Cold Eternity by S.A. Barnes (B&N) (Amazon)
Fair disclosure: I started reading Cold Eternity earlier last year, but did so in ebook format and got about nine chapters in reading a bit here and there before setting it down and forgetting about it, as can often happen with ebooks, which just feel more ephemeral than their bound matter counterparts. Cut to January 2026 and I spotted a hardcover in the local book store which I decided to snag (along with a copy of the newly in print There is no Antimimetics Division, about which I shall write more later). For reasons I can't quite put my finger on I have a habit of vacillating between trying to go full ebook on my reading, followed by lengthy periods in which I find it impossible to pick up an ereader and just read actual books.
As it happens, snagging Cold Eternity in hardcover format was what I needed, and I plowed through it over the last two weeks. It's around a 6-8 hour read, and the third book in S.A. Barnes' science fiction horror novel series. I have not yet read her prior to novels in this set, but have picked them up and plan to do so (so consider that obvious praise for Cold Eternity that it motivated me to get her other books).
In brief, the core premise of Cold Eternity would make a great Mothership campaign: our protagonist, who narrates the story from her perspective, is a woman named Katarina who is on the run following a bad fall from grace in the political scene of a setting that organically grows with her narration, a future society which has colonized the solar system and is now run by a parliamentary agglomeration of various colonies. She was wrapped up in some sleazy political manipulation, effectively an idealist used as a pawn, and then ordered to lay low while waiting for the inquiry to pass when the dealings are exposed. A scary encounter with a thug motivates her to get off the EnExx17 station near Enceladus entirely, and she finds a off-the-books job offer from a mysterious guy named Kurt who needs cheap and desperate help.
The job, it turns out, is on an ancient starship called the Elysian Fields, a relic vessel from a century earlier that was initially started as part of a grand project to study life extension through cryogenics, and ended up being a mausoleum in space when the technology failed to generate results. For a while it was operated as a tourist trap to generate revenue, recently enough for Katarina to remember visiting it as a child. The ship's public concourse was turned into a gaudy tourist trap advertising the mysterious family behind the construction of the ship, the Winfelds, including elder Zale and his desire for immortality, and his three children who all died in a shuttle accident and were then "immortalized" as holographic constructs. In the intervening years the ship apparently wound down its tourist operation and was moved to maintenance mode, with the enigmatic technician Karl on board to keep things running smoothly.
Katarina takes a shuttle to the Elysian Fields after an ominous warning from the bartender where her remote interview for the job took place, suggesting others have been hired by Karl and none of them have ever come back to the station. From here, she quickly learns the bizarre routine of monitoring the accessible floors of the ship (upper and lower decks are barred from her by Karl) and a weird requirement for her to push a button every three hours to "check in with the board," something Karl says he has no time for due to his working on ship repairs. She still hasn't met Karl, who remains in the guts of the ship somewhere making a constant racket.
The story moves into "haunted house" territory with the Elysian Fields very much being a true mausoleum in space, and Katarina begins to encounter oddities, including a video feed she was convinced showed some sort of sickly looking person crawling on the floor. As the story progresses, she deals with evidence of prior employees with superstitious tendencies, stranger noises, eerier hallucinations caused by her sleep deprivation due to the button pressing schedule, and then the holograms of the children of the Winfelds begin to manifest in their designated performance auditorium, speaking to her.
I won't dive any further without a spoiler warning, but will say that about 90% of the intense action this story is end-loaded into the last 80 or so pages. It also takes a weird and interesting turn, and there's a single chapter in particular which effectively infodumps everything that is going on. There is a moment where the shift goes from slow, creepy haunted spaceship story with questions about the sanity of the narrator to "action movie mode" with a plot twist that is so far out of left field that I started to wonder if maybe Barnes had originally envisioned a much slower, more methodical storyline and someone, an editor maybe, advised her to pick up the pace a bit.
So, if you would like to read an interesting book with a lot of ambient world-building that does a great job at a gothic haunted house slow-burn story but on a spaceship (at least for the first 80% of the book) then this is a must-read. The ending is pretty exciting, even though it does raise many, many questions. Overall I enjoyed it enough to immediately seek out Barnes' other two scifi horror novels, and I feel that the story is worthy of inspiration for a future Mothership campaign, too. Solid A!
So now for the Spoiler Warning. You have been warned!!! Go read the book first, then return here.
The late-game reveal in the book involves discovering that the ship has been used for the last century or two by Zale Winfeld as his laboratory for solving death. He manipulated his children into serving him, except for his eldest son Aleyk, who he later forced into submission by cryogenically freezing and uploading their minds into an AI system. Some of the details on why he did what he did to them are a tad bit sketchy, I guess it was mainly so he could have them around for company. What Zale did to himself, though was much more extreme: he apparently got into the occult, discovered an ancient cult which practiced possession, and figured out how to get possessed by something akin to a demon, though defined in the story as potentially an alien visitor from thousands of years ago. The exact details are vague, and just off kilter enough that I was left wondering why the explanation of his nature wasn't attributed to nanotechnology, cybernetics or something more grounded in regular scifi; to put it simply, the monster that Zale turned into, assuming he found the beast or its parasitic remnants on earth, would have had a history that is hard to shake, especially given how difficult it is to kill once the thing is fully revealed.
The story tries to wrap up in a very cinema-action style way both Katarina's plight on the ship with the Zale (and Karl) plotline, but also tried to put a bow on her flight from the political mess she was involved in. The net result does leave one feeling like it was all tacitly resolved, but I really felt like maybe, just maybe it was not the original intended ending of this book.....or maybe Barnes' free associates when she is writing?
So some thoughts on what the real ending could have been: my first thought for much of the book was that it was going to eventually be revealed that it was a rogue AI causing problems (Svalbard). Maybe the AI constructs of the kids were real, and maybe Zale was still around (but cybernetically enhanced), but I was pretty sure the reason Karl never appeared in person was because his feeds were AI generated. The truth in the end was of course Karl was so cybered out he was grotesque to behold, but it felt like an interesting miss here. Maybe the intent was to imply "AI is doing all this" as a feint, but to then move to "occult research leading to lost alien presence on Earth," honestly felt like an even bigger reach to me.
Still, it was a fun book, and the ending holds well enough even though the tonal shift to insane gore-drenched ending felt maybe a bit forced, but I think maybe if the book had a bit more evenly spread out action and was able to find ways for Katarina to slowly piece together the mystery over time rather than info dump from Aleyk's AI construct toward the end, it might have felt like the explosive ending was a bit more earned. I guess what I am saying is, for better or worse, the reason Resident Evil type games are filled with scientists and madmen who like to journal everything is so your character can find this stuff and piece together what is going on. If Katarina had found more clues and information over the course of the first 200 pages of the book then I think the surprise payoff at the end would have been more impressive. Who knows, maybe the reference to the occult ceremony and the mysterious cave (which she does find the holographic depiction of, but without context or clues) are the basis for other future stories....or maybe something referenced in prior novels? I don't yet know, but will be reading her other works next.
A couple other odd comments:
1. If Katarina was 12ish when she visited the Elysian Fields, and we assume she's 30-35 now, then it means that the ship was receiving regular visitors within just the last 20 years. But the transition of Zale to possessed host for the demon-alien happened as a precursor to the ship's founding more than a century (or two) ago.....so what changed that led to the ship being rapidly decommissioned as a tourist trap and put in maintenance mode? Lots of questions like these go unanswered since the book is told exclusively through the perspective of Katarina.
2. Karl's backstory is another late reveal. All of Karl feels vaguely forced. It would have been interesting if Katarina had been able to learn more about Karl sooner, so that when his big reveal does happen it is more shocking. As it stands, we learn all the info on Karl at once, so the only surprise was that he was, in fact, a real person and not an AI construct by Svalbard.
3. Katarina's political abuser, Niina, conveniently shows up at the end with the away team. I think (but correct me if I am misunderstanding) they were following the ship all along.....but why? It does sort of feel like the subplot of the political snafu that drove Katarina underground was growing as the story progressed, and what it felt like in the first couple chapters feels distinctly different from the last few chapters. Maybe a rewrite to align the eventual ending with the beginning might have helped this feel a little better in terms of continuity? Although I do feel like the book feels like its story was evolving as written, it holds together well enough for me to wish that these bits and pieces had been maybe re-evaluated just a bit so that the pay off and reveals at the end of the story feel more properly aligned with the setup.
Either way, a good read, well worth it.
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