Dead Silence is a masterclass in how not to write a horror novel
Alien–meets–The Shining this ain’t
As I see it, there are two schools of thought on whether I, as an author, should write negative reviews of other authors’ books:
I shouldn’t write negative reviews, because every time I do, I’m burning potential bridges.
I should absolutely write negative reviews, because people love to read mean-girl takedowns.
But of course both of those schools of thought are incorrect. The correct answer is that I shouldn’t waste my time on book reviews at all, because nobody actually reads books, and even fewer people read book reviews, and if I want people to actually read this blog, I should just fill it with a bunch of culture war bullshit.
I’m not going to do that, though.
Some of you who subscribed in the last few weeks will be disappointed to learn this, but this blog is mainly about how I’m a fancy ✨horror author✨ (y’know, in the same sense that Vanilla Ice is an actor), so I’m going to write about horror fiction, d*rn it, and if you don’t like it, you can go lock yourself in a haunted spaceship. Which is actually what we’re here to talk about, after the break:
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I want to discuss S. A. Barnes’s sci-fi-horror novel Dead Silence, because I’ve never seen a novel start with such an attention-grabbing premise (“What if cruise ship, but haunted, BUT IN SPACE???”) and then squander it so quickly and so thoroughly. I want to do this not because I’m annoyed with Barnes and her book for wasting my time (though I am), but because, as a writer, I want to understand why bad books are bad, so that I can avoid making the same mistakes in my own writing. And if you’re a fancy ✨horror author✨ like me, maybe you can as well.
So what is it that Dead Silence gets so wrong? I mean, nothing, if its abundant blurbs and awards are to be believed. Chloe Gong, author of These Violent Delights, called it “Truly un-put-downable in the purest sense.” Lisa Shearin, author of the Raine Benares novels, says, “I’ve always considered Alien the high mark of sci-fi horror. No longer. Dead Silence leaves it in the dust.” Additionally, the New York Public Library named it one of the best books of 2022, Gizmodo called it one of the year’s best SFF books, and it was a finalist in the GoodReads Choice Awards. So clearly a lot of people really liked this book!
And I find myself completely puzzled by all the praise, because this book just seems broken on a structural level to me. The experience of reading it was one of near-constant disappointment and frustration, even though I started it really wanting to like it. I mean, it was Alien–meets–The Shining! How could it possibly go wrong? The answer, of course, is “by utterly failing to understand what makes Alien or The Shining work”—but I’m getting a little ahead of myself.
To set the stage for my disappointment, I need only describe Barnes’s setting for her novel, because the setting is the one thing the book gets (almost) right: Imagine a future with luxury space cruises. Imagine the most luxurious space cruise ship of all time, the Aurora. Now imagine the Aurora disappears on its maiden voyage, never to be seen again. Imagine that, twenty years later, a scrappy space salvage crew comes across it, and finds it literally frozen in both space and time, its interior a silent, airless ballet of icy corpses floating in zero g’s. And also there’s some ghosts or something (but they take a while to show up).
That’s where our story begins (sort of—more about that in a sec), and it’s the backdrop for the book’s one truly unforgettable sequence, in which our hero Claire has to spacewalk her way through through an atrium full of frozen passengers in order to retrieve a distinctive sculpture and thus secure salvage rights (it’s a thing). It’s a scene that’s beautiful, tense, and disturbing all at once, and it had me more than ready to tear through the rest of this book—I knew that at any moment the airlocks would slam shut and the crew would be trapped in zero gravity with space ghosts (but probably not Space Ghost). I wasn’t expecting anything Pulitzer-worthy, but the possibilities for haunting, terrifying moments seemed endless.
But then…none of those moments materialized.
Because, despite my expectations, those airlocks did not slam shut, and a few pages later, our heroes were safely back on their own ship, having encountered zero Scary Things. This is the first instance of Barnes voluntarily letting all the tension out of her story for no clear reason—allowing her characters to escape her Scary Place, only to contrive a reason that they Must Go Back. And yes, the reason is “contrived,” in every sense of the word: Apparently, the sculpture isn’t sufficient to secure salvage rights after all, and they have to take the whole Aurora back to earth with them. You’d think this would be a simple of matter of tying it to their scrappy little vessel with some strong rope (isn’t everything weightless in space?), but nah—they have to get the Aurora up and running again and pilot it themselves.
There are a lot of reasons that this plot point makes no sense, but more importantly, it serves to undermine everything unique and interesting about Barnes’s chosen setting. By reactivating the heat, artificial gravity, and ventilation systems on the Aurora, they turn it into a pretty normal place—one that could easily be swapped out for a nautical vessel or even just a nice hotel on earth without changing the story much at all. Even worse, they seal off every part of the Aurora except the bridge and the surrounding cabins, eliminating the possibility of ever exploring the ship. So if you were wondering what a haunted space seafood buffet or haunted space shuffleboard court would look like, you’re out of luck. Sorry.
But anyway—once Barnes undoes everything interesting about her scenario, things settle in and Scary Things finally start to happen. Sort of. Some ghosts show up. Some crew members do a suicide or three. Maybe. It’s actually never clear what’s really happening, since the whole thing is pitched as an “Is our narrator losing her mind???” scenario, but even that is undermined by the detached way Claire narrates the story. And, of course, the tension is all further undermined by the fact that we already know Claire is going to escape.
Oh, right—I forgot to mention that part, I guess: The book actually starts in medias res, with Claire back safely on earth, struggling to explain to her employer what transpired on the Aurora and how she escaped. The main narrative doesn’t catch up to this frame story until more than halfway through the book, meaning that, yes, you end up reading the first 200 pages with the knowledge that our hero is never in any real danger. And while Claire’s survival could be used to create a kind of suspense—i.e., How did she escape???—Barnes ends up punting on that one as well: Claire simply doesn’t remember how it happened. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
And yes, this all means that Barnes has to invent yet another reason that Claire Must Go Back to the Aurora to fill out the last 150-ish pages (this time, in true Rambo III fashion, it’s For Her Friends), but by that point, I confess I had pretty much checked out. You can only ask me to be on the edge of my seat, and then make me feel stupid for being there, so many times.
If there’s a lesson to be gleaned from Dead Silence, it’s that the tension in a thriller can only function on a one-way ratchet—any scene that allows your characters to find their way into less danger than before is a mistake, undoing all the hard work you’ve done as a writer. Both of Dead Silence’s inspirations—Alien and The Shining—understand this implicitly: By the second act of The Shining, the Torrance family is snowed in at the haunted Overlook Hotel; a half-hour into Alien, the crew of the Nostromo has been abandoned in deep space with a killer extraterrestrial by an employer that doesn’t care whether they live or die. If the Torrances could have walked out the front door and driven back to Denver any time they wanted, or if the Nostromo had had an abundance of easily accessible escape pods, it would have made for very different—and significantly less scary—stories.
Movie guru Blake Snyder puts things even more bluntly in his (admittedly controversial1) screenwriting bible Save the Cat!, where he insists on calling (most) horror movies “Monster in the House” flicks, emphasizing that the “house” is just as important as the “monster.” If you’re locked in a house with a monster, that’s scary (how will you escape???); if you’re just sort of near a monster and can walk away from him whenever you want…well, that’s, y’know, less scary. In order to be scary, Scary Things have to be inescapable—and I can’t think of a book that illustrates that any better than Dead Silence, where the Scary Things are inescapably escapable.
Maybe it’s possible I missed something, though! Clearly, this book was a bit of a hit, so I’ll turn the question over to y’all: Have you read Dead Silence? Did I miss something? Is this a better book than I’ve given it credit for? Let me know in the comments! 🕹🌙🧸
⬅️ In case you missed it: Writing schedules, pro wrestling, and His House
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Save the Cat! is something of a victim of its own success—it’s become so influential that it’s resulted in an awful lot of movies (and novels) feeling the same. My own take on the volume (in which Snyder purports to give aspiring writers the “recipe” for a successful screenplay, going so far as to give them the page number for every major plot point) is probably a bit more nuanced than the internet will bear, but if you want it, here it is:
Snyder’s “beat sheet” is a bit like the ubiquitous “five-paragraph essay”—you should learn it, internalize it, and forget it. It’s useful if you have no idea what you’re doing, and it’s helpful for those moments when you can’t understand why your story just isn’t working, but it’s also not something to be slavishly followed for its own sake. It’s just one source of pretty-good advice. Treating it as anything more—or less!—is a mistake.
Just because things are not bound by gravity in space, does not mean you can simply move them around no matter their size or mass (i.e., Newton's Third Law). They couldn't have just dragged the ship back because you'd need exponentially greater thrust to tow an enormous vessel. If your proposition were true, and everything were simply "weightless" in space, then a space-walking astonaut's fart could blow their ship off course.
Overall, I agree that there was a lot of needlessly sacrificed momentum, but when writing a review, you should double-check your criticisms.
UPDATE: I read it. I did not look at the blurbs or accolades until after. I didn't hate it. I got into it, and read until the very end--which was hardly a surprise, but then the whole thing was a big collection of cliches and recycled tropes--the nerd, the crass opportunist, the trauma that haunts the main character, the evil company, etc. Some stories & sub-plots were over-written--what had happened on Ferris Colony, for example, I felt like that was told to me more than once.
I did like the Aurora, and I liked The Monster, and though I found the main character less than sympathetic, I was rooting for her. There was a great book in there, somewhere. It was better written than the book I'd read before it, so maybe it seemed better than it was to me.