Review: The Night Ship, by Alex Woodroe

SYNOPSIS

Driving a logging truck through the Romanian mountains, smuggler Rosi and her crew come across a radio signal that hints at impending doom. As the world goes completely dark, their truck becomes a vessel sailing across a sea of nothingness.

But they’re not alone: transmissions trickle in through the radio from similar isolated islands across the country, from amateur radio hobbyists and police cars and customs facilities. Attempting to rescue survivors and find a way out, the group save more lives, but soon discover that something hungry lurks below, and it’s sending up agents – and transmissions – of its own.

Comparison Titles: Pontypool Changes Everything by Tony Burgess, The Boats of the Glen Carrig by William Hope Hodgson, Void 1680 AM by Ken Lowery, The Vast of Night (2019 film directed by Andrew Patterson)

My Review

Thanks to Anne for organising this tour and to the team at Flame Tree for sending me a copy of this novel

Set in Romania in 1987, this novel follows Rosi and her companions as they travel through a mysterious darkness that has fallen over the land. The thick darkness grows like vines and takes over humans, pulling them down into the darkness. With flashbacks to Rosi’s childhood as she learns to inform, just like her parents, and then become a smuggler. She’s travelling with her fiancé Gigi, although she really doesn’t want to marry him, and a philosophy student hitchhiking to a conference.

But they all have their secrets and when they fall in with another group, it gets more stressful. When the vines attack, they rescue a few people on their truck and head back out into the darkness, never stopping.

Navigating by the signals they receive on their radio, they head to a border, but not before losing almost everyone they rescued.

The claustrophobic atmosphere of not only Ceausescu-era Romania but the close confines of the truck’s cab as they journey in the dark is permeates this novel. The guilt and fear of surviving through any means darkens Rosi’s thoughts, and the others show it in their actions as they struggle to live just a bit longer.

It’s a narrative of heartfelt longing, and survival in a dark place. The allegory is obvious, but the story itself is also just perfect – tension, fear, mystery, all bundled up on the back of a flatbed truck.

For a while I couldn’t work out where the novel was taking me, a road novel without a destination, and then we get Catalina’s chapters and it started to make sense. I’m not going to spoil it, but the epilogue does a good job of making sense of things if the reader hasn’t picked up the significance of Catalina and the thing in the lab. The ending was just so sweet and perfect.

Loved it. This is my kind of horror.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Alex Woodroe is a Romanian writer of dark speculative fiction and Shirley Jackson Award-nominated editor-in-chief of Tenebrous Press. She’s the author of Whisperwood, as well as several short horror, fantasy, and science-fiction stories and non-fiction articles published in venues like Nightmare Magazine, Horror Library, the Nosleep podcast, and more.
She lives in the heart of the Transylvanian region of Romania, and lets her country’s culture and unique natural landscapes influence her work. She’s been a translator, a beermaid, a teacher, a copywriter, and a dog trainer, but ultimately realized she wouldn’t be happy until she terrified people for a living.

alexwoodroe.com / X: @alexwoodroe / Instagram: @alexwoodroe