Cold Eternity

February 1, 2025

Barnes (Ghost Station) returns with another space horror. An interplanetary political scandal sends Halley into hiding on a space barge that houses the cryogenically frozen bodies of Earth's wealthiest, but she may be trapped in an even more dangerous situation when she starts to hear disturbing sounds in the vents. With a 125K-copy first printing. Prepub Alert.

Copyright 2024 Library Journal

Copyright 2024 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

February 1, 2025

The hallways of the Elysian Fields spaceship should ring with only Halley's footsteps as she patrols coffins of the almost dead--so why does she hear scraping and scuttling behind the walls? Desperation sent her to the famed ship where the wealthy are preserved to someday be cured of injury, disease, or advanced age. But they'll never be revived because the technology was so faulty that humanity abandoned it. In a Lost-like setup, Halley's job is to push a button every three hours, and the lack of sleep might explain why she sees creeping shadows on her security feeds just before they glitch. Barnes (Ghost Station) is skilled at recognizing what readers will expect and manipulating their hypotheses born from consuming countless horror stories. The twists will have them wondering if this is akin to Alien, Midnight Mass, The Others, or anything in between. Theorizing is a delight, even as each guess is ravaged. Underneath it all is a timely exploration of ethics and the power of an individual to shape the future. VERDICT Space horror at its most entertaining. Fans of Caitlin Starling and Jo Kaplan will love the atmospheric chills and visceral horrors of one of literature's creepiest horror settings.--Matthew Galloway

Copyright 2025 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

March 1, 2025
Halley Zwick needs to disappear. A political scandal has put a giant target on her back, and she needs a place to fade away. When she comes across a job posting for Elysian Fields--a floating cemetery of cryogenically frozen people who'd hoped for cures never found hundreds of years ago--she thinks she's found the perfect spot to hide. Halley's job is simple: make rounds on the ship and push a ""check in"" button so someone knows it's being manned in exchange for room, board, and meager wages. But she soon finds that nothing about her new home is simple. At first, Halley thinks she's seeing things--with only herself and her boss on board, there couldn't be anything slithering around on the floor, right? And surely those objects in the old exhibition rooms hadn't moved by themselves, had they? It doesn't take long for her to realize that things at Elysian Fields are not at all what they seem, and the underlying disquiet felt throughout the novel explodes into a frantic crescendo. Readers won't want to put down Barnes' latest (after Ghost Station, 2024) sf-horror hybrid.

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