Booklist Review
Ophelia Bray has worked hard to escape the orbit of her influential family by joining a competing corporation and is attempting to salvage her career by signing on for a reclamation and exploration mission. She awakens from cold sleep en route to an abandoned habitat on the distant planet Lyria 393-C and tries to integrate into a tight-knit team dealing with a loss. From the start, the team is unsettled by materials left behind, missing equipment, and the unusual conditions in which the previous team left their habitat. As Ophelia's group tries to complete their mission and figure out the mystery of what happened on the previous assignment, they deal with their own issues, and Ophelia tries to put the secrets of her father's legacy and her family's privilege behind her. Fans of the original Alien film will enjoy this tense psychological-horror story set in a far-flung future as the crew tries to identify the forces at play while navigating the atrocities of their corporate employer, which they know all too well.
Library Journal Review
Ophelia is a psychiatrist in the year 2199, specializing in treating space explorers who suffer from ERS, a disease that presents itself in violence--most notably, a mass killing of 29 people. She joins a mission to claim a planet that held sentient life in the past to study the crew who are mourning the mysterious loss of a crew member on their last trip. They are holding on to their secrets tightly, but Ophelia is an expert at keeping secrets herself. The horrors of the isolation and loneliness of space travel are enhanced by Barnes's writing, as she only allows readers to see Ophelia's unreliable point of view and utilizes slow-burn pacing to perfection, expertly building the world and relentlessly intensifying the dread. Barnes simultaneously slips in small doses of terror that get and stay under readers' skin, until the entire narrative explodes and holds them entranced for its final act. VERDICT Barnes (Dead Silence) is quickly cementing herself as the go-to author in space horror. This will appeal to fans of sci-fi/horror hybrids that are heavy on the planetary-exploration details, such as David Wellington's Paradise-1, and also readers who enjoy the psychologically intense polar horror of Ally Wilkes.
