There's a lot here in common with the previous book from Run for It publishers, 'The Sea Hides Its Dead' by Megan Bontrager, which I reviewed last month. Both are stories that inherently feature the sea, are set off the coast of Maine and involve female lead characters facing a lot of secrets. I feel safe in mentioning those similarities, but there are a bunch of others that would lead me into spoiler territory, so I'll keep quiet about those. Bontrager's book has the edge on a hallucinatory and claustrophobic mood, as well as its more overt cosmic horror. They're probably tied on wicked cool setting. This one wins out on pretty much everything else.

The prose would be comfortable from the outset if Hannah Whitten wanted it to be, because her prose flows like we might expect from a 'New York Times' bestseller, even if that's for fantasy and this is her first dabble into horror. Instead, she wants it to feel quirky and off, as if something isn't right for reasons nobody can quite place. Some of it is understandable: Claire Sutherland loses all her comfort and routines as early as page three, after the death of her fiancé, Elias Ashbury; that would throw anyone off their game. However, so many little details creep in and accumulate until the foreshadowing almost becomes a character of its own.

The aneurism Elias died of looks uncannily like tentacles and the octopus-like creature he had in a huge tank at the house dies at the same time; the exotic fish guy who removes it can't identify its species. Both Claire and Elias had traumas in their childhoods but neither ever talked about them. We gradually learn more about both, Claire's tied to some sort of accident that caused issues and memory loss. After that, she's often followed by the same vehicle, which once knocked her down in a hit and run. A Zoltar machine tells her that "You will always go back to the ocean".

And she does when Elias's family invite her to a celebration of his life at Harrow Point, the family home. Elias was a hedge fund manager and they lived in a mansion, but here's when we begin to realise just how rich his family are. Audrey, his mother, sends a private jet to fly her to Portland. Harrow Point is a private island off the coast with buildings that look huge on the surface but also extend far below it within the rock. They're Ashbury Marinography, their money earned through submarines and deep-sea exploration.

In other words, they're ultra-rich but Audrey's silver credit card bounces. The glass of water Claire was given on the flight is saltwater. Chauffeur Alton's wrist is wrong. There's a weird goiter on the neck of a family servant. We have no idea yet what any of these things mean but they surely mean something and these details continue to add up until we're almost ready to put the book down to try and connect the dots. For a horror novel, it's built like a mystery and we're seriously engaged in trying to figure it out, perhaps because we know Claire's walking into danger and she's the only sympathetic character in the entire book. We're on her side from the outset and want her to live.

Because of this, I don't want to go too far into synopsis because it would be easy to spoil the treat that's coming. I should probably stop after Claire's given the standard tour of Harrow Point by an assembled family who clearly aren't entirely comfortable with each other. Discomfort extends to the oddly tiny rooms, given the immense scale of everything else. They're tiny enough to trigger Claire's claustrophobia, which Audrey politely dismisses with the ease of someone who always has the final say. The pride of the tour is their submarine and it's clear that they want Claire to spend time inside it, again ignoring her claustrophobia.

There's a lot coming and I didn't see through much of it. It was pretty obvious that Claire would be teaming up with one particular family member, not because they're the same but because they're totally different. I'm starting to recognise the enemies-to-lovers trope quicker every time I see it. It was obvious that this insanely rich family has secrets and the 'Ready or Not' vibes kicked in right from the moment Claire met them. Wealth disparity is a serious issue in the U.S. right now, which causes power disparity, and so an increasing amount of horror, whether in book or film, is focusing on what the ultra-rich can get away with.

It's a peculiarly American form of horror and it's very recent, perhaps because the poor in the U.S. don't think of themselves as poor but as temporarily not rich. The American Dream is mostly dead but it lives on in the minds of anyone who might benefit from it. British horror is much more about the working class and the horrors of poverty, loss and lack of control. It shouldn't surprise much to find American horror beginning to look at the upper class and the horrors they can wield through incredible riches. The more they have, the more they want and the easier they can get it, anyone in the way be damned.

This book is very aware of the mechanics of the horror genre, Claire at one point remembering an elective she took on gothic horror that talked about the difference between horror and terror. In this instance, she knows she's been going through terror thus far and hopes she doesn't shift into horror. The one spoiler I'll give is that she does. This builds wonderfully, milking terror for all it's worth, but there are moments of horror even early on, with Claire dreaming about her dead Elias and noticing that he's gradually rotting from one dream to the next. When eyeballs roll out, hang on cheeks and then pop, we're in horror not terror. That's fewer than fifty pages in and relatively isolated, but there's plenty of horror in the second half.

Almost everything I can say is positive. If I had to stretch to pull in a negative, I could suggest that the ending seems a little easy, but it works nonetheless. The absolute ending after that is better still. I liked this a lot, just as much for what it didn't do—but could easily have done—as for what it actually did. I haven't read Whitten's fantasy but I can see that she's done very well with a couple of series, 'Wilderwood' and 'The Nightshade Crown'. I may or may not seek those out, but I do look forward to her next horror novel. ~~ Hal C F Astell