Hitting shelves April 8th is the latest and greatest novel by S.A. Barnes called Cold Eternity, and you don’t want to miss this one. I’m a big fan of Barnes’ horror sci-fi novels (check out my review of Ghost Station here and Andrew’s review of Dead Silence here) so I was over the moon when this ARC showed up in my mail box.

In this story we follow Halley who’s on the run from a political scandal and is trying to find a place to hide until it all blows over. She accepts a job from a stranger who is looking for a caretaker for a giant space barge that stores hundreds of cryogenically frozen bodies from 100 years ago. It seems like the perfect spot; she’s the only employee, there’s no signal, and all she has to do is press a button every three hours and check on the tanks that store the bodies.

But when lack of sleep starts to kick in, and her boss becomes more and more interested in her previous life, Halley starts to see and hear things that couldn’t possibly be real. Except….maybe on this empty barge in the middle of space, not all the bodies are frozen, and Halley isn’t alone.

“I have nothing to fear from the dead, and one possibly shady man is nothing compared to a station full of them.”

“There’s always money to be made if you can promise people a way to cheat death.”

This is genuinely Barnes’s strongest novel to date. There was just something so flawless about this story. Halley is someone you can quickly get behind and root for, even as you begin to uncover why she’s in hiding. She’s a complex character, but one with the best of intentions at the heart of it. As she evolves and fights to survive, you see some really solid character growth. We spend most of the novel inside her head as she navigates this giant abandoned ship, along with memories from her past, and you quickly become very attached to this woman.

Barnes’s books always have some fantastic horror elements and really spooky moments. Compared to her first two, I would say this has the least amount of horror moments, but the overall vibe is far more claustrophobic and chilling throughout the entire book. When the horror moments do happen, they are truly terrifying and described in such detail that I felt like I was facing off alongside Halley.

I really enjoyed the AI discussion in this book, the themes of what it means to be human, what it means to stick by your values, the look at the political landscape and the lengths people are willing to go to do what they deem the “right thing”. It felt very current and very poignant.

Overall, Cold Eternity is my favorite S.A. Barnes novel so far and I can’t wait for their next one. Pick up a copy for yourself on April 8th, or better yet - pre-order now!

“How much damage we do, running from things, refusing to see what’s right in front of us because we need things to be different, because we want to wait for someone else to come along and fix it.”

A big thank you to Tor Nightfire for sending me a copy in exchange for an honest review.