Written in the exacting, masculine style of the classic storytellers of yesteryear this fiction collection explores the dark side of the maritime world—as if Herman Melville had written for Rod Serling’s Twilight Zone.
TABOO ISLAND
The narrator of this short novel is a professor of physical anthropology at a Canadian University. He comes to take a professional interest in the legendary Bigfoot or Sasquatch, said to inhabit his region. With his close female friend—a psychologist specializing in the mentality of apes—the two journey to a remote, uninhabited island off the northern Pacific coast of Canada, following up an alleged sighting of the beast there. It is revealed that this island traditionally served the local Haida Indians as their “Alcatraz” for penal offenders. Indeed, the Indians evidently still consider it taboo—their Indian pilot refuses to set foot on it. The two investigators debark anyway, intending to rendezvous with the backwoods guide who’d made the original Bigfoot sighting. When they come across a dismembered body instead our professors realize this will be no mere academic foray. Yet we may wonder which is really the more endangered species here—man, or beast?
THE FIGUREHEAD
Marco is a trader plying a gray and sometimes black market of maritime curios. He covets a ship’s figurehead which he spots mounted on a lonely island beach, and returns to steal it under cover of night. Only then does he discover it once led a ship called the Davy Jones to an awful fate. Where then will it lead him?
THE FACE IN THE WATER
A mysteriously abandoned though perfectly shipshape sailing yacht is discovered by a Coast Guard patrol. The yacht’s log chronicles a horrifying life or death that ensures when the skipper—who was soloing across the Pacific—repeatedly encounters an uncannily familiar but nameless face in the water “looking back at me…mercilessly eyeing me for the least sign of weakness.”
NIGHTMARE IN A BOTTLE
A message in a bottle recovered at sea has highly disturbing implications for the guilty sailors who find it.
FROM OVER THE DEAD HORIZON
An insurance dick interrogates Miss Songaard, the only witness to the weird disappearance at sea of the insured Kevin. This exchange highlights the incommensurable contrast between the skeptical detective’s relentlessly sober questioning and the earnest young woman’s account of a very eerie sequence of events indeed.
OUT OF THE INFERNAL WHIRLWIND
The rather staid Norman is dating the wild, mercurial Clary. Cruising in open ocean water aboard his sailboat they spot what seems to be an off course hang-glider coming their way. It finally makes a breathtaking landing right on their sailboat’s deck. This surprise visitor, “Doc”, immediately intrigues Clary, and just as quickly aggravates Norman. She’ll soon have to decide whether to stay with Norman then, or go with Doc back whence he claims to come, the mythical Crocker Land.
THE DEEP FALL
Four adventurers seek to illegally salvage a sunken passenger liner’s safe. They succeed in bringing up its contents, most importantly a valuable emerald. At just that point though the authorities are observed fast approaching, intent on busting this illegal operation. One of the four culprits nevertheless manages to swim unseen to shore bearing the gem. Although he eludes the authorities, he’d sure better be able to produce that looted gem when he re-encounters his co-conspirators later.
BOOK REVIEW
This debut collection features nautical horror stories along the Pacific Northwest coast.
The first four of these short stories were previously published between 1993 and ’97 in various issues of 48° North—TheNorthwest Sailing Magazine. In “The Figurehead,” a trader of maritime goods finds the perfect object waiting for him on a Puget Sound beach—a well-preserved bust, broken from a ship’s prow. “The Face in the Water” details a lone sailor’s descent into madness while heading for Hawaii. “Nightmare in a Bottle” is about sailors stranded on an island, remembered through the nightmares of the man responsible. In “From Over the Dead Horizon,” a widower vanishes from his newly purchased yacht at sea, much like his deceased wife.
The next three tales including “The Deep Fall” (in which a professional diver enlists Russian expats to help retrieve a sunken safe) and Taboo Island (a novella about whether or not Sasquatch exists)—are longer thrillers on how the sea can turn greed and hubris against those who ply its waves.
Writing with a reliably chilling smoothness, debut author Morris sometimes wears a love of Poe quite boldly (e.g., the “tap tap tap” of a bottle). As the stories progress, however, he more masterfully tinges them with hints of unreality, as when an octopus nibbles a corpse’s head as its “many tentacled arms wave continuously, sinuously, seductively, seem positively to beckon.” Morris also uses legends (Davy Jones’s locker) and anthropological insight (the body boats of Indian tribes) to shade his dark blue realms. And each story delivers a satisfying psychological impact, either up front or as a suitable denouement. A drowning man, for instance, is sure there’s “some intervening phenomenological stage between inundation and annihilation.”
The ambitious final tale about Sasquatch is the outlier, though it also proves the author’s restless intellect knows no bounds.
Crafty and classically subtle horror tales for all ages.
