Synopsis:
Death comes to those who live.
The Longing is here: a ruthless psychological pandemic that only ever ends one way. Most find relief in a bullet or a blade. Kaya Sinh chose fire.
With Kaya gone, her friend Adam has only the support group they’d attended to keep him going. He’s at his lowest when a priest named Hayle Carnoth appears at group one night, claiming to have discovered a cure for the Longing. Thinking it a crude effort by the priest to seek members for his dwindling congregation, Adam drives him off.
But he keeps coming back.
With the Longing closing in, Adam agrees to let Father Carnoth share what he’s discovered. They visit a nearby cathedral, where something has appeared inside the steeple.
Review:
Each year I stumble across a small, unruly handful of books that shatter my tidy, pre-conceived beliefs about “what a novel can do” – is allowed to do even. “Daytide,” by Chris Panatier is one of those books. It refuses easy comparison, and laughs in the face of eloquent description- and frankly the best I could muster at first was a slack-jawed but chest-deep “Fuck yeah.” If you’d like something a shade more nuanced- although I feel that sums it up pretty well- I shall do my utmost to provide.
Full of gorgeous writing, wicked priests and enough turpentine to make your head spin and sinuses clear, “Daytide,” is a wild, furious, tender, hopeful thing- really bloody sad but also hilarious- by the lantern’s light it was a good time. A roaring novel with the most visceral imagery and drunken, bad-ass angels, “Daytide,” is a story that requires readers to forget genre, whatever your definition of horror or fantasy or sci-fi is, and baptise yourself in the stinging, turp-soaked, existential delirium that Panatier has so beautifully crafted- just feel. “Daytide,” is the first novel out from Rapture Publishing, it’s on shelves February 26th 2026 and is an unclassifiable triumph.
Jesus, where to start? Adam I suppose. Adam has an unfortunate affliction, a disease (do you call it?) that tends to end in only one way- “The Longing.” The consensus is that giving in to it eventually is an inevitability, and yet he continues to attend meetings, hoping to out-stare his own fate. It’s in one of those meetings that we meet Father Carnoth, and he rocks up with a cure. That is but a fraction of one story in one realm. I have for the sake of brevity and preserving the sacred spoiler-free integrity of the madness that ensues, omitted the mysterious, sentient smoke, the turpentine-drinking angels and the mechanics of just how all this collides.
Having read Panatier at his heaviest- asylums and automatism all wrapped up in the gothic, but also a novella about “portal-potties,” it might be fair to say the only constant in Chris’s books, next to quality writing, is sublime character work. I felt that intensely about Morgan Bright, a complex beast indeed, I felt that more intensely with Sunday McWhorter, who, far less complexly, is unwaveringly decent, and with “Daytide,” I feel it even more keenly still. Adam’s battle with his own fate is a truly compelling one, perhaps a relatable one- the rippling hope and defeat, the steps forward and backward. Hadriel, one of those drunken angels I keep fleetingly mentioning, is a charming and hilarious and utterly no-nonsense Bowie-loving menace who truly launched herself at my affections. Even the villain is one who made the pages hotter in my hand and I loved to hate. “Daytide,” is a novel full of personality and personalities, and as bizarre as it might sound, time dilates, breaths shorten, chapters pass and those 600 pages slip through your fingers in a very “King Sorrow,” like way.
It’s a wonder. It’s a bruiser. It’s a hymn sung through cracked teeth and a laugh caught on the edge of a sob. It’s a holy riot of a book that left me dazed, delighted, a little singed around the edges, but in awe still. It’s a sermon that knocks you breathless and drops you back into your mortal body with your pockets full of stardust. After glimpsing it, with its turpothecaries and tithes and fights to the death, I’ll be finding Daytide confetti in metaphorical crevices for months. Weird analogy and incoherent summary delivered, I suppose all that’s left to say is bravo.
Leave a Reply