Customer Reviews

Dead in the Water

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

From its famous opening line to its unsettling conclusion this surreal horror tale will hold you spellbound. It is the tale of shipwreck survivors being "rescued" by what turns out to be ghost ship of The Flying Dutchman type. Author Nancy Holder keeps the reader locked inside a fever dream that refuses to end at the novels finish. Highly original and deserving of its Bram Stoker award.

Most of my fellow reviewers are exactly correct. This book starts with a crusher of an opening sequence and only gets better as the plot develops. Seemingly 'stock' characters are introduced, but fortunately Nancy veers away from all tired cliches, heading off into a horrible, surreal nightmare. Easily one of my favorite horror novels, even now, 5-6 years after first reading it. Holder covers the gruesome and, yes, touching aspects of her novel with equal skill and aplomb. Readers should be advised to seek out Holder's short fiction as well - she appears in countless horror anthologies and I've yet to find a clunker. Why we haven't seen a new, 'original' horror work from her (aside from her myriad 'Buffy' novelizations and collaborations) continues to escape me. She also wrote a good SF trilogy ("Gambler's Star") that is worth checking out as well.

This is simply one of the best, most disturbing horror novels I have read for some time. I have a habit of judging novels by their opening pages and this book opens with a tour de force which draws the reader him/herself into the nightmare of drowning. I think it is fair to say that the rest of the book is even more disturbing and the ending still haunts me ... a must-read for horror fan

The prologue remains one of the most disturbing things I have ever read. From that point on, the story only goes up in terms of pure horror and violence. The book continues to haunt me 2 years after I first read it. It's passages have a haunting poetry to them, and the overall effect is that of living through a particularly horrible nightmare. In the right hands, it could make one of the most horrifying and visually arresting films ever created.

A group of unhappy people go on a budget cruise on a rundown freighter. An accident while they are overtaken by a fog bank causes them to have to abandon ship, whereupon they discover the nightmare has just begun.
The book had a couple of creepy moments, but mostly it just annoyed me. I can't really even put my finger on why, other than the fact that I found it to be rather cliched and predictable. It didn't outright insult my intelligence, but it did talk down to me a few times. It wasn't a bad read, but I can't honestly recommend it either.

I read this book over the course of two days - I couldn't put it down. Although, as another reader mentioned in an earlier review, there were some stock characters, they, and the story itself veered off in directions I never anticipated. It was a confusing, haunting book that still left me wondering days later. I wouldn't classify this book as true horror - it really wasn't that scary - I would consider it more of a horror "mystery".

Okay, I wanted to like this novel . . . I really did. I managed to get through 120 pages, and at that point I read the professional reviews for it and found out that everyone drowns in the end - I got to the point where the "sea monster" had more or less attacked it's first victims mind, and I said "Enough, already!"
I liked Donna and wanted to hang with it until I found out what happened to her, but I just couldn't. I'm not into sea monsters, sorry. And if everyone drowns, why bother . . . someone should be able to escape . . .

1-liner plot: Evil Sea Monster (entity, rather), possibly Poseidon's feral form, seeks to take souls!!!
(a weak extension of the mythos in her more deserving Stoker Award - "I Hear the Mermaids Singing")

Plot Summary (Sans Spoilers):
Donna, a female cop, goes on a reduced-priced ship to take a vacation to Hawaii. The cheap ship is a converted Vietnam warship made into a passenger/cargo carrier. Two Southern couples are also in for the savings (although their prickly arrogance reeks of wealth). An old woman named Ruth (who reminds me of the grandmother story teller from the 1998 movie Titanic) is also traveling to visit her fortune teller(?) in Hawaii, who claims to have seen apparitions of her late husband. A cancer-researcher doctorate divorced father and his cancer-ridden 7-year-old son are also in this.

Use your imagination. Imagine the whole bunch shipwrecked. Oh, I forgot to mention the crew...

Immediately, odd things start happening on the ship. Not to mention, there's a crazy sailor from 'Nam on board as the cook. The man claims he talks to the King of the Sea. Cancer son likes him because he's weird and into yucky stuff little boys tend to take delight in.

And then, Ruth starts seeing/feeling her husband haunting her room. A dampness fills up her room...

One night, the ship is... shipwrecked! (How? Why?)

Chaos, as they run for lifeboats, but the passengers get to safely board the rafts. After a few weeks, believe it or not, a large 5-star HMS cruise ship finds them.

Eventually, the reader is informed that the cheap ship was carrying some illegal cargo rumored to have nukes in them. (This doesn't really get resolved... I think Nancy forgot about this. Or, is this mysterious cargo the bottle?)

The HMS cruise ship turns out to be other than expected. Again, it conjured up images of Titanic..

OK, that's about enough of a plot summary -- I've left out a lot of the weird out-of-the-blue stuff that just "appear" suddenly and totally unexpected. (Sometimes, it's delightful... but, mostly, it just irks, and you get pissed someone managed to publish a random-writ first draft!)

My Comments:
It started out reading like a first draft ('fraid to admit), but things got better near the end. Felt a bit like this was a newbie writer getting "broken into" her first novel. I associated with Donna's character, her brashness, independence, and her earthly ties to her career (such that the evil soul-taking Captain had difficulty getting to her). The novel was something of a pain to read, the prose needing *much* editing. However, my obsession with finding out what happened to Donna helped me finish the novel. Yet, the ambiguity in the ending was... drab, done a million times by other stories in this genre.

Nevertheless, the eccentricities of some of the characters really got to me -- such as Elise's husband's tendency to shave, thoroughly clean/wash himself before he has sex (or silently requests to) with Elise. Elise's saying that certain things are just too proletariet. Again, Donna's nature...

I was misled by Stephen King's praise for *the Pinnacle Horror Series,* (stories by a bunch of authors in the genre), which, I don't believe was given, explicitly, to this novel itself.

And... having skimmed through The Marshall Plan for Novel Writing............ well, I guess Nancy's book might be a good example of what a novel based on the Marshall Plan's dispersed through the book might look like. (which goes on to say how helpful the Marshall Plan is...)

Overall, be prepared for a rough cruise (prose-wise and plot-wise) as you read this. (If you read this.)

Note: I believe her short stories were a lot more deserving of the Stoker Award... I especially liked Lady Madonna.

Written in 1994 and the winner of the Bram Stoker Award, it is significant that this book has had only 2 reviews, both with 5 stars. Nobody else bothers to waste their time reading it. I love a good horror novel, but this beats anything I have ever plowed my way through. The pickings must have been slim, indeed, for it to have won the award. Someone, (if anyone in the world bothers to click onto this one) please tell me how the Bram Stoker awards are chosen. I am not stupid and I have a rather good imagination but throughout the majority of this thing, I could not tell what was real and what wasn't. Maybe the author would email me and tell me. HaHa.