Dead Water by C. A. Fletcher

Horror is so not my genre; at least I thought not until I read C.A. Fletcher’s Dead Water publishedby Redhook in 2022. I loved this book and here are a few reasons why.

THE SETTING

All I had to do was read the first paragraph of the novel’s front cover panel summary and I was sold.

On the edge of the North Atlantic lies a remote Scottish Isle. The residents are a mix of those born and bred on the land and newcomers seeking a slower, quieter way of life, away from the modern world. But all have their own secrets, some much darker than others.

I love mysteries that take place on islands, the more remote the better. And the windswept, weather-beaten one in Dead Water that is located off Oban’s west coast and accessible only by the Isle of Mull ferry, couldn’t be better suited to this genre or better described by the author. He chooses to let the reader see it through many perspectives, including the ravens that constantly keep watch over its events and inhabitants.

The ravens weave a daily fabric of vigilance and memory across the land as they fly criss-crossed patterns of an intricacy no one on the island has the patience to notice. It’s always been like this. The time they inhabit is different to the one humans live in. It’s not that it runs at a different pace, the passage of the years felt relative to a different lifespan; it’s that these birds float across the sky on a plane that intersects humans’ but is unnoticed by them.

The birds, on the other hand, notice everything. That is their purpose, both how and why they stay alive. They see, they remember and they understand. The island is a barrier island, bulwarked against the thunderous might of a northern ocean, and they are its sentinels. [p. 70]

The author uses the ravens not only to portray the island but also to foreshadow the malicious evil seeping onto it.

A birdwatcher might see the ravens on their throne and think they were seeing the same island that the ravens saw, but they don’t. It isn’t just that the birds’ eyes are sharper and see further, it’s that they are wired to a different array of senses. These ravens mark changes that would be entirely undetectable to an ordinary mammal or bird. Change, to long-lived birds like these ravens, is always to be noted, not just because a disturbance in the status quo might well be a harbinger of danger, but because that “balance” must be preserved in all things if at all possible. It’s as if the ravens have a sense of memory of how things should be and an active mind that allows them to react to things when they are off-kilter. How the ravens sense these changes isn’t directly explainable in human terms, but it’s analogous to the simpler sense of balance mammals achieve once they learn to walk. And if the world lurches, the ravens note it. And try to adjust.

Looking down at the roofs of the fish-farm sheds, they feel the change. They scan the landscape and the sea for a new shift in the pattern.

Because the pattern they are charged with observing has altered. [pp. 71, 72]

THE CHARACTERS

I don’t know who I liked best: Matt, Sig, Rex, Evie, Tom, or Kathleen. Or the relationships they have with each other. The author does a masterful job not only of creating distinct characters through their alternating points of view but revealing the deep bonds among them. We see Kathleen through her grandson’s eyes after he receives a call of warning from her.

He’s shaken. She has never sounded worried, his gran. Even when Grandad Donald was getting so hollowed out by the bloody Alz that he was little more than a shambling six-foot baby with a man-nappy—and all the attendant needs of feeding and cleaning up—she was tough as nails and didn’t shirk a bit of his care. Nor did she ever complain, though Matt could see it rubbing her down to a shadow and so did as much for her as she would allow him to do. Proud and solid as the rocks around her house, she is. Never worries. [p. 94]

VISUAL IMAGERY

C.A. Fletcher shapes visual scenes that will haunt your dreams. And not in a good way. But isn’t that what we want when we read horror?

The rabbit’s not moving anymore. And with no blur of movement to catch the eye she’s almost invisible, certainly unnoticeable as she lies on the scrape of sand at the water’s edge just around the headland from the fish farm, amongst the clumps of bladder-wrack left by the retreating tide. Her body lies stretched out on its left side, as if exhausted. But if she was just exhausted then her flanks would be heaving as she got her wind back, instead of lying stiff and unmoving on the sand.

Only a sharp pair of eyes would spot the body of the rabbit on this untraveled scrape of beach on the remote spur of land. The raven’s eyes are sharp and honed by a hunger that has still not been satisfied since its disappointment with the swimmer and the sharks earlier in the morning, but more than that it can see the rabbit is dragging a strand of darkness behind it, just like the dog was, weaving it into the fabric of the island like a tangled black thread.

It drops a wing and cuts a slow descending spiral through the empty vault of air above the wet sand. As it gets closer and closer its eyes remain locked on the frozen body, noting how the water lapping back and forth across its stiff legs does not trigger any reaction. The raven has never seen a rabbit lie in the water like this. [pp. 133, 134]

If you enjoy exceptionally well-written fiction steeped in horror, myth and fantasy, then this is definitely a book you will love.

Check Amazon for more on this book I love.