the Resilience, a ship with a five person R & E crew about to land on a planet to continue exploring after the planet was sold from Olivia's family's company to it's rival, who Olivia works for. She's a black sheep as her mother married against her rich family's wishes and dealing with her uncle and mother constantly messaging her telling her not to go on this mission. Olivia's dealing with the trauma of just having a patient commit suicide and knows the crew she's going to has just lost a member to suicide also, so she's determined to go on this mission to try and make up for failing her patient and help others, among other personal reasons.

The beginning of this was a pretty slow start as we get a lot of Olivia's back and forth on guilt, her rich family and a traumatic experience when she was eleven with the cover-up lies that all lead to. The pace kind of stalls with this stuck in Olivia's head part but really takes off when she joins the R & E crew and they arrive on the alien planet. There's the mystery of the crew not seemingly wanting Olivia to know the full story of what happened to their deceased crew member, not wanting her to get inside their heads, and the mystery of what happened to the previous crew on the planet as the station is littered with distressing clues that not all was right.

The dynamics between the crew members and Olivia, helped pull the story out of exclusively keeping Olivia in her own head and breathed some outside life to it. As Aliens is one of my favorite horror movies, it's hard not to compare a lot of space horror to it, and this definitely had similarities that fans of that franchise will enjoy here. The building tension, suspense, and mystery with human dynamics mucking and helping paired with the unknown and danger of an alien planet was engrossing and fun entertainment. The ending delivered on human emotional breakthroughs for satisfying character development and alien danger for a suspenseful plot climax. This also left readers with a much more uplifting ending that what we usually get from this genre, which was pleasantly surprising, so if looking for scifi horror that supplies a little romance thread and a happily for now, definitely pick this one up.

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