If you’re reading this right now I’m guessing you could use a break from the horrors of our current reality, might I suggest the horrors of not-so-different one? Stay with me here, because Cold Eternity by S.A. Barnes is a spooky sci-fi thriller that says “Fuck Billionaire and AI…in spaaaaace!” It’s a little bit Alien, a little bit The Shining, and lots of fun.

Cold Eternity is S.A. Barnes’s third space horror novel (I reviewed Ghost Station last year) and features a young woman on the run from a scandal hiding out in a massive cryogenic storage space station for the rich and famous of yester-century. She is ostensibly alone aside from a wayward caretaker, but I think it’s no spoiler to say: she’s not as alone as she thinks.

One of the things I like best about Barnes’s books is that she understands horror tropes really well. Particularly, two common tropes that can lead to readers getting annoyed and putting the book down: characters acting uncharacteristically dumb or irrational, and characters not just leaving the bad place. Barnes writes a reason for her protagonists to be acting irrationally. In Ghost Station the protagonist had unresolved trauma and in Cold Eternity main character Halley is desperately sleep deprived. And for a number of well defined plot reasons, she cannot just leave the station even though Bad Stuff is happening. I appreciate that Barnes respects the intelligence of her readers and her characters. Halley is not stupid, but she is scared, tired, and doesn’t have any good options. That makes people act differently.

As in Ghost Station, Barnes has excelled here in creating a world that feels like it could be ours, warts and all. Politics and billionaires feature heavily in this novel, which veers close to feeling like a bit Too Much, but Barnes tempers it all with just enough sci-fi and horror to still make it fun escapism. It’s actually a bit hard to write a review of my favorite parts without spoiling them so what I’ll say is if you’re getting really tired of hearing from the Silicon Valley mafia I think you’ll enjoy this book’s take on them.

Cold Eternity comes out April 9th, 2025.

Like space horror? Be sure to check out The Locked Tomb and our coverage of it over on No Page Unturned.