Ghosts Among the Stars – Sam Whittaker

2.5 stars

There’s a lot to like here. I’m pretty picky with my sci-fi horror, but one trope that I consistently tend to like is a crew coming across an abandoned old space vessel of some kind and finding more than they bargained for. Sam has a bit of a different take on what the horror element was, which was interesting.

Where I think this fell short was in the length. This novella is very short, and I think that did a disservice to the story. It was hard for me to care about or grieve any of the characters as I didn’t really know anything about them. How did they come together? Where did they come from? Where were they going? We didn’t even get to know what their original mission was before finding the abandoned space station. I wanted to learn more about these characters so they had some depth and I could get closer to them.

I wanted to know more about the horror element also. What was the motivation? How were they doing what they were? What happened to the original crew that made it out of the pods? Where did the evil character come from, and what was it? There’s a lot of things that I want to know that I didn’t really get an explanation.

Ghosts Among the Stars has an interesting premise; it just needs to be longer to give the story time to come alive for me. One more pass through editing would’ve helped to button up several extra words that weren’t needed and things of that nature.