S.A. Barnes is the author of Dead Silence and the forthcoming Ghost Station. She works in a high school library by day, recommending reads, talking with students, and removing the occasional forgotten cheese stick used as a bookmark. Barnes has also published numerous novels across different genres under the pen name Stacey Kade. She lives in Illinois with more dogs and books than is advisable and a very patient husband.

What drew you to space as the setting for your horror novels? Why do you think it is so appealing to readers at this current moment?

Space is one of those settings that, to me, is both terrifying and fascinating. Even without someone or something actively trying to kill you, space is deadly. It absolutely does not care about us. We are 100 percent taking our lives into our own hands by crossing that boundary. (I suspect being of the age where I watched the Challenger disaster live on television in a classroom may have played a role in my fascination with the dangers of space exploration.) But I’ve also loved watching all the new developments. I mean, we only had confirmation of the existence of exoplanets in 1995. And now we’ve seen the first images of a black hole, and we’re finding planets (even potentially habitable ones) left and right these days. I think readers are drawn to space horror because it offers the hope of an advanced future, an advanced humanity—especially at a time when life on Earth feels particularly difficult. But there’s also a familiarity to the problems in space horror because, as always, we bring our issues (greed, jealousy, selfishness) with us.

While Dead Silence was set on a ghost ship, Ghost Station takes place on an abandoned planet. What were the challenges moving the action back to land?

One of the elements I enjoyed most about writing Dead Silence was the completely contained environment. I’m a bit claustrophobic, so the idea of terrible things pursuing me in a place I can’t escape is enough to give me actual nightmares. (In fact, the entire time I was writing that book, I dreamed of being chased by zombies.) So writing a book set on a planet that, while hostile, is still an entire planet was certainly trickier. I couldn’t rely on that same kind of claustrophobia to amp up the tension. That being said, it was fun to play with the familiarity of being on a planet, but characters always having to keep in mind that they couldn’t just walk out the door. It’s always striking to me, when looking at photos from Mars, how much it looks like a desert here on Earth. But this team has to keep in mind that no matter how much this planet might look like certain locations on Earth, they can’t survive out there. In a way, that’s worse than being on a ship, in my opinion. Add to that the possibility of losing your faculties and wandering out into that hostile environment unknowingly, and it felt incredibly scary to me. I was also intrigued by the idea of a dead planet. One of the theories about why we haven’t found intelligent life on other planets might be because our timing is just off. Advanced civilizations might have existed out there, but thousands of years before humans would have been able to detect them. I followed that concept with this story in the idea that the entire planet is essentially an ancient graveyard.

One of the things that draws readers to your books are the complex, interesting, and haunted women leads. You are able to balance strong character driven storytelling with plenty of tension, fear, and action that keeps the pages turning. How do you strike that balance so well?

Thank you so much. That is something I really hoped to accomplish with both Dead Silence and Ghost Station. As a reader, the stories that really stick with me are the ones where I truly connect with the main character and fear for their safety and want them to grow/change by the end of the story. (A recent example: I adored Paradise-1 by David Wellington. It made me cry at various points.) I hope to do that same thing in my own writing. It’s always tempting for me to focus on the big scary thing that’s chasing them or the cool tech that surrounds them. But I think it’s important to keep the emphasis on the main character’s journey and their efforts to overcome their own flaws and shortcomings while they’re trying to survive this situation that tests their limits.

How does your day job at a high school library inform your writing? I am sure some of your students have read your books. Do they ever report back?

I love working in the library. It’s such a joy seeing students connect with a book, sometimes for the first time in their lives. And to play some small role in that? Amazing. At times, writing can be very isolating, but working with students and books is a reminder of the absolute joy stories can bring us and how they can make us feel less alone. (That is what books did for me as a shy, awkward kid, and it has been—and continues to be—my dream for my books to provide that same comfort for someone else.) Yes, I’ve definitely heard from students. Some of them will approach to ask if I’m “the one who wrote that book.” A couple of months ago, a student noticed the promotional poster for an upcoming talk I was doing at a local Barnes & Noble with Daniel Kraus and was super excited to share that [the following] Monday. Another student wrote me an email after reading the book, telling me how much he loved it—I printed that out and saved it! And to my delight, our four copies of Dead Silence have been continually checked out since the beginning of the year. But to most of the students, even when they know about the book, I’m just the person who tells them to put their Takis away and keep their voices down!

What books and authors are you most excited about right now?

I adore that [“Murderbot”] series and character! Also, I’m still thinking about Black Sheep by Rachel Harrison. Such a fantastic read. I LOVE her books. Ally Wilkes has an absolutely superb arctic horror, Where the Dead Wait…. I’m also super excited for The House of Last Resort by Christopher Golden and This Wretched Valley by Jenny Kiefer.