Horror has historically been a rocky genre for me. I feel like I always go in with such lofty expectations—excitement! creepiness! immersion!—and yet, what I get is hardly ever that. I find myself, more often than not, yawning my way through it, and so here we are again.
I can't fault the premise. A ghost ship floating around for two decades with hundreds of souls on board, all of them dead, and no one could find this ship until now? For a space-loving gal like me, you might as well be waving catnip (spacenip?) in my face. But alas, the premise was pretty much the highlight of the whole thing, and it didn't really get better from there.
If I had to put my finger on the biggest issue here, it would have to be its overreliance on being inside the main character's head and using her ruminations and indecision and paranoia as a way to drive the story forward. Ah, you're thinking to yourself, but isn't that what domestic thrillers do? And you'd be right, except not only is this not supposed to be a domestic thriller, but I'm not a fan of that genre for the same reasons.
So I was forced to endure what I would've thought twice about picking up, had I known what it was going in. And the more time we spent in Claire's head as she waffled back and forth, second-guessing herself, reliving over and over the trauma of her childhood, the less appealing I found her. There's something about spending paragraphs and pages in her head that just made my eyes glaze over and my neck droop.
You add to that all the time spent with the crew arguing back and forth on what to do, the detailed descriptions of the spaceship they found, and their careful searching of every room on that ship, and you might as well have shot me with a tranquilizer dart. I frequently caught myself nodding off, only to rouse again to check how far into the book I was, convinced I'd almost reached the end, then being dumbfounded at the realization that I somehow wasn't even halfway in.
Also, call me crazy, but I'm a firm believer that not every story has to have a romantic subplot, and this book is the perfect example of that. The attraction between Claire and Kane was distracting and quite frankly baffling. Because what could he possibly see in her as she freaks out and waffles about? And so the precious few brain cycles I should've been using to think about the mystery surrounding the spaceship was instead being commandeered into puzzling over what's going on with these two nutters.
Between all the shenanigans in Claire's head and the equally silly shenanigans between Claire and Kane, by the time we finally get to the unraveling of the spaceship mystery, it somehow came across anticlimactic. Maybe I didn't buy into the explanation. Or maybe it just felt like it was quickly glossed over so that we can get back to more silliness. Either way, I was left unfulfilled.
Unresponsive spaceships is such a classic scifi horror trope, with so much potential and possibilities, that the fact that not much came of this was terribly disappointing. Readers more used to domestic thrillers may find the excessive ruminating to be on par for the course. But those hoping for predominantly scifi and horror elements will probably be hard pressed to find satisfaction here.
Readaroo Rating: 3 stars
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