Synopsis:
A woman who can’t remember her death.
On an eerily quiet island off the coast of Ireland, a woman with no memory claws her way out of her grave and back to life. But not everyone welcomes the return of Mara Fitch.
An island with a terrible secret.
Inishbannock. Where strange misshapen figures watch from the trees and the roads are covered in teeth. Where two brothers gamble for nothing, the doctor only treats the dead, and the pub owner speaks in riddles. Where a poet loses and finds his soul. And a husband without a wife claims to know everything about Mara.
A past that refuses to stay buried.
As Mara returns to her life on this upside-down island, her memories begin to leech their way back to the surface. The more she remembers, the more the village will do anything to stop her . . .
But the sea remembers it all.
Review:
Neil Sharpson’s “The Burial Tide,” is a novel that will sting your eyes, salt your wounds, and fill your lungs with dread. In this briny folk horror Sharpson explores patterns of abuse and writes about human monsters in tandem with the most unique creature feature of 2025. With a chorus of unreliable narrators, Barker-esque body horror, slick and sinewed, and oodles of atmosphere, Sharpson’s latest practically transports readers to the fictional island of Inishbannock- allows them to glimpse gray skies, hear the gulls, smell the brine and rot carried on the wind. Poetically bleak, commentary-packed, generally wicked, and in complete contrast to the impression I’ve given you so far, really quite funny, this one is out from Zando Projects September 9th, and I hope to see much more buzz about it before then.
We first meet Mara in the midst of a less than ideal, gothic faux pas- when she wakes up in her own coffin, having been buried alive. When it comes to how exactly she found herself there? Well, she doesn’t know. Suffering from some pretty severe amnesia, Mara, and the reader, have to rely wholly upon what she is told by those who live with her on the small island of Innishbannock, just off of Ireland. A pandemic apparently. Wiped out four. No, three. A small, and rather hostile community, you’d imagine reintegration to be hard enough for Mara, with no memories, and not native to the island anyway, but it’s near impossible. She has no recollection of her husband Cian, and in fact, finds him rather repulsive. The house they share is not one Mara can envisage herself ever feeling at home in. The pandemic that allegedly killed her has left no real trace beyond the four, no, three bodies. Despite all these absurdities, nobody who lives on the island shares these concerns- leaving Declan, a writer, on the island for a retreat, with an outsider’s perspective, as the only one able to confirm that something about Innishbannock and its people, is very, very wrong.
As I mentioned earlier, the creature feature in this novel is certainly unlike anything I’ve stumbled across before, visceral, uncanny, folkloric, entirely surprising. Some of the body horror passages are, in addition to being disturbing as hell, supernatural- and yet, in retrospect, “The Burial Tide,” is a novel far more concerned with human monsters. For one, human appetite- greed. The compulsion we seem to have to possess, exploit, cage and ruin. It’s hard to discuss without spoiling anything- so I won’t. Sharpson also examines small communities, Innishbannock being a place in which hostility toward those not born there is the norm, and people’s tolerance toward Declan, who is only visiting, runs out when he overstays his welcome, ergo, as soon as he arrived. This exclusionary culture feels almost inseparable from Sharpson’s commentary upon cult-like, powerful families- through which power, status, privileges and responsibilities are passed down, never up for grabs.
Sharpson’s writing is brand new to me, and, whilst I can’t tell you how it measures up to his previous works, I found it to be a mighty fine place in which to start. We didn’t so much shake hands as he grabbed mine and dragged me into the surf. Sharpson’s prose is an utter delight, brackish and beautiful, the gallows humour, not enough to alleviate, but much appreciated amidst, the disorienting and truly claustrophobic atmosphere he seems to so effortlessly foster. Celtic folklore meets psychological torture in Neil Sharpson’s “The Burial Tide,” which is beautiful and terrible and wholly impossible to look away from in equal measure.
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