Dr. Ophelia Bray is the foremost expert on Eckhart-Reiser syndrome (ERS, essentially space-PTSD). The condition results from extended periods of isolation in space, and it once sparked a mass murder of 29 victims. Ophelia is assigned to assist a distant crew shortly after the death of one of their crewmates. She joins them before they land on an abandoned planet once home to an advanced civilization. Despite her efforts to earn the crew’s trust and evaluate their mental health, they push back at every turn. She begins to feel like they’re hiding something. But Ophelia also has secrets, and they threaten to unravel the mission entirely.
Ghost Station makes a lot of promises and introduces a lot of interesting concepts. It proceeds to engage with none of those and focuses instead on a cast of despicable characters who won’t grow. The book’s plot is predicated on secrets. The crew has many secrets surrounding the death of their former comrade. Ophelia has secrets that could conflict with the nature of her mission to ostensibly help the crew. The alien civilization on the abandoned planet holds all sorts of delicious morsels but is relegated to the background for the vast majority of the book. The result of this hodgepodge of setup-sans-payoff is a lackluster story with a whimper of an ending.
Unfortunately, the characters exacerbate the plot’s lack of cohesion. Ophelia has a buttload of secrets, and every single one of them made me question whether she should be a mental health professional. She needed therapy more than any of the crew members, and that’s saying something, considering their friend died only a few months prior. The real problem, though, is that her secrets don’t amount to anything. Without major spoilers, the one reason for anyone to care about her dark past becomes moot. The remainder of the crew is skeptical at best and outright hostile at worst. They prank Ophelia, tell her she isn’t needed, and refuse her treatment at almost every turn. When I started reading, I thought the setup was a perfect launch pad for self-reflection and character growth among the cast, but they were all so static I could feel my hairs stand on end. By the final pages of the book, the characters have changed precisely zero, with the tiny exception of Ophelia’s blossoming crush on the captain (which similarly buys a one-way ticket to nowhere).
All of these fumbles are packaged in prose that feels like a low-grade thriller novel. For the right reader, it will probably hit that turn-your-brain-off-and-enjoy spot, but it left me chuckling over tired dialogue and faltering phrasing.
My single note of praise for Ghost Station is the book’s sense of looming dread. I promise it wasn’t just my blanket dislike. Barnes has a knack for dropping little hints of horror without spoiling the big reveal. But even this praise comes with a dark cloud above it. The horror elements of the story remain largely unexplained and underexplored, to the point where I went, “are you kidding me?” when I finished reading.
Ghost Station is remarkably like a ghost in that it feels ethereal and intangible. It can’t grasp onto any of its ideas long enough to make an impact, and when it fades away, you’re left wondering if you ever saw it in the first place.
Rating: Ghost Station – 3.0/10
-Cole
