S.A. Barnes is known for novels that are “at the intersection of science fiction and horror” (Alma Katsu, quoted in marketing copy for Barnes’s Dead Silence [2022]). With her newest book, Cold Eternity, the hook is one that has started off many haunted house stories: A down-on-their-luck person is enticed into taking a caretaker job for a derelict, sinister property. The sci-fi spin here is that, rather than a gothic mansion, our main character Halley is in charge of a ship full of cryogenically frozen bodies. And she might have more than just the frozen dead for company.
When we first meet Halley, she’s skulking around a shabby space station, a fugitive on the run. Not long ago she was working in the office of the Prime Minister of the United Nations of Colonies (UNOC) as a bright-eyed young aide. But then she was implicated in a political scandal and had to leave her old life behind. She’s desperate for a job that will allow her to save up some cash, and also give her a chance to lay low until the scandal blows over. When she finds out about a caretaking job aboard the historical ship Elysium Fields, she has some reservations but ultimately decides it’s the only safe harbour open to her.
Elysium Fields is an oddity of a ship. It’s 150 years old, dating back to when humans first started taking to space and attempting to live on other planets. Its original owner, Zale Winfeld, was a fanatic about cryogenics, believing that not only could certain illnesses be cured in the future, but even death itself would eventually be a reversable aliment. In the meantime, people would just need to be kept in stasis until technology improved enough to safely unthaw people, and to cure death. “According to Winfeld, death was only temporary, until technology caught up and allowed everyone to live forever. Defeating death—that was to be his legacy. Available for a price, of course.” Winfeld started loading up his giant ship with the rich and famous (as well as the occasional charity case). But Winfeld never opted to freeze himself. After his three adult children died in a shuttle accident, he disappeared, “unwilling to be ‘saved’ without his family by his side” (p. 10).
For a while the ship was in operation as a kind of morbid museum, the celebs of the past on display in their rooms alongside collections of their clothes and newspaper articles extolling their past deeds, a space-age version of a pharaoh’s tomb. Halley herself visited Elysium Fields on a school field trip when she was twelve years old. But now its museums days are in the past and it is closed to visitors. No one is working on cryogenics and there is still no cure for death. The ship travels on a pre-determined course, a cruise going nowhere ferrying the dead.
The ship’s mechanic is Karl, and he is the only other living human officially on board. He hires Halley under the table as someone to check in on “the residents” so that he can turn all his attention to mechanical matters. It’s also Halley’s job to push a big button every three hours so that the Elysium Fields board of directors know that someone is in fact looking after things. From the start something is off about the job. Karl’s reasoning for hiring a second pair of hands makes sense, but a few people on the station tell Halley that in the past people have accepted the gig and were never seen again. Halley also sees something odd during her very first hour on the ship: On the security camera she sees a figure crawling along the floor. Is it one of the residents, awoken from cyro sleep?
Obviously something more is going on aboard Elysium Fields, a certainty that becomes more apparent as various odd and spooky things happen. While the atmosphere is foreboding, one frustrating aspect of the middle stretch of the book is that at times Halley seems very uncurious and unconcerned about what’s going on around her. When strange items start appearing outside her door, she chalks it up to Karl playing a prank on her.
The spooky atmosphere is also scuttled every time we get more of Halley’s backstory. Whenever we flash back to Halley’s former life as a political aide, the book stops being a horror story and becomes a political thriller. Both of these plotlines are very well-written with interesting characters, but they undercut each other. The atmosphere on Elysium Fields is lonely and claustrophobic, a ship of the dead cut off from the rest of humanity. But the political plotline reminds the reader that there is a world outside of the ship, a universe full of people and mundane things like colony rights and election fraud. It’s like reading a haunted house story where the narrative spends as much time talking about property taxes as ghosts.
The strongest parts of the book, and the element that really marries both the sci-fi and horror aspects, is whenever Halley visits Elysium Fields’s theater. The theater is akin to Disneyland’s Hall of Presidents, only instead of animatronics of Abe Lincoln and FDR it’s holograms of the three dead Winfeld children. In the past, Bryck, Ianthe, and Aleyk Winfeld gave pre-programmed presentations to visiting groups—they also had enough AI processing to answer questions about themselves and the ship. But Halley suspects that there’s more going on with them. When she was a child, she had an encounter with the Aleyk hologram that left her mentally scared. And even now Aleyk will often act in ways where he seems to be fighting against his own programming, trying to warn Halley using the few recycled sound bites he's able to say.
Halley and Aleyck’s relationship is the heart of the book. Both Aleyck and Halley are idealists who wanted to make the world a better place. Both of them did aid work in the field. They also both know what it’s like to be the child of driven, narcissistic parents who only see you as an extension of themselves. Even with Aleyck being a hologram constrained by outside forces, there’s a kinship and chemistry between him and Halley that makes it all the more tragic that the real him died over a hundred years ago. Every scene with him and Halley is gripping in part because it’s never clear which “Aleyck” Halley is going to get: the robotic version trotted out for the public, some malfunctioning abomination, or the “real” Aleyck behind the coding.
Eventually Aleyck is able to break free and speak with Halley and explain to her just what is going on. It’s over a chapter’s worth of exposition, and it’s a lot to take in all at once—both in terms of volume and how out of left field some of the revelations prove to be. Despite that, it is rewarding finally to have Aleyck and Halley able to talk to each other directly, giving some emotional heft to the scene.
The big reveal (in vague terms) is that the Elysium Fields isn’t a ghost ship: it’s a maze, complete with its own monstrous minotaur. I personally prefer ghost stories to creature features, but at least the monster here is truly terrifying, something alien and dangerous, the description inspiring dread not just in Halley but the reader. Still, in the final act the book shifts from subtle spooky to Grand Guignol. Halley’s past and present come together as her old co-workers show up at Elysium Fields to retrieve her, leading to a confrontation with the monster. Halley’s old boss, Niina, is a ruthless, savvy political animal, and it’s fun seeing how she deals with something as dangerous and otherworldly as the ship’s creature. What follows is a very bloody and delightfully gruesome finale.
“Cozy horror” has been a hotly debated term, but that is how this reads to me. There’s a lot here that will be familiar to people who enjoy space-set horror—it even uses familiar sci-fi tropes like calling the currency of the day “credits.” But the storytelling is solid and the characters fleshed out, and the occasional twist in the maze upends the reader’s expectations about just where the story is going. The ending brings Halley’s arc full circle: she got into this mess because she ran away from dealing with the fallout of her actions (even if she was mainly a pawn in the whole thing); now, she’s willing to stand her ground and do the right thing even at great cost to herself. It's not the most groundbreaking arc, but it works, and that more or less sums up Cold Eternity: not much new, but what we do get is well done.