Here's something interesting from C. J. Cooke, who's new to me but who's built a reputation with bestsellers like 'The Boy Who Could See Demons', 'The Lighthouse Witches' and 'The Nesting.' This is her seventh novel and it's a mature psychological thriller rooted in history and folklore but with a gothic flavour too. It's a bleak read, but it never bogs down and it builds to a serious twist that I only partly saw coming.

The core elements lead to obvious comparisons to other authors I've been reading lately, but in a fascinating combination. Given that all three of the names I'm about to mention are favourites of mine right now, I should clearly be on the lookout for earlier C. J. Cooke novels and I firmly expect that I'll be comparing other books to her soon.

Half the book is told in the past tense on a Scottish whaler called the Ormen. These are chapters that recount the story of Nicky Duthie, daughter of George Abney, whose company used to own a quartet of ships but is now down to this one, because it's about to go out of business. She's young but married, her husband Allan away fighting in the Boer War. She's attacked in a park and wakes up on board the Ormen, which is now a day out from Dundee with no intention of returning until the season is done. Cooke has a marvellous sense of time and place and quickly reminded me of the work of Alma Katsu, author of the similarly cold 'The Hunger' and 'The Fervor'.

However, the other half is told in the present tense over a century later but on the same ship. It's now a wreck, stuck on a remote coast of Iceland next to an abandoned town called Skúmaskot and its days are numbered, because the authorities are going to haul it out to sea and scupper it as a hazard. In the month before that happens, Dominique is keen to explore it and document it for a social media audience, because she's an urban explorer. Initially, these are two entirely separate stories with an obvious connection in the Ormen, but it becomes clear that they're also linked in other ways and the smaller stories eventually combine into one bigger one, in a similar way to the gothics of Jaime Jo Wright, like 'The Vanishing at Castle Moreau', which also has a feminist angle.

The last touch comes with the hugely impactful twist that arrives when those two stories merge at last. I'm not remotely going to spoil that, except to say that I asked a lot of questions as I read this book and some of them were pretty close to where Cooke goes but most were a long way off. The comparison here is to Catriona Ward, because her novels like 'Little Eve' and 'The Last House on Needless Street' are puzzles for us to solve, set by unreliable narrators who the author sets up for us to figure out in a host of details that we might not acknowledge as we read.

I'm being very careful about what I say here because it would be easy to spoil this book and I have no intention of doing so. Clearly, Nicky was targetted and there's a reason for her to find herself on the Ormen. It's a tough reason that's hinted at strongly on the back cover blurb of my Berkley trade paperback edition and I've hinted a little more at it with my mention of a feminist angle. It has to be said that 1901 was not a great time for women's rights and some readers will complain about the lack of trigger warnings, but Nicky and Dom are very deliberately set up as contrasts. After all, Dom is travelling on her own in the wilds of Iceland, not remotely something that a lady could get away a century earlier.

I should mention that it's not just about Nicky and Dom, though they are the central characters in the vast majority of the book. A negative aspect I'll call out isn't that they dominate but that they almost dominate, because Cooke shifts perspective away on a couple of occasions that seem a bit awkward for being so isolated. There's a chapter told by Olav, a resident of Skúmaskot in 1902, and one by Diego, near Svalbard in 1979 at a point when the Ormen is still afloat but has been refitted from a whaler to a research vessel. I get why these chapters are there and why they had to be told from their perspectives but they still feel rather jarring shoehorned in between so many chapters told by the two central women.

However, there are supporting characters that fit much better. There's a crew on the Ormen who are hunting whales in 1901, each of whom plays some sort of part in Nicky's story. One thing that I'll praise Cooke for her is that they could all have been of a kind, which would have rendered the historic scenes even bleaker than they already are, but she resists that. There are levels to what happens and that has plenty of meaning. There are also other characters in 2023 Iceland, with a trio of other explorers joining Dom on the Ormen: Jens, Leo and Samara, who clearly have more of a part to play than is initially obvious.

There's also a layer of the supernatural here that we wonder about constantly. The reason Nicky finds herself at sea on the Ormen ties to folklore and an interesting take on a Scottish legend I'm aware of in a slightly different form. Seanan McGuire has covered it in her 'October Daye' books. Dom, on the other hand, is seeing things. She dreams of horses, mermaids and people who lived in Skúmaskot before it was abandoned. Clearly there's something going on here but we're tasked with figuring out what before Cooke lets us in on her grand twist.

I do have some questions about that twist. I'm not convinced everything quite works, but it's fair to say that, even if it doesn't, Cooke's writing and plotting builds this to a hugely impactful finalé. Both the twist and much of what comes before it are not going to be easily forgotten, just like in Catriona Ward's novels. Even when we forget the details, we'll remember certain things clearly and they're not going to dim with time. That's due to powerful writing indeed. "She's on board", indeed. ~~ Hal C F Astell

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