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.
Review:
Isaiah is different from the other sailors on the whaling vessel Merciful. Like his father, he sees cloudy visions of the future. And after what happened to his father, he knows enough not to reveal this important secret to anyone, especially to the sailors, who appear to be the most superstitious bunch ever created.
When a man’s body is pulled from the belly of a whale, and when that man revives and speaks, it’s enough to spook everyone. In fact, the man is locked below decks in the unspoken hope that he will hurry up and die, ridding the ship of this unnatural harbinger.
And that’s when Isaiah’s dreams begin.
That’s also when things start to go strange aboard the Merciful. A miraculous catch of fish arrives right on deck, which highlights the drunken captain’s true priorities, and then things start to go bad. Very bad.
From the Belly manages the trick of submerging the narrative in a constant sense of building dread. It’s not exactly a slow burn, as the plot and the horror begin almost immediately, but it is a steady descent into terror.
Most notably, the novel provides some of the most unique, and uniquely horrifying examples of body horror I’ve seen in some time, with crew members afflicted with cancerous growths of what turn out to be barnacles and oyster shells, growing beneath their skin, rupturing, and then falling away.
You see, the sea wants its revenge.
Against what?
This is the aspect of the book I was most pleased with, honestly, as the whole story plays out like a particularly somber EC horror tale in which the guilty are punished by supernatural forces, but the guilt is less some individual foible or crime. The guilt stems from the capitalist drive for greed and profit over everything, over nature itself. This theme permeates every page, with characters terrified of what appears to be a spreading sickness while simultaneously locked into place by a system of debt that makes them slaves in everything but name.
Everyone in a position of power, from the captain to the surgeon, see the world only in terms of profits and losses, with a windfall of food seen as disposable, taking up space reserved for whale oil, and the advent of a new and terrifying disease seen as a possible biological weapon.
Human life has little value in the world of From the Belly, and animal life has none beyond what can be readily transformed into profits for the company. Think Moby Dick meets Aliens.
But unlike either of those narratives, there is no singular guilty party, no Ahab, no Weyland Corporation, no god damned Paul Reiser. Instead, the whole system is judged guilty, and the sentence is ugly.
There’s also some mild romance, but I hesitate to even call it that, fraught as it is with witchery and desperation. And in the end, even love, of that’s what it is, can’t save Isaiah from the sea’s torments.
A surreal, dread-inducing tale that delivers chills from first to last. Strongly recommended reading.
From the Belly releases May 30th, 2024
Leave a Reply