THE NIGHT THAT FINDS US ALL

A nautical yarn soaked in horror and doom.

Narrator Samantha Vineyard, aka Sam Vines, accepts an invitation to join a crew to sail a century-old wooden ship from Puget Sound to England. From the outset, she foreshadows unspeakable loss. The ivory-white Blackwatch is powered both by sails and a Rolls-Royce engine nicknamed Rollo. Sam is a quick-witted, salty-tongued alcoholic who maintains Rollo and is intrigued by the baroque inside of the ship. Her friend and crewmate, a guy named Loick, has told her the ship is haunted, and she gets creeped out by some of the gibbering sounds and ghostly shadows. Among the others aboard are three Steves, collectively the Threves; a female first mate nicknamed Seabees; and Hank Huntington—whom Sam calls Hank Fucking Huntington. (OK, f-bombs fit the genre, but they tend to wear thin after the first hundred or so.) Trouble arrives early and often—a crewman dies, and even a stop in the calm waters of the Panama Canal brings a ghastly demise. Sam’s storytelling style grabs readers’ attention with vivid, imaginative prose. On the deck one night, “it’s as dark as Satan’s bunghole.” A strange simile, yet apt. “I’m on the razor’s edge of batshit,” she says once, though it’s true throughout the story. And her “mind skitters around like drops of water on a smoking hot pan.” Sam’s discovery of an old journal, half mildewed and rotted but still partially readable, suggests the Blackwatch is indeed haunted and always has been. Meanwhile, the tension builds without letup: Whatever godforsaken disaster happens, matters will only get worse. The author, an established horror writer, looks like he’s done his nautical homework from mizzenmasts to bilgewater. Readers not normally given to the genre might want to give this yarn a try, because it’s also a good sailing story and an exciting thriller.

Great fun if you don’t require a happy ending.