I was listening this morning to a Vox podcast called, The Gray Area, episode: Your Mind Needs Chaos in which a “philosopher of cognition and research” fellow explains that our minds are basically prediction machines, designed to protect us by understanding the world well enough to predict what will happen next so that you can prepare a response. To keep your machine tuned up, you have to introduce unexpected experiences from time to time – such as chaos (think Doctor Who or Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency or Air Disasters¹) or horror books and films.

Which is perhaps why I was craving a little horror this weekend. Or perhaps it’s just October.

So, book 1: Dead Silence, which I really enjoyed.

Claire Kovalik, Team Lead of a small communications repair ship on the edge of space covered by the communications web connecting all ships with each other and with earth. She’s been working for Verux pretty much all her life. As a child, her mother, a scientist, brought Claire to Mars following the death of her father. When the small habitat where they lived and worked with a handful of other families, becomes infected with a toxic disease, quarantine fails and Claire is the only survivor. She is placed into a Verux foster home and, because some people hold her responsible for the deaths on Mars, she is unable to find work anywhere except at Verux – and there, only beneath a certain ceiling.

When the book starts, Claire is imprisoned in a mental hospital back on earth, where she is being interrogated by two Verux executives who want to know what happened to her ship.

Her story starts with her team picking up a distress signal from space outside the communications web. It’s outside the area where they are authorized to operate by Verux but curiosity gets the best of them and they pursue the signal – only to discover that it is a lost space liner, the first of its kind, and basically a huge Titanic with a putting green, a swimming pool, high-end shops and salons, wood-paneled suites with gold fixtures, and a huge atrium with a glass ceiling. Billed as the first opportunity to travel space safely and comfortably, the ship was created by Verux’s main competitor, the ship attracted the crème de la crème of earth’s society: tech giants, sports superstars, European royalty, and annoyingly wealthy plastic reality TV sisters and all the dog-walkers, hair and nail stylists, and other support staff. When the ship disappeared off the grid, the company that built it went out of business and was taken over by Verux. And now Claire and her team can claim salvage rights, if they can just bring back to earth the black box and several items that could only be found on that ship.

Which means they have to go aboard. The first hint they get of what is to come is when they enter the cargo bay and find a baby grand piano floating upside down, edges damaged by having floated into walls and crates. Then they walk through the crew quarters, where they find doors blocked shut from the outside. They continue upstairs past the servant’s quarters and through increasingly luxurious sleeping rooms, where they find ominous messages scrawled in blood on the walls. Finally they reach the main arcade of the ship, where bodies begin appearing, killed in various violent ways.

During this spooky trek through the ship, Claire has been seeing things – well, people – specifically her mother and people whom she knew on Mars. And then she begins hallucinating the deaths of the people who she sees around her. At first, her crew isn’t experiencing the same thing but then, while trying to disengage the black box, they accidentally engage the engines. And then it occurs to them: what if they brought the whole ship back to the communications web? It’s only 3 days away. Surely whatever infected the people on the ship wouldn’t impact them so quickly as that, after all the passengers and crew were on the ship for months before whatever happened occurred.

So they strip their own ship of parts to repair the engines, and fire her up.

And then the rest of Claire’s crew begin seeing things and acting oddly. After one of them kills himself, she is knocked unconscious and her memories, after that, are confused. She has no recollection of how she got into the lifepod and escaped the ship back to the communications web, where she was rescued. All she knows is that her crew is probably dead – especially since she keeps seeing their ghosts around her in the asylum, along with other ghosts that occupy that space.

The first half of the book spends most of the time narrating the events that led Claire to her current state, with occasional returns to the present, where you begin to get a sense of how Claire’s mental state has brought her to the hospital. Once her past story catches up to the current moment, the book continues in a single timeline as Verlux wants her to guide their teams back through the ship, which is now on an earth-bound course.

I’ve read several books featuring ghost (space) ships and I have to say that they always leave me a little… wanting. While they are exciting and spooky, you’re never quite sure why the ship is causing those who explore it to go crazy. This one does a nice job explaining that in a way that a) makes motivational sense; b) makes scientific sense; and c) leaves the door open that ghosts actually exist.

And now my brain has updated its prediction model for what to expect if I find myself on a haunted space liner.

1. Or trying to get marketing teams to make decisions, although I wouldn’t recommend that one because that way madness lies. ↩︎