The Night Ship by Alex Woodroe

Book Review

Stephen Frame

Reading The Night Ship calls to mind a number of other great SF horror tales: Stephen King’s The Mist, John Campbell’s Who Goes There?, John Wyndam’s Day of the Triffids, Jack Finney’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers. This is one of the story’s strengths – it manages to combine weird end of the world, existential horror with the creepy terror of not knowing who or what the person next to you really is.

At the outset, Rosi and Gigi are driving a timber truck through communist-era Romania. Though they are engaged, Gigi has no idea the truck is stuffed with contraband Rosi is smuggling. Rosi suspects Gigi may be an informant for the security services. They pick up a hitchhiker, Sorin. They hear strange warning messages on the radio. Then the world ends. Their truck is cast into pitch darkness. They appear to be floating. Everything is gone from around them. Then they start to hear garbled radio transmissions from people who seem to be in the same predicament. With nothing else in the way of options, they set out to find these others.

So, on one level, The Night Ship is a survival against the odds tale, with the heroes facing a world they are utterly unprepared for. Beneath that is Rosi’s journey within herself, as she is tested by this environment and discovers what kind of person she really is. Then the story throws in another twist. The event which cast them into the dark is not supernatural. Its source is all too human, and as Rosi, Gigi and Sorin search for the locations of the radio transmissions, they find the darkness is home to an entity seeking to cleanse it of contamination. The contamination in this case being the humans caught in it. In a gut-wrenching turn of events, the entity is revealed to be one of the staff from the lab where the catastrophe began. The person tasked with cleaning the lab of contamination. The entity learns to send its own radio messages to lure people in. Then it begins to make its own versions of those it captures and infiltrate them into groups of survivors.

I particularly enjoyed that the story steers clear of gore and body horror, instead sticking to paranoia and fear of the unknown to drive the chills. It’s an intense read, as you live out Rosi’s experience – her suspicions, her doubts about her companions and herself, her fears that she will fail those around her. Rosi is a great character, flawed in many ways, shining in others, leading you to turn the next page. The setting is the other great character in the story. It’s never adequately explained where or what the darkness is during Rosi’s journey through it, which leaves you wondering how she and her gang can possibly survive, so again, good page-turning stuff. The parallels between the darkness and the reality of communist Romania are obvious but not laboured in the narrative. If the story does have a weakness, it’s that some of the minor characters have clear ‘red shirt’ status and their not being particularly nice people with it. But, it is a horror story, so somebody has to fall prey. That aside, The Night Ship is an absorbing and  unsettling read, well-worth spending some time with.