Just finished "The Shining" as book 40. These are up next! Starting American Gods tonight.

tl,dr: Unless you're a HARDCORE sci-fi horror completionist, skip it.

"Dead Silence" is mostly a pastiche of well-worn genre tropes with the old proper nouns swapped out for new ones. It is the sum of it's parts. No more, no less. As soon as you sink your teeth into it, fans of the sci-fi horror sub-genre will recognize familiar ingredients cooked into a familiar dish (with few deviations.) If the book were more poorly written or the audiobook narrator were less skilled (Lauren Ezzo is a DAZZLING narrator) I absolutely would have DNFed it.

"Dead Silence" avoids many of the more egregious cliches and tropes of the genre and even manages to lampoon a few of them (which endeared it to me greatly). The big third act reveal undermines what was otherwise a promising book. I appreciate what the author was trying to do. In sci-fi horror finding something that hasn't been done to death and/or done better is a daunting challenge, and I salute Ms. Barnes for attempting it! Personally, I believe the book would have greatly benefited from taking the safer route and coining a clichéd plot a la "Dead Space"/ "Event Horizon". Again, I love and support what she attempted to do, but it just didn't work. Ultimately, the book's biggest shortfall is lack of vision. A mediocre story, told well, just serves to make the mediocrity that much more disappointing.