Week 12 Review: Cold Eternity

From Goodreads:

Cold Eternity, the newest space horror novel from the author of Dead Silence and Ghost Station, blends the dystopian dread of Severance with the catastrophic approach to AI from M3gan. Halley is on the run from an interplanetary political scandal that has put a huge target on her back. She heads for what seems like the perfect place to lay low: a gigantic space barge housing the cryogenically frozen bodies of Earth's most wealthy citizens. The ship and its cryo program are long defunct, but Halley starts to think she sees figures crawling in the hallways, and there's a constant scraping, slithering, and rattling echoing in the vents. It's not long before Halley realizes she may have gotten herself trapped in an even more dangerous situation than the one she was running from….

My Review:
This was such a fantastic read! I've really enjoyed all of S.A. Barnes' sci fi horrors, and this one, is particularly isolating, which just amped up the creepy vibe. Halley has her reasons for running, but the signs were there that this was a bad situation-she just thought that it would be better then what she was running from, and it turns out it wasn't.

Getting to know Halley as she's on the run, and then takes on this job, I loved it! That she visited the ship when it was a tourist attraction, and had a troubling encounter with the simulation of one of the creator's kids, well, that was greater incentive to both take on the job, and to not take it.

A big part of this book is about how to make choices when both the options are bad. The job that she had, and what happened that caused her to run,yeah, there are no good choices. I sympathized with her having to struggle over what she should do. 

There were 2 pretty major reveals in this book, what was going on with the A.I., and what threat there was on the ship. They were both in turns so very horrifying, especially when the whole situation was understood. I did wonder why the one guy only showed up on her screen like he did. Oh, but I wish that there had been some way to reverse what had been done, but alas. The ending was pretty satisfying! I had hoped it could've worked out just a bit differently, but it didn't.

Loved reading this book, and I can't wait to read more by S.A. Barnes or as Stacey Kade! 

Author: S.A. Barnes 
Read: March 20th, 2025 
Source: NetGalley
Reason Why: Love her writing and it sounded really great, and it's a SAC 2025 Book and a WoW Book! 
Publisher: Macmillan Audio
Expected Publication: April 8th 2025

5/5 Hearts

5/5 Books

5/5 Stars