An apocalyptic world turned into a pitch-black sea of nothingness, but smuggler Rosi and her crew of survivors aren’t alone. Something hungry lurks below…
Driving a logging truck though 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.
Dark bleatings, my lovelies! This brand new scifi/horror novel is out *checks notes* tomorrow, I believe, so here I am just in time to tell you a little bit about it before it officially hits the shelves.
Upfront, I need to tell you that I felt like I was floating in a sea of disorientation, which is appropriate because it mirrors what the characters are going through. Our protagonist, Rosi, and a small group are just plodding along, as you do, when their world suddenly upends and the next thing they know, they’re sort of driving their truck through nothingness. All sense of time and space seems to disappear and they’re floating through a nothingness abyss, but with some control still over direction. This happens almost immediately as the inciting incident, and it opened up many questions.
Questions like…
What in the bejeesus is happening?! Is this just some local crazy anomaly, or is this a worldwide apocalypse situation? Are they delusional? Is Rosi imagining all of this? Where has everything familiar actually gone, will it come back, and if it does, how and when and will things ever be the same again? Why is this happening, whatever it is? And what’s lurking beneath them in this floaty abyss? Something is, and do we even want to know? Is anyone else alive out there and if not, how come this group is? Or are they? Is this Hell?
That is a lot of questions to open a book with, and I was verily intrigued. The downside of this adventure for me is more to do with my own reading tastes and less to do with the execution, as I have no complaints towards how the author wrote this. I loved the concept of everything just kind of disappearing and the group floating around in some unknown paradox (how anxiety-inducing and interesting!), but I really had problems picturing it and had to really focus on trying to conjure these images, rather than having them just come to me as I was reading. This isn’t what I’d call any sort of failure on the author’s part, it’s totally a me problem. I tend to avoid speculative fiction of any genre for this reason. If it’s the real world but with weirdness, I’m good, but if it’s something unimaginable to me, as this concept apparently is, I struggle. This did take me out of the story quite a bit because if I relaxed, I’d lose the image, and would have to focus quite hard to get it back.
However, as I said, the concept is crazy interesting, and I really liked the author’s writing style. The premise alone was fascinating and intriguing enough, but then we realise that actually, there might be other people still out there, and also, oh no, there seems to be something we can’t see lurking in this nothingness, aware that we’re here. I was constantly pleasantly surprised by how the ante was being upped.
Another aspect of this that I loved was the removal of technology, as well as the removal of most other familiar mechanics. The only communication method between our group and anyone else comes in the form of the radio, which I thought was a refreshing reminder of what once was, and what could be again, should more modern technology vanish for whatever reason. The sense of isolation was palpable on several levels, which elevated the horror.
I think that if you’re a fan of scifi horror fiction, especially without my speculative fiction hang ups, you might love this. It’s stressful, dark, unique, and a mysterious. Multiple levels of horror!
If you’d like to check out the book or the author, I’ve popped some links below for you:
Bleeeeat!
Happy Goat Horror 
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