A whale of a good time…
Synopsis
The whaling vessel Merciful has just made its strangest catch yet: a massive whale containing a still-living man secreted within its stomach lining. Sailor Isaiah Chase is tasked with keeping the enigmatic man alive.
As their relationship grows, a series of accidents, injuries and deaths quickly befall the ship and its crew. Isaiah is plagued by strangely prophetic dreams, even as the crew continues their endless quest for whale oil under the command of an increasingly unhinged captain.
As events spiral further out of control, the mysterious man confesses what Isaiah has begun to suspect: the crew of The Merciful has fallen into a cycle of punishment for their greed and destruction. Isaiah must confront the sea’s vengeance made flesh, and choose between this new, strange love and the fate of the ship itself.
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Review
From the Belly is, on its face, a tale of ocean horror on a whaling ship, but, as befits stories from indie horror maestros Tenebrous Press, this is a beautifully weird tale: a bizarrely compelling romance fused with a deeply disturbing tale of deep sea vengeance and aquatic body horror. It’s as nail-bitingly tense as it is half submerged in dreams.
The tale takes place entirely on a whaling vessel, crewed with sailors desperate to write off their debts to the whaling company by killing as many whales as possible and captained by the marvellously named Captain Coffin, who we quickly learn is not the most cheerful of captains and thoroughly deserves the nominative determinism of his surname. When the crew find a man, somehow still alive, in the belly of one of their whale catches, strange things start to befall the ship, even though the new crewmember is safely locked in the brig. Crewmate Isiah, who has a great deal of strangeness about him himself, begins to regularly visit this strange new guest while the situation on the ship gets worse and worse.
Some of the most striking scenes of this novel are these compelling face-offs between Isiah and the mystery man, at once loaded with danger yet also increasingly melded with a strange kind of connection. The more this connection is explored, the more compelling their bond grows, and the more must-read these scenes become. I was entranced by the strange discordant tone between their growing care for each other and the increasingly nauseating events happening to the other crew members.
As the events on the ship grow more serious in danger, we are plunged into a desperately tense situation, with lashings of aquatic horror, creeping horror, dream-like horror and ultimately a great deal of body horror; a nightmarish concoction which bubbles away for a long time but ultimately rewards the patient reader with a feverish dream of ocean hell. The sense of vengeance hangs over this tale, but there is deep humanity here too, and the question of how deserving the ship’s crew are of the ending seemingly coming their way.
Aside from the brilliantly compelling relationship between possible villain and protagonist, I was entranced by the sense of inevitability and tragedy laced into this story. Nahil conveys this with a combination of dreamlike prose and utterly horrific imagery.
Overall, this a strong entry from the eclectic and gleefully bizarre Tenebrous stable: a story of tentative passion fused with ancient vengeance. This will get inside your head. Let it.
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