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A review by billymac1962
Dead Sea by Tim Curran
5.0
I've read a ton of horror novels and I've seen it all: I've seen ideas hashed and rehashed by masters and hacks.
Dead Sea did something that only a few have succeeded in doing.
It scared the crap out of me.
I love the sea. Every year we vacation to someplace warm where I can be close to it, where I can simply gaze at it, swim in it, or take a diving excursion. This year may be different, because each time I venture into its warm embrace, I don't think a second will pass that I don't think of the terror I experienced reading Dead Sea.
This is a novel of the Bermuda Triangle, or Devil's Triangle, if you will.
Curran comes up with a spectacular tour-de-force here. Not only can he horrify the reader, but the story and his ideas make this a very satisfying novel. Much has been said of this book needing an editor, and I can certainly get that. But even though there is a definite over-descriptiveness happening here, I can't get many of his descriptions out of my head.
They say that the Inuit have forty words for snow. I think Curran could easily top that. He digs into his extensive vocabulary to describe the fog, derelict ships, horrors, in so many creative ways, that on one hand, it gets to the point of, “Okay, I get it already.” But on the other hand, many of these descriptions approach brilliance, and having finished the novel, I can't imagine cutting any of them.
I do have a bone to pick, though.When I looked this book up on Goodreads, it said the page count was around 330 pages. I feel duped, because I was expecting a short read (which I wanted), and what I got was a 570 page (I just switched editions for this review so I'm not ripped off of my yearly pages read total...like that matters, but hey.) marathon though the dead sea. And these are dense pages! It got to the point where I was fixated on my Kindle's progress bar as I'd be clicking page after page (I counted: 27 times Yes, this means poor Bill is fixated) to move one percent.
Eventually I got wise and placed a thin strip of duct tape across the bottom so I wouldn't know. Huge difference!
This allowed me to fully absorb myself in this, and boy, did I.
The duct tape is there to stay, by the way.
Okay, rambling aside, I highly recommend this novel to everyone who fancies themselves horror or even sci-fi aficionados. This is easily a five star read, and holy crap, would this make a kick-ass movie. Scariest read in years. Well done, Mr Curran.
Dead Sea did something that only a few have succeeded in doing.
It scared the crap out of me.
I love the sea. Every year we vacation to someplace warm where I can be close to it, where I can simply gaze at it, swim in it, or take a diving excursion. This year may be different, because each time I venture into its warm embrace, I don't think a second will pass that I don't think of the terror I experienced reading Dead Sea.
This is a novel of the Bermuda Triangle, or Devil's Triangle, if you will.
Curran comes up with a spectacular tour-de-force here. Not only can he horrify the reader, but the story and his ideas make this a very satisfying novel. Much has been said of this book needing an editor, and I can certainly get that. But even though there is a definite over-descriptiveness happening here, I can't get many of his descriptions out of my head.
They say that the Inuit have forty words for snow. I think Curran could easily top that. He digs into his extensive vocabulary to describe the fog, derelict ships, horrors, in so many creative ways, that on one hand, it gets to the point of, “Okay, I get it already.” But on the other hand, many of these descriptions approach brilliance, and having finished the novel, I can't imagine cutting any of them.
I do have a bone to pick, though.When I looked this book up on Goodreads, it said the page count was around 330 pages. I feel duped, because I was expecting a short read (which I wanted), and what I got was a 570 page (I just switched editions for this review so I'm not ripped off of my yearly pages read total...like that matters, but hey.) marathon though the dead sea. And these are dense pages! It got to the point where I was fixated on my Kindle's progress bar as I'd be clicking page after page (I counted: 27 times Yes, this means poor Bill is fixated) to move one percent.
Eventually I got wise and placed a thin strip of duct tape across the bottom so I wouldn't know. Huge difference!
This allowed me to fully absorb myself in this, and boy, did I.
The duct tape is there to stay, by the way.
Okay, rambling aside, I highly recommend this novel to everyone who fancies themselves horror or even sci-fi aficionados. This is easily a five star read, and holy crap, would this make a kick-ass movie. Scariest read in years. Well done, Mr Curran.