Felt like doing something different than the usual fare for this blog post, so welcome to our first ever book review blog courtesy of yours truly. It’s a little funny that I’ve never done this before, but if you knew my reading habits, it’s honestly not horribly surprising. I’m a bit of a binger. When I start reading, all I want to do is read. When I start watching tv shows, all I want to do is watch tv. Ergo, my reading occurs in sporadic bursts that have to be handled carefully so as not to interfere with my writing schedule.
Ever since I hit massive burnout, surprise, surprise, I’m not writing a ton right now. That’s left me with a lot of time to fill with other books. While I typically find new things to read by osmosis, my usual eclectic pulls have been waylaid in one specific direction and that direction is maritime (sometimes specifically Arctic) queer horror novels.
Couldn’t really tell you why my focus went in this specific direction, though I’m sure watching AMC’s THE TERROR did something significant in putting me on this path. Once you watch that show you get a bit fixated, I suppose. Guess I’m slowly becoming a maritime stan, though it’s likely more that the desperation and fixed nature of setting a horror story on something as flimsy and contained as a ship at sea makes for a good, effective horror experience. The Demeter chapter of Dracula has long been one of my favorite horror goalposts, after all.
I’ll try to have a general spoiler-free overview of each of these books. If you’ve read one or more of them and would like to discuss them in depth, definitely say something in the comments. I’d love to have a fun little book club moment since I think Yougei’s getting a little annoyed listening to me one-sidedly info dump about these books as I read them.
WHERE THE DEAD WAIT - Ally Wilkes
I picked up this book after it was recommended in an author discord server I’m in. Someone asked for maritime horror novel recommendations, and this was one of many offered up. I had a shload of expiring Kindle credits I needed to burn, so I picked a name from the list at random, and the rest is, as they say, history. Though I will say I would have been hard pressed to have bought this title digitally if I hadn’t had all those points to burn. This ebook cost $11.99. I am a huge library user, so forgive me if I’ve been living under a rock this whole time, but that seems… almost stupidly expensive for an ebook that wasn’t more than 400 pages long.
Anyway. This story rides the blessed line between maritime and Arctic horror—a flavor I’ve been very much enjoying now that I’m post-THE TERROR. It’s a masterful foray into the protagonist’s past horrors as a survivor of an Arctic expedition gone wrong and his mounting future horror as he goes back into the Great White North in pursuit of a lost shipmate of his. It blends the past with the present in a very skillway way that I hope to emulate in my own work someday, plus the main character is just so my type that it’s stupid. He’s massively haunted, woebegotten, and reviled by society for the choices he made to survive. You really can’t get more Migi-coded than that.
To be honest with you, the best thing I can tell you to get you to read this book is that if you had handed me it and told me “Hey, this was originally HANNIBAL fanfiction in an AMC’s THE TERROR au,” I would have believed you, hands down. The dynamic between the main character and the man he is returning to the site of his worst trauma to find is just so them. The surreal way the horror is delivered is also incredibly Bryan Fuller-esque, with atmospheric, metaphor-ladened manifestations of cannibalism, murder, and guilt emerging from the woodwork of the ship, ghosts rising up to serve as fucked-up Jeremy Cricket’s when you least want them around, and the overwhelming way the other man haunts the narrative, filling up the cracks the main character is riddled with until you know the guy fully even before you meet him… Hannibal fans will eat this one up. I promise.
On the downside… The reason I loved this book as much as I did was because it reminded me of the Hannigram dynamic. That is such a rare dynamic to find. It’s twisted and dark and full of sick longing. You just don’t find many stories capable of reaching those depths, which is also why I struggle so hard to find Hannigram fanfiction that feels in character. It’s hard to write. This book was deepest and most intriguing when it leaned into that interesting dynamic, so when we got to the end, I was so sure this book was about to give me everything I’d ever hoped for and more… But it just fell flat. In my opinion, this book should’ve committed to the bit. We dulled our fangs in the final hour with this one, folks, and I’m going to be mad about it for a while longer yet.
If you do read this one, please let me know how the ending sat with you. I’m massively curious if I was the only one walking out with blue balls or not. Would’ve been a 4.5 outta 5 if it’d stuck the landing, so I gotta give it a 3.5 out of 5 instead.
FROM THE BELLY - Emmett Nahil
I’d seen this one come across my dash in the months leading up to its publication and then sporadically afterwards, and from the very first time I glimpsed the summary I was intrigued. FROM THE BELLY is straight up maritime horror, modeled closely after the grisly tale of the Essex whaling ship—if that doesn’t ring any bells, just know it inspired Melville to write MOBY DICK. It’s a much more outwardly supernatural read than I expected, full of metaphors made manifest, Biblical-esque punishments for past and continued sins, and body horror so exquisite that you really, really probably won’t like the book if you aren’t down to clown with vivid descriptions of it.
This book continues to intrigue me even a week after reading it. Aesthetically and philosophically, it reminded me a ton of Dishonored and its internal worldbuilding. This is a fantastic book for those who love good, comprehensive, creative worldbuilding for secondary worlds. There’s organically woven tidbits of the in-world religion, a polytheistic worship of elemental beings Above and Below, with sailors’ superstition riding atop all of it to manifest in squid ink tokens tattooed around the knuckles, the ribs, atop the growing masses lurking just beneath the skin. Whales are a huge facet of this story overall, and if you’re at all familiar with my beloved Outsider from Dishonored, you may be pleased to find a worthwhile comparison to him in this book as well.
For a short summary of the book, it’s about Isaiah Chase, a young man on a whaling ship captained by Captain Coffin (if you know about the Essex story, you’re going to recognize a lot of names and understand what all these names imply). After taking down a whale, the crew discovers a naked man inside its belly, still living despite all odds. They take him aboard and put him in the brig, too determined to make profits to return to safe harbor. After all, they need to bring down more whales to pay off the debts to the Company, debts that don’t even get dissolved in death, but passed on to their families. But the whales have seemingly vanished. The skies have turned against them. The man in the brig won’t speak, won’t eat, and from there, things begin to… happen. To grow. To Change.
It’s a short, snappy read that only took me a few hours to get through, and while it isn’t perfect, I enjoyed what this story brought out of me. It’s queer normative, deliciously gruesome, illustrated with beautifully atmospheric art, and has an inhuman character who acts wonderfully inhuman, even as he falls for the most human of the crew. This is one I desperately want someone else to talk to about, so give it a read and hit me up if you have thoughts as well. 3 outta 5.
THE TERROR - Dan Simmons
I keep talking about it, so it’s no surprise that the book the AMC show was based on is on my list as well. I read this sometime last year, actually, but that should just go to show you how I have to schedule out my reading time to fit my schedule. The show, however, did get a rewatch from me not very long ago. As a TL;DR, I recommend the show over the book in terms of which is the better written story in regards to character narratives. The book has the better climax by far. Consume both, but take the show first so you better appreciate the gaps filled in by the book.
For those who aren’t familiar, THE TERROR is a fictionalized retelling of the doomed Franklin Expedition, a British expedition sent to discover the Northwest Passage at the tail end of the Age of Exploration. It was composed of two ships, The Terror and The Erebus, who went missing without much of a trace along with the 120+ crew members after being locked in pack ice for a few years during one of the coldest, most inhospitable sequence of winters to date. Simmons bases a lot of his narrative on what little evidence has been found over the years and bundles it all up with a supernatural twist to serve as an extended, violent metaphor for the hubris of man seeking to conquer places better left alone.
I won’t get too much into the tv show because it really is its own beast worthy of dissection. The book, while not what I’d classify as equally enjoyable—I really don’t need to read about Crozier having sex with a woman in a platypus pond in Australia? Seriously, being inside some of these men’s heads was more miserable than reading about the scurvy and cannibalism—heightened my appreciation for the show and the narrative as a whole. It includes a lot more folklore and cultural information that really fascinated me, plus let you get inside the heads of the other crew members that couldn’t be so explicitly explored in the fixed pov tv show. But at a beefy 780+ pages, I can’t say this is a book I’ll be rereading anytime soon. It’s definitely worth reading, but not with the sort of frequency I find myself rewatching the tv show. 2.5 outta 5 stars.
THE ROUTE OF ICE AND SALT - José Luis Zárate
Oh, boy, this one is a treat and a half. I saw some posts online from other reviewers describing this as a disgusting book, but man, some people just don’t appreciate erotic prose the way they should, especially when it’s as masterfully written as this. THE ROUTE OF ICE AND SALT was originally written in Spanish, but don’t let that stop you from picking it up. The translation is incredibly smooth and lovely, and if you have ever studied Spanish as a language, you’ll appreciate the rhythm of the prose, especially if you do what I did and opt for the audio version of the story. Some of the lines read like Pablo Neruda poetry—it’s really quite lovely.
This story is actually a queer retelling of—surprise, surprise—the last voyage of the Demeter, ie the best chapter in Bram Stoker’s Dracula. It’s told from the perspective of the captain, a closested gay man who has forsaken the idea of romantic, physical queer love due to the prejudice of society and the horrible things that happened when he dared indulge in his youth. He manifests his desire internally through fantasies of being with the men around him, using the metaphor of his position as captain and they as underlings as reason why they cannot be together—he is alone, married to the ship, aloft a lonely peak and cursed by this demarcation of station (and the immorality of his own desires) to never be close to those he desires below. It’s beautifully, poignantly written and overwhelmingly filled with longing, and I haven’t even gotten to the survival horror of it all.
This is Dracula. This is unapologetically queer. Dracula is more of a monster than he’s ever been in this book, a creature of blood lust who also preys on the captain’s lust as a means to get close to him, to drain him, to control him in his pursuit of reaching London upon this cursed, doomed ship. It has everything you would want out of a first-person account onboard the Demeter mixed with an immensely erotic, viscerally physical experience of a lonely queer man burdened with the lives of the men he can never truly be close to in the way he so desperately wishes to, in life or in the death that has come to claim them all.
A must-read (-or listen) for lovers of rich, decadent, and erotic prose. 5/5. I plan on getting a physical copy immediately.
ALL THE WHITE SPACES - Ally Wilkes
This was the last book of the bunch to be read, so it lives freshest in my mind. I have… a lot of thoughts about this one. I’ve always found book reviews to be such a toss up, to be honest, because I understand the purpose of reviewing them subjectively. People who have similar tastes to myself and trust my view on things will want to know how a book made me feel specifically. But that isn’t always fair. I like what I like, and lots of people like other things. That’s the point, they’ll say. You’re supposed to have a group of readers who share your tastes. That’s how they find books that fit their own.
Anyway. This is a finely written book. It says what it needs to say and doesn’t linger overlong, and the main character, a trans man named Jonathan who stowed away on an Antarctic expedition right on the heels of World War 1, is a well written character with solid character growth and a firm point of view. The cast was strong and memorable. But that didn’t make me like this book. I didn’t really like it. Jonathan is not the kind of protagonist I enjoy, one who starts from utter naivete and juvenile preconceptions of the world and those in it. I found myself very frustrated while reading—not because Jonathan wasn’t doing what I would’ve done, but because he is so utterly naive to the way the world works, to the existence of worldviews beyond his own. It takes quite a lot of bad things happening to get him to open his mind, and his lack of curiosity or empathy bothered me. It shouldn’t take a lot of people dying for you to begin to think about things. I know being othered doesn’t make you always more sensitive to the ways other people are othered, but man. Group Think did a lot to hamper Jonathan, and “being one of the men” is one hell of a drug—understandably, I suppose, for someone in his position, but that doesn’t mean I have to enjoy being along for the ride.
Not liking a protagonist isn’t a reason to discount an entire book. Jonathan will appeal to a lot of people who aren’t me. He’s a well written early-20th century trans man navigating an already terrifying situation, even without the concern that he might be outed. If that sort of thing interests you, you’ll likely enjoy him as a character. But I also had issues with the plot of this book, namely with the way the horror is delivered. I had this issue with WHERE THE DEAD WAIT as well, though to a lesser degree that didn’t overshadow my enjoyment of the other facets of the story.
Wilkes’ books have a tendency not to commit to the horror she’s presenting. ALL THE WHITE SPACES is about an Antarctic expedition that was already doomed from the start. The crew started South too late in the season. Something terrible befalls their ship. Forced onto the ice and then onto the inhospitable frozen land, the crew contends with the seemingly supernatural as it chisels their numbers away, piece by piece by piece. I finished this book Saturday night and I am still trying to understand the nature of the “monster” they’ve encountered. I know it’s part metaphor, as it always is in these supernatural-leaning Arctic horror stories, but the purpose of it all… It’s a bit hard to articulate without spoiling things. WHERE THE DEAD WAIT toed the line between is it a hallucination or is it actually ghosts—a balance I don’t think it accomplished as I am, again, still confused on what it all was in the end. ATWS is explicitly supernatural, and yet…
I don’t know. I think I would’ve enjoyed it more if it WASN’T made as explicit as it was. If it’d all been mania brought on by the aurora and the PTSD of the post-WW1 soldiers-returned-to-the-sea sailors, the slow whittling down of sense and humanity until only teeth remained, I think it may have kept up its momentum better than how it all ended.
All things said, this wasn’t a slog to get through. Wilkes does her research when writing in historical settings and it always shows, something I, as a student of history, always appreciate. There were enjoyable moments and enjoyable characters. I truly loved several of them, with Tarlington at the top of the list because he is another certified Migi-type character. You show me a maligned character othered by society and overwhelmingly cognizant of that fact and his lack of ability to change it and I’ll be hooked. But this as a whole wasn’t a book for me. 2 out of 5 for the Migi specific scale, and 3 out of 5 for the objective review.
So, that’s it for my current bunch of books on this topic. Have you read any of these? Do you have recommendations for more along these lines? I’d love to hear everyone's thoughts on the matter and if you liked my little book review moment. I don’t want to promise more of them—at least, nothing this long or specifically themed—given how I take my reading in sporadic chunks, but if you’re open to see more of my book thoughts in the future I’ll keep it in mind as an option for future blog posts.
Until next time,
T.D. Cloud
Interesting =)