Tim Curran

Charlie Petty is a man known for having ice water in his veins. He never backs down and is never shaken but unfortunately has stirred up the wrong crowd. As a degenerate gambler, his luck has run out, and his debt has now come due. Charlie is offered a chance to clear his debt: simply stay alone on a ship overnight to prove to its owner and potential crew that it’s not cursed or haunted. Never mind the ship’s history of suicide, violence, mutiny and murder. Or how the ship’s past crews show more have all gone missing or insane. The fact that no one has set foot on deck in the darkness for years doesn’t faze Charlie one bit. It sounds like easy money to bust up a superstition or two. Charlie thinks his luck is returning. Little does he know it’s about to run out completely.
Charlie is a gambling addict as well as a womanizer, He finds himself deeply in debt to a loan shark, and to make matters worse, he's secretly sleeping with the loan shark's girlfriend. It seems, at least for now, that the "cheating" appears to have slipped under the loan shark's radar. The shark, Arturo, is only concerned with the fifty-thousand dollars. Actually, he's ready to forgive and forget the entire lump sum, if Charlie will agree to spend the night in the haunted captain's cabin of the Yvonne Addams. Oh ...did I mention that the cursed ship is has been sitting at anchor for the last year? I thought there had to be a good reason for that and Charlie might be better off with the loan shark:)

The ship's history would make a "best seller" by itself. Can you say, "spooky night around the campfire"? The Yvonne Addams is full of holes and also filled with "assumptions" about the long since dead, or missing crew members...100% creepy. However, our Charlie believes that fifty-thousand dollars just to survive one night on board seemed "too good to be true", and this reader totally shared Charlie's doubts...and wondered what Arturo really knows, and what his true intentions might be. That question results in a clever little "flourish" at the stories end, but it has been very successful in at least getting Charlie to at least wonder if he has made the wrong decision and again setting him yet again adrift on the sea of doubt. Charlie says on the sea a lot in this story,

On board the Yvonne Addams, along with Charlie, we encounter the dim, gloomy, cold, claustrophobic atmosphere. Even if this ship wasn't said to be haunted, Charlie's below decks exploration would be unsettling all by itself. Sneaky author Tim Curran now begins messing with our minds almost immediately with the suggestion of things heard, seen, and felt . . . and the intimation of what those things might actually be. Very carefully he builds up the fear and horror, escalating the story to the point where we're prepared to accept Charlie's strange, bloody dreams as memories of what has happened before. By the time Charlie starts to explore the ship, challenging those dreams, we know in our very hearts that things are not going to end well.

There's a monster at the heart of this story. A monster worse than any mere spook or poltergeist, and it's exciting to watch as it's ever so slowly revealed. This is the type of story that leaves the reader picking at invisible spiderwebs as you creep across the room to turn on just one more light. This is not a story that is in anyway subtle. It's so chillingly methodical as it builds and then explodes in intensity. A fantastic read...but best not done in the dark:) show less

4.5* rounded up to 5.

This was another hit from Tim Curran!

A ship and her crew encounters a dense, endless fog. From there it's all downhill for them.

There is no way for me to impart to you the descriptive skills of Mr. Curran. They are simply outstanding. He made me see creatures that I could never have dreamed up in a million years. After reading this book for a while, it took me a moment to adjust myself to real life when I looked up. He made me feel as I were in the fog myself.

The show more atmosphere and tension in this story are both excellent. It has been a long time since I've soaked in a truly creepy read like this. I wholeheartedly enjoyed it!

The only thing that bothered me (resulting in the subtraction of half a star), was a few repetitious chapters around the 25% mark. I felt like the point had been made about where each character was and what they were facing and I wanted to get on with the story.

Other than that this book was pretty awesome. Imaginative, descriptive, atmospheric, creepy and crawly. This story had it all. Highly recommended!

*A note regarding the Kindle edition of this book. On Goodreads the description says it has 300 some odd pages, but the Kindle version was over 500 pages. It's a relatively long book.* show less

CW: Rape, homophobia, racism, misogyny

EDIT: After sitting on it for a few minutes, I've given it one star. Maybe I'll rethink it again, but for now, I just need the rating to reflect my revulsion.

This review is going to have spoilers, and I'll hide the major ones, but I'm not hiding the whole review on principle, because I think everyone should know what they're getting into before they read this book.

First thing's first: this is a good horror book. It does what it sets out to well, and show more creeps the hell out of the reader, with enough gore and slasher moments to appeal to those of us who are really into detailed accounts of disembowelment. I will say that too much exposition happened in the last ~7 chapters from Clegg. This stuff should've come wayyyy sooner. Also the ending was a letdown.. But other than that, it's a good horror novel. The writing is good, too. For all this, it deserves the two stars I've given it.

The problem with the book, however, is basically every depiction of everyone. Bonnie is treated as nothing but a sexually appealing piece of meat the entire book, and I think that's a shame. Moreover, I think it's reprehensible that not a single strong woman is portrayed in the whole book. They're all quick to give into sexual desires or they just die after very little character development. The closest we get is Jaylene, but she's literally referred to as a "slit licker" by another character and is constantly disparaged with rabid, disgruntling homophobic slurs.

This kind of homophobic undercurrent mirrors a ton of others, including racism, homophobia, and serious misogyny. Curran drops the n-word and f*ggot among others. The women are sexualised or weak, or both. Multiple characters are raped, both male and female, but only the female characters have their rapes described, and you get the uncomfortable feeling that Curran enjoys writing those scenes.

What makes all of this particularly troubling is that literally none. of. it. contributes. anything. to. the. story. You can argue that these kinds of stereotypes, opinions, and language have their place in horror (though I would disagree), but they are so out of place in this book. They genuinely drag the down from a solid 4.5 stars to 2 or fewer. I honestly can't tell if Curran was trying to portray his characters as just from a small, close-minded town, or if these reflect his own values, because they were purely vitriolic in nature, and didn't serve to further the plot or the tension or horror whatsoever.

Of course, Curran isn't the only author that has this problem. Other authors (particularly white, male ones) seem to think that writing horror is a free license to be as absurdly offensive as possible. Horror can be written to repulse us, sure, but let's not use it as a way to play out whatever sick fantasies of raping women and calling lesbians 'slit-lickers' we have.

Overall, I cannot in good faith recommend this book to anyone; despite the writing and good employment tension and gore, its portrayals of women and minorities are just way too offensive to have been enjoyable. I only finished it because it was genuinely creeping me out, which is hard to do, and because I wanted to know the full scope of the social transgressions this novel lays out for this review. show less

"He stood there, watching that awful fog billow and surge. It was bad. By God, it was real bad. But Gosling was almost glad it was there, hiding things, masking others. For if it cleared, he was almost afraid of what they might see out there.

And what might see them."

This is my first book by Tim Curran - after this terrifying voyage on the sea, I'll definitely give more of his stuff a try and hope those books are as potent. He writes beautifully, drawing out the pacing when the tension is show more thick by shortening his lines and dishing out almost poetic prose while his dialogue is convincing and genuine.

Besides the storyline holding genuine thrills and chills, it's amped up with intelligence. Not only horror, but the confusing melds of physics and wormholes and other dimensions. The ending especially injects healthy doses of science fiction to sail it though.

What caught me in for a bigger hook was the exploration of sea lore. There's so many stories about voyages on the water gone bad - from sea monsters and sea legends, to disappearing vessels and ghost ships. You have sirens and weeds and mutinies, monsters and squids and all the hidden horrors of the sea exposed. Plenty of frightening source material to draw upon, and Curran went all out on delivering here, to the point to where it was almost overload.

It's rare for me to feel a chill reading a book or watching a movie - but in this case, I definitely felt it. My list of genuinely creepy novels is short, and usually those only make the list because of one or two short scenes. Not the case here. The book is rich in tension, that fog is outright creepy because - like playing on the effect of something creepy happening in the dark - it's creepy because the fog keeps the mystery high. You can't see what's more than a few feet in front of you, you can only hear it, imagine it, and fight it when it's suddenly there.

The monsters are mean and the monsters are many. They're well-conceived, nasty creations; brutal and merciless and gory. There's even a weird scene with an extraterrestrial and at first I thought it would be an ironic commentary that this creature is encountering man as another new, hostile monster to overcome in the sickening sea world...but the author turned it instead to where it is another hostile force our group of men must reckon with if they want to survive.

A worthy grouping of characters who complement and contrast. When they're not battling the sea and all the monsters within, they're battling each other. The survivors are divided into two groups for most of the book, and each of those groups must survive sanity over the odds....it's not helped that some of them don't get along. Testosterone taints the air as thickly as the fog at times. This brings a realistic twist we all would recognize in people in a world we wouldn't.

Dead Sea is an epic horror novel, although it's not 100% perfect because sometimes it's a little drawn out and redundant. Despite the length being a little too drawn out, pacing is kept up well for the slowly dawning horror that affects the group.

It's delightfully claustrophobic and reminiscent of Lovecraftian lore, a lengthy voyage into a genuinely chilly, fog-drenched horror novel that all fans should experience. show less