Review

I feel pretty similarly to Ghost Station as I did to Dead Silence. I wish everything was a bit longer. Each chapter individually and also the book as a whole. And again, I wish it skewed older in terms of audience. We have an interesting setup and some interesting ideas, but things resolve a bit too quickly and cleanly.

I feel like rather little actually happens in the book, just because of how quickly things fly by. We get to the planet, have a hike over to some ruins, deal with some weirdo possession stuff for a little bit, then we go home. I'm left wanting more, though I will say that it goes down smooth. If you want some light sci-fi fare you could do a lot worse. I'd say it mostly just feels like we're missing the middle act of a movie. Also I feel like there's an over-reliance on chapter end cliffhangers. They nearly always get resolved within the first sentence or two of the next chapter anyway, so we could do with far fewer of those.

I do like the concept of mistaking an alien entity for the actual artificial structure that were on the planet. That's a fun idea. Like I said, these books had a good number of fun ideas, I think they just need more incidental details and supporting structure. We had a good number of characters and I really couldn't tell you much about them, because they mostly just exist as 1-2 trait vessels. Which is fine in a movie, for example. We don't need to give all the silly marines in Aliens a whole big backstory. But in a novel, I do want more because I really didn't care when any of the people died. They didn't have that much going on in the first place.

Interesting stuff from the author, would like to see what they'd do with a longer and more adult book.