The Night Ship by Alex Woodroe
I would like to thank Flame Tree Press and Random Things Tours for an advance copy of this novel in exchange for a fair and honest review
Publisher - Flame Tree Press
Published - Out Now
Price - £20 hardback £3.82 ebook
Driving a logging truck through the Romanian mountains, smuggler Rosi and her crew come across a radio signal that hints at impending doom. As the world goes completely dark, their truck becomes a vessel sailing across a sea of nothingness.
But they’re not alone: transmissions trickle in through the radio from similar isolated islands across the country, from amateur radio hobbyists and police cars and customs facilities.
Attempting to rescue survivors and find a way out, the group save more lives, but soon discover that something hungry lurks below, and it's sending up agents – and transmissions – of its own.
There is a long tradition of fiction putting normal people into a pressure cooker of an environment to see what might happen. It may involve aliens, triffids, zombie or Claudia Winkleman in a castle but the general theme is what do people do when everything is on the line? Alex Woodroe in their great weird horror novel The Night Ship has a unique spin on this what if the people entering an inexplicable but deadly environment already come from a dangerous pressure cooker of a country? The result is a powerful eerie tale of suspicion, trust and the desire to escape.
It’s 1987 and Romania is firmly in the grip of the Soviet Union and the cruel rulership of the Party and its ability to monitor and control its citizens by threats, disappearances or sometimes just rewarding people for spying on their neighbours. Travelling along the roads are a couple in their twenties. The driver is Gigi a fine good role model for then men and his one day no doubt wife to be Rosi; although Rosi has no plans to be married and has not told Gigi about the contraband she is smuggling on their truck to add to her escape fund. A strange set of messages potentially from a military base spook them as it sounds like something is wrong. They pick up a strange hitchhiker named Sorin and go to investigate. Then reality disintegrates. The world turns into a dark void eating everything and only their truck survives and even works to some degree. Their radio silence suggests others are out there in the dark and yet they also become aware something even deadlier is awaiting them in the void.
This is a very good horror novel operating on two levels. It’s a very tense mic of cosmic and weird horror a we enter a world of strange darkness that is eating away reality. The sudden shift to this strange place is handled well and few real answers are given, even a later explanation admits few really understand what’s happened. We travel a dark void filled with nothing bar fragments of the world as islands or mysterious drifting vehicles that may or may not contain survivors. The trio find a dangerous presence that attacks them with dark vines and something almost human shaped. It’s intense, pressured and by its nature beyond our understanding each page becomes purely about survival.
But here is the fascinating angle that really makes the book work. In Rosi’s world you cannot take people on trust. The greater good that usually brings people together in these stories is here outweighed by a country’s long history of being eternally spoiled upon, the active threat of being disappeared or being informed upon even by your own family. Rosi’s own group is only just sharing secrets and even then no one knows who is telling the full truth. As they traverse the void the little islands of radio messages they come across become familiar to them game of potential allies, betrayals or heartbreaking realisations they were too late to stop something monstrous happening. Ultimately it’s groups perhaps finding this world not that different to their own in terms of having to survive.
The set pieces are all very well handled and create a pressure keg of a story as we start to relate clearly not everyone can be trusted. Rosi is our main character who so wants to leave her country and her own guilts behind but finds herself having to decide will she allow others to now be saved. Possibly our most relatable character and bar some later instant romance that didn’t quite work for me I found her a fascinating unpredictable lead. Intriguingly we also meet a dark mirror of her on the other side Catalina a scientist working at the centre of this disaster and while like Irina a woman who knows her own mind she’s been mistreated by the system so much her own chance for power as a consequence means she becomes a huge cunning danger to them all. It’s those who decide to align with power versus those seeking to escape its grip so even now the Cold War is over the messages about life under other forms of controlling states should hit home for many right now.
This is smart thought provoking horror extremely relevant to life now just as much as it gives insight into a period of history many would not have witnessed or understood what life was then like. I very highly recommend this and I look forward to reading more from Woodroe in the future.
