A Claustrophobic Space Thriller

As I stated in my Dead Silence review, I wanted to read a glut of thrillers that verge on horror this season. While Dead Silence leaned heavily into horror, I decided to give S.A. Barnes’s latest, Cold Eternity, a try.

This is the third space-horror novel written by S.A. Barnes (I’m currently reading her second novel, Ghost Station, so stay tuned for that review). Cold Eternity promises a fantastic setup: a barely maintained space station, bodies in cold storage, and a protagonist who desperately needs to disappear. I expected atmosphere and fun scares. Let’s dive in.

The Setup: The Elysian Fields

Our protagonist is Halley Zwick, and she is running from something. Halley used to work on a political campaign that did some very shady things to get its candidate elected. Now she’s persona non grata and stuck in the rough part of a space station, looking for unsanctioned, off-the-books work. She’s trying to lay low, earn enough money to vanish, and maybe outrun the fallout from her past.

That’s how she stumbles into the job on Elysian Fields. The Elysian Fields is an enormous cryogenic barge drifting in an orbit far from regular space traffic, home to the frozen bodies of Earth’s richest citizens from a century ago.

A Job That Screams “Sus”

Halley is hired to keep an eye on the systems, the bodies, and, most importantly, to press a confirmation button every three hours to prove someone’s still alive up there. The pay is terrible, the contract is sketchy, and the whole operation screams “liability,” but it lets Halley hide from the powerful people in a place no one would look for her.

Her boss is Karl, the caretaker and engineer, who brings her on to pick up the tasks he “doesn’t have time for.” Right from the beginning, I find Karl and this whole job extremely “sus.” Who would design a system where you must press a button every three hours just to prove the station is being taken care of? That’s ridiculous. Karl is an engineer fixing a space station, and he couldn’t have built a mechanism to do that automatically?

I could hack something together to press a button on a schedule right now, and I don’t live two hundred years in the future.

That said, the contrivance also works: the button gimmick is how Barnes traps Halley (and the reader) in this relentless, sleep-starved loop.

The Cryo Mausoleum and Its Ghosts

The cryo program and the ship were created by tech billionaire (trillionaire?) Zale Winfeld. The program’s been shut down for years because no one ever fully solved the problem of safely thawing people out of cryo. But Winfeld’s fingerprints are still everywhere: in the branding, in the frozen “guests,” and in the glitchy AI “hosts” modeled on his three adult children.

For Halley, who visited the ship once as a child and had a deeply unsettling encounter with those holograms, being back on board awakens memories that don’t quite fit into what makes sense.

One of my favorite scenes happens early on when Halley first enters the security office. Through the static of the monitors, she sees a body crawling down the corridor. It drags itself along the ground, creeping forward in a way that’s very wrong. She calls Karl in a panic, but he dismisses it as the station getting into her head. When she looks back, the body is gone.

It’s a simple scene, but it’s a great way to set the mood and tell the reader, “Yes, something is off here, and you are all alone.”

The Sleep Deprivation Factor

Halley’s life shrinks to three-hour increments: patrol, check systems, hit the button, grab a micro-nap, repeat. The job is basically an enhanced interrogation technique disguised as employment.

This aspect of the book really got to me. I have a full life with three kids, and my youngest is clearly a night owl. She refuses to go to sleep until well after 9 PM, often dancing in bed or building forts in the dark while her parents are trying to sleep. I know what exhaustion feels like on a deep, cellular level.

Watching Halley go through this relentless sleep deprivation in a failing ship full of dead rich people hit me hard. It makes every weird sound and glitchy hologram feel ten times more menacing because you’re never sure if she’s seeing something real or hallucinating from sheer lack of rest.

The Ghosts in the Machine

On Halley’s rounds, she realizes the holograms of the Winfeld children aren’t just looping scripts; they’re trying to tell her something. Aleyk Winfeld, the son who rejected his father the most, becomes the key figure here.

Sometimes these “messages” come with genuinely horrific imagery: flashes of the real Aleyk trying to break out of his own body, clawing his way out through his own mouth. It reminded me of the body horror you’d see in Beetlejuice. It’s grotesque, weird, and memorable.

Final Verdict

I don’t want to get too deep into spoiler territory, but I’ll say this: what you think is happening on the station is more or less what’s happening, but Barnes puts enough fun twists on it that it still feels satisfying.

The creepiness and the eventual explanation worked for me. The ending is clean in a way I appreciated: no cheap cliffhanger, no obvious dangling threads meant to hook you into a sequel. It’s a tight, self-contained story.

I recommend Cold Eternity if you’re in the mood for a claustrophobic, space-bound thriller with a strong horror flavor and a protagonist who is hanging on by a sleep-deprived thread.Question for you: When reading reviews, do you prefer full spoilers or spoiler-free? Let me know in the comments below!