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The Cold, Restless Dead

Author: S.A. Barnes

The Elysian Fields, a giant barge of a spaceship carrying cryogenically frozen corpses from the hopeful past, is not what it seems. But then again, neither is Halley, so how can she complain that her job as a steward of this ghost ship is not as described?

Halley is on the run, and The Elysian Fields asked no questions and seems like the perfect hide-out. Every three hours she tours the ship, makes sure the dead are safe, and pushes a button. But are the dead really dead on this ship? Her boss – and the only other human on board – says she is cracking under the stress of the long, lonesome hours, but the more Halley investigates it, the more she notices things that should not be. Like the holographic AIs, designed based on the creator’s grown children, who seem to go off script at random times and exhibit eerie sentience and capabilities. Or the subtly changing details of the frozen – a once red ribbon turns pink, for example.

I prefaced this book with SA Barnes’ Dead Silence (a favorite) and Ghost Station (somewhat disappointing). Still, I love the combination of space, horror, and science fiction, and was eager to jump back into the creeping atmosphere of isolation induced paranoia. In that way, Cold Eternity doesn’t disappoint, at least initially. The ship is suitably creepy in that sterile, creaking way we have come to know and love. One moment, a long, well lit hallway is just white and boring, blink and you see a body dragging itself around the corner, blink again and back to medicinal perfection. Are you going mad, or are the inhabitants of this ship not quite as dead as they seem? Add in sleep deprivation (Halley has to push that button every three hours, plus she can’t sleep thanks to the creep factor) and the vibes are, as they say, lit.

Image by David Cosgrove from Pixabay

But then it stalls. Eventually, the perfectly posed corpses of the defunct crypto program go from macabrely poignant to dishwater dull. We’ve seen them, again and again, and there really are only so many different ways to describe Halley’s escalating paranoia before it becomes anticlimactic and we lose the tension and start to count pages.

Similarly, the sentient AIs, led by Aleyk, go from being creepy aberrations to nuisances. It’s obvious early on what the AIs really are and why they are trying to capture Halley’s attention. Readers soon figure out what is going on behind the scenes and what the original intent of the cryo was, long before Halley unveils the sinister secret. This takes out some of the creepy factors, so that when the revelation is made instead of being shocked with Halley, we’re nonplused. We knew. We knew two hundred pages ago. How did she miss it?

Of course, most of the real problem here isn’t the story, but the pacing. It does pick up toward the end, and we get a little action/survival horror that is greatly welcomed. We knew what would happen, but it was still enjoyable to watch, and the conclusion gave us some satisfaction.

If the pacing had been tighter, Cold Eternity could have been quite the rollicking story. As it is, it’s an entertaining but slow and somewhat anticlimactic read.

 

– Frances Carden

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Frances Carden
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