Ghost Station

I enjoyed the suspense and tension in this slow creeping mystery in this scifi horror novel. Ophelia, a psychiatrist from a rich family with quite a bit of buried trauma in her past, tries to save her name by joining a remote planetary reclamation crew as a therapist. The crew is tight-lipped and grieving a past crew member's death, and resent her presence (and her family). They all land on a planet to explore an abandoned station, and things quickly start to fall apart. It doesn't help that Ophelia is involved in trying to prevent ERS, a sort of "space madness" syndrome that causes people to get violent and paranoid.

What I enjoyed the most about this book was its slowly building tension. Traumas and secrets from the past intersect delightfully with mysteries in the present. There's a lot of delicious ambiguity in all of the creepiness. Are events just pranks or hallucinations or truly real? Are strange physical symptoms a sign of impending ERS? How much can Ophelia herself even be trusted?

This was just a solidly good horror book for me. Nothing world shattering, but all the threads are woven together satisfyingly.

Huge thanks to the publisher for providing me an advance reader copy in return for an honest review!

Ghost Station had all the markings of a fascinating sci-fi horror book, but fell flat in trying to be scary. With too many intertwined mystery elements trying to throw off the reader, I left this wanting more.

Dr. Ophelia Bray has taken an assignment as the team psychologist for a small mining team tasked with gathering samples from a former corporate planet known for having harbored intelligent life millennia ago. This team is being assigned a psychologist after the death of one of their team members from a suspected mental illness that affects members of such teams. But Ophelia is not going purely out of the goodness of her heart, but in part to escape a controversy in which a former patient of hers committed suicide despite her treatment. This is further complicated by the fact that she is part of the extremely wealthy and powerful Bray family who owns Pinnacle, one of the massive mega corporations and former owner of the planet Ophelia is headed to. The moment she is awoken from cryosleep and introduced to the team, Liana, Birch, Suresh, Kate, and team commander Ethan, suspicions arise and tensions flare. Immediately Ophelia starts to question what really happened to their former teammate as she clashes with some members about her own identity and past. Ophelia also has to reconcile with her own traumatic past while keeping her own secrets from this new team. But as mysterious symptoms and behaviors among team members start to manifest, the team has to try to put their differences aside to survive, unless it is someone on this very team that they need to try to survive against..

That blurb made this out to be more interesting than it ended up being. I say it for every horror book I read: the primary objective is to scare/horrify/disturb me. If you don’t do that, even if you do everything else right, you can’t consider yourself a successful horror book. And unfortunately this fell into that category. While thrilling and psychological at times, at no point was I ever scared or on the edge of my seat while reading this.

Firstly, there were just too many story threads trying to resolve themselves here. We have the mystery behind the former teammate, the mystery of Ophelia’s former patient, the mystery of Ophelia being the child of a immensely wealthy family, the mystery of Ophelia’s childhood, the mystery of the sleeping headsets, the mystery of why one team mate seems to know who she is, the mystery of the planet they are on, the mystery of why the reports of the former habitat they’re staying in aren’t matching up to reality, the mystery sickness that is infecting them one by one… there’s just too much going on that the narrative tries to incorporate. It was never going to be a clean execution. Add to this the completely out of left field attempt at a romance? Why was that at all incorporated?

Secondly, the character work leaves a lot to be desired. Ophelia is the worst psychologist I’ve ever seen, and she should never have become one. While she often worked well under pressure and was a half-decent trauma doctor, at no point was she a competent psychologist. Constantly second guessing herself, riddled with unresolved trauma and PTSD, a consistent emotional punching bag for the rest of the team, subject to anger issues yet an utter pushover.. she could literally have been any other profession, yet it was decided that she would be the galaxy’s worst psychologist? Why not just make her like a replacement crew mate for the one that died? I have no idea.

The actual, real mystery of the book ended up being underwhelming. Undeveloped enough to be unsatisfactory for a mystery thriller, but not enough to be, well, mysterious and unpredictable in a Lovecraftian sense. After the first half, there’s a decent bit of action, but none of it is really interesting, just running around the station screaming at each other.

If I were reviewing this as a thriller rather than a horror, I think I’d be more forgiving, but I just wish it was scarier. I’m not really sure what to compare this to, but it seems like the author’s first book was similar, so I guess if you really enjoyed that one you could pick up this one. That or if you want like a worse version of Alien or Prometheus.