DEAD WATER - C.A. Fletcher

4 stars

I really, really enjoyed this one. Bit of an abrupt ending, but honestly that can be mostly forgiven because of the excellent creeping tension.

I've had Dead Water on my radar for quite some time. When it came out, I saw quite a few mutuals online who hyped it up—the title, the cover, the description—and I was so excited. It sounded gothic adjacent, paranormal in a way I always love, and just plain atmospheric.

But then the reviews trickled in, and I let them sway me. (Don't let them do that! Learn from me, another random reviewer trying to sway you! Lol.) People said this was boring, too long, not exciting, not horror enough, not interesting enough, not "enough" enough.

I'm kind of at the point in my reading lifecycle where those kinds of negative reviews are almost like a siren call to me now. Usually, in my experience this means that a genre purist has found a book to be multi/hybrid genre and boyyy do they not like that. As a multi-genre person myself, I usually go OOooooo, alright, it's time for me.

Dead Water is one of those multi-genre feeling stories. A little bit literary, a little bit gothic, a little bit horror, a little bit small-town isolated community diary, and a little bit fable.

If you like book journeys where the point of the thing is to get a bone-deep sense of an entire community, this is the novel for you. The multiple POVs, the unflinching depictions of a large handful of flawed characters, their issues and wants and hates convalescing into one tangle with the backdrop of a creeping horror.... Yeah. That's the stuff. This literary-dominant atmospheric neo-Gothic northern island story is delicious if you're in it for the unfolding experience.