Fiction Friday: A Dark And Endless Sea

“A Dark And Endless Sea” is a visual story that recalls the classic, offering a satisfying story without the gore of modern horror stories.

I’m a verifier for the Horror Writers Association (HWA), where I verify entries for the Bram Stoker Award. The award is presented to those entries the HWA considers the best yearly submissions compiled into a reading list for members to vote for the winner of each category.

A Dark and Endless Sea made the reading list in the novel category, and after I read it, I could not help but agree with the HWA’s decision.

The author is Blaine Daigle, who has also written A Dark Roux and The Broken Places, published by Wicked House Publishing. The story centers around Whitt Rogers, a man haunted by a voice he hears. The voice pulls him in a direction he must follow, but he has no idea where it’s leading him.

Whitt has only fragments of memories; he’s unsure of his and is scared to death to sleep because of the never-ending nightmares.

A drifter shuttling from one town to another but never remembering them, he continues to follow the one constant in his life: the voice. Held prisoner in a recurring nightmare, he jerks upright with a scream and locks his throat to find a note taped to the door.

Taped to the door of an abandoned building, Whitt found refuge in escaping from the ice and snow of the Alaskan town he had stumbled into. No one knew him, but he was holding a letter with his name printed in giant, bold black letters. No one knew him in this town because he never interacted with anyone. No one knew he was staying in this building, so how did this person know where to find him and who he was?

When Whitt tears open the envelope, he finds a note written apparently by ‘The Voice.’ It tells him that Whitt will find his answers if he takes a job on the fishing boat, Sonia.

So, the real story begins, which reads more like a murder mystery than a horror story.

Daigle leads the reader on with tantalizing clues that lead to more clues and no real answers. When you think you know how it will end, he throws another pointer in, and you have to rethink what you thought you knew.

Sonia is a fishing boat unlike any other, filled with a crew like Whitt. None of them remember their past, all of them suffer from nightmares, and none of them can sleep without help from the pot—a captain who has his agenda and could care less about the catch.

Someone or Something is pulling everyone’s strings and leading them all to a mythical place called “The Emerald Sea.”

This is a sailor’s tale about a place where monsters live, a place Sailors fear, and where the captain is taking them.

I struggled with the pace, but Daigle was stingy with his hints and dragged me along, kicking and screaming because I wanted to know how it ended. It is a very slow story, but enough descriptives and tantalizing hints pull you along to the end as you figure out what is happening.

Despite the story’s pace, A Dark and Endless Sea is a great story, and the end is worth waiting for.