Dead Silence by S. A. Barnes
A Monster in Search of a House
Ten years ago, I was a stay-at-home dad to a newborn baby with little more to my name than a failed teaching career and a half-finished draft of a novel. It wasn’t much, but I was in my late twenties, sick of my boring existence, and ready to make my way into the extremely-glamorous world of publishing.
The novel I was working on was what you might call a “psychological thriller” or “literary horror” novel. The details of it aren’t important for our purposes here, but just know that I eventually did finish it and publish it with a small publisher, and it won a few awards, which, together with five bucks, will get me a latte. At the time, though, the book just wasn’t working, and I couldn’t figure out why it wasn’t scary (or, at least, wasn’t as scary as I wanted it to be). My salvation came from a writer named Blake Snyder.
Snyder has become controversial in certain circles, but whatever you think of him, countless writers have been heavily influenced by his 2005 book Save the Cat! The Last Book on Screenwriting You’ll Ever Need. It’s a book that’s controversial for the exact same reason it’s wildly popular: Snyder purports to give his readers the exact formula they need to write any type of movie script. Most infamously, he supplies readers with a “beat sheet,” which tells them on exactly which page of their scripts each plot point should appear; more interestingly, though, Snyder also insists there are only ten stories in existence and all of them have three fundamental ingredients. Snyder gives each of these stories whimsical names like “Buddy Love” (a category that includes romances, buddy comedies, and pet movies) and “Out of the Bottle” (stories of wish fulfillment and comeuppance), but for our purposes, we only need to discuss one story type: the one he calls “Monster in the House.”
Snyder’s “Monster in the House” genre is one that includes most horror films and creature features (along with some science fiction films and crime thrillers), and he claims, appropriately enough, that two of the key ingredients are a “monster” and a “house” (the third ingredient, which isn’t terribly important for this review, is “a sin”). The “monster” aspect is probably obvious, but the “house” is the real insight—or at least it was for me, since the lack of a “house” in my novel was a large part of why it wasn’t working.
Snyder is clear that when he uses the word “house,” he doesn’t (necessarily) mean a literal house; the essence of the “house” aspect is that the characters must be trapped with the monster. After all, a monster out in the middle of nowhere isn’t terribly scary, since you could just run from it. If you’re locked in a house with a monster, however, now there’s immediate tension. The “house” doesn’t even have to be a physical place, he tells us; there are plenty of stories where the functional “house” is a metaphysical “curse” (see, for instance: It Follows, Smile, etc.); the important thing is, there has to be a reason your characters can’t escape the scary thing (whatever the scary thing may be).
And all that is a roundabout way of saying it, but the lack of a “house” is the fundamental problem with S. A. Barnes’s pulp sci-fi/horror novel Dead Silence.
The elevator pitch for Dead Silence is hard to argue with—“It’s The Shining meets Alien!”—and it’s a pitch that tells you basically everything you need to know about the plot. In the distant future, a ragtag crew of blue-collar astronauts comes across a long-lost “space cruise ship,” which turns out to be (wait for it) haunted. The narrative potential of a giant haunted spaceship seems obvious, at least to this reader, but as a “house,” the ship—the Aurora—turns out to be eminently, comically escapable, to the point that Barnes ends up spending most of the book inventing increasingly threadbare reasons for why her main character has to go back. If it sounds like it gets absurd, well…it does.
This shortcoming is kind of unfortunate, because, with the Aurora, Barnes has created a killer setting (often literally so) for her novel. The first few dozen pages, in which she describes the haunting, frozen chaos of the mysterious cruise vessel, are absolutely unforgettable as a work of scene-setting. The descriptions of a vessel once built for celebration, but now devoid of air or gravity and filled with a ballet of floating corpses, are unforgettable, and in fact, the main action of the book kicks off with a gripping sequence in which our hero Claire has to navigate a dark, gravity-free atrium, avoiding the frozen bodies, in order to extricate a couple of works of art. But as soon as that sequence is over, the story starts to fall apart.
After Claire’s initial mission succeeds, she and the rest of the crew return to their vessel—which, as you can imagine, immediately grinds the story to a halt. (It’s the first of many times that this happens.) It’s not entirely clear why Barnes feels the need to do this; the task of trapping our heroes in the haunted space cruise ship seems like something that could be accomplished as simply as slamming and locking the doors during Claire’s initial mission. Barnes wouldn’t even need to explain why this had happened—it would actually be scarier if she didn’t. Instead, she allows her characters to leave peacefully, necessitating the first of several convoluted reasons that they have to return.
In the case of the second excursion into the vessel, the characters decide that they have to pilot the vessel back to earth in order to prove their salvage claim on it. Why they need to do this is never quite clear (couldn’t they just tow it behind their own tiny vessel? isn’t everything weightless in space?), but as a reader I was willing to suspend my disbelief in order to let the spooky stuff happen. Unfortunately, this plot choice has the unfortunate effect of undoing everything that was interesting about the Aurora in the first place. In order to make the ship habitable, the crew finds a way to power on the artificial gravity, the heat, and the oxygen, along with sealing off everything but the bridge and a handful of cabins. It makes perfect sense why a crew would want to do all of this, but narratively it just transforms a spaceship into a hotel, turning the story from “The Shining meets Alien” to “just The Shining again, I guess.”
If that were the only cost of enjoying a ghost story in space, I’d be willing to pay it; unfortunately, Barnes insists on allowing her heroine to escape yet again halfway through the book. Prior to that, there are a few scary moments to enjoy—ghosts popping out, grisly suicides, etc.—but at the midpoint it becomes clear none of it mattered, because not only is Claire doubting her own grip on reality, she’s also already escaped from the haunted ship.
Y’know, again.
I used the past-perfect tense there deliberately, by the way: Claire has escaped from the ship. We don’t get to see her escape; there are no moments of derring-do or near misses; no moments of terror or even mild tension. She’s just off the ship, and she doesn’t even remember how she escaped. Once again, the “house” proves not just escapable, but inescapably escapable—this is a haunted house that you can seemingly run away from without even trying. And obviously, since the book is only half-over, we’re going to return to the Aurora, but…couldn’t we have just stayed there?
It’s possible some will say I’m nitpicking about the narrative choices S. A. Barnes makes here, but my point isn’t that I would have written it differently (although I would have)—my point is that she wrote it wrong, at least if she intended to have an emotional impact on the reader. The purpose of a thriller, after all, is to thrill. If each chapter, each scene, isn’t ratcheting up the tension, your thriller will simply fail to do its job. Dead Silence repeatedly inflates the tension balloon halfway, only to let let that tension out with an obnoxious Bronx cheer. It has the effect of making the reader feel like a chump for caring.
If there’s still any doubt that Blake Snyder was right about the “house” needing to be inescapable for a monster story to be scary, we need only to compare Dead Silence to the two films referenced in its elevator pitch: Alien and The Shining. Both films are masterpieces of sustained tension, and they accomplish this in part by trapping their main characters in confined spaces early on. By Alien’s act break, the crew of the spaceship Nostromo is drifting through empty space, abandoned by their employer and without sufficient escape pods; a half-hour into The Shining, the remote Overlook Hotel is buried under snow that we know won’t melt for months. If Ripley had been able to leave the Nostromo whenever she wanted, or if the Torrance family could have simply checked out of the Overlook and caught a taxi…what would the story have been, exactly?
Certain readers will point out that in the respective sequels to these movies, Aliens and Doctor Sleep, the characters actually do fight their respective ways back into the respective danger zones, but—to state the obvious—there’s a reason those are separate movies. In both Alien and The Shining, the characters have a simple, specific goal—escape alive—and the movie is over when that goal is achieved. Sequels necessitate new conflicts, so they introduce those—but in every case, each is a story about one thing.
Dead Silence, by contrast, is a story about a lot of things—a whole lot of things happening, then un-happening, and then re-happening, repeatedly. That’s all too bad, because I was all-in on the premise when I first heard it—who wouldn’t want to read something with ghosts and outer space in it? It’s just that Dead Silence isn’t that book, sadly. It’s all monster, no house.