Tides of Madness - Robert Cave Harriston
I received an advance review copy of this book for free from Book Sirens, and I am leaving this review voluntarily.
I really, really wanted to like this. The blurb sounded like it would be exactly the sort of thing for me, and I've been in a big novella phase recently, so this sounded perfect. Unfortunately this was a complete failure to launch that feels more like a first draft than anything else. Here's the blurb:
How far would you go to protect your village from an incomprehensible cosmic horror?
In the picturesque fishing village of Pedregalejo, Antonio Romero's simple life is shattered when he pulls a bizarre, unnatural creature from the Mediterranean depths. As strange occurrences plague the village and an charismatic newcomer gains influence over the locals, Antonio is drawn into an ancient mystery involving Phoenician ruins, a secret cult, and an awakening cosmic entity. Aided by a skeptical marine biologist and a priest guarding terrible secrets, Antonio must confront horrors beyond human comprehension to save his daughter and his home. But as the boundary between reality and cosmic nightmare blurs, Antonio realizes that the price of salvation may be his very sanity.
The Tides of Madness is a chilling cosmic horror novel for adult readers, blending Lovecraftian terrors with the sun-drenched atmosphere of the Spanish coast. It is the first book in the Terror Europae series of Cthulhu Mythos stories set in Europe.
This book has a lot of problems, and I'm not sure exactly where to begin with them. I dearly wish that I could sandwich my criticisms between the things I enjoyed about the novel, like good reviewers are supposed to, but I unfortunately was unable to find much of anything to like about it.
The story is told through the eyes of Antonio, a simple fisherman (something that he reminds us of time and time again), who becomes embroiled in an ancient mystery involving elder gods and a weird summoning ritual. He's involved because he pulls a horribly unnatural creature out of the sea in his fishing nets, but it's never clear why his involvement is ever allowed to go beyond that. Immediately after discovering said creature he straps on a SCUBA suit and accompanies a marine biologist on a dive deep into the ocean, but we're given no reason why she would invite him on her expedition - and it's made clear that he has no understanding of any of the science she's doing. He has no reason to be there other than for us to see it through his eyes. While all this is happening an archaeologist has arrived in the village to study the nearby Phoenecian ruins, Atonio has never met him or interacted with him, but as soon as he surfaces from his dive the archaeologist urgently summons him to the ruins to discuss an unsettling discovery. Why? We don't know.
The unexplained nature of Antonio's protagonism is merely a symptom of much larger issues, both with the quality of the writing itself and the structure of the book. This novel is deeply repetitive, but never about anything important. Every chapter treats us to sentences like "in that moment, I felt the weight of eons pressing down upon me, the vast uncaring universe opening its maw to swallow us whole". Antonio constantly feels like "the sea, my constant companion and livelihood, now seemed a vast, unknowable threat. Our little village of Pedregalejo, once a haven of simplicity and tradition, now felt like a fragile outpost on the edge of an abyss". Sometimes we get this sentiment repeated within just a few paragraphs of last hearing it. Every section ends in a big, ominous statement meant to make us dread what's coming - "as the sun beat down on us, a false promise of normalcy, whatever slumbered in those twisted caverns, whatever eldritch entity had nearly claimed us, was now aware of our presence. And it was stirring". It's so overwrought that it feels like a parody of itself, and it's so full-on all the time that although the author wants us to feel the significance of this thing, nothing feels important at all because it's all pitched at the same emotional tone and nothing is described in any real detail. Unfortunately, at some point in a cosmic horror novel you have to actually describe the indescribable horror, you can't just gesture at it and say "look how weird and scary this is".
The constant repetition of how deeply weird and scary everything is - and how Antonio is a simple fisherman - makes it seem like the author doesn't trust his readers to remember what's going on. And yet, in a cruel twist of irony, it's the author who doesn't appear to be able to follow his own narrative. Once we move past the first couple of chapters we start to run into some weird issues of continuity that absolutely scupper any chance the book has of redeeming itself, and if it were any longer than a 90 page novella I would have DNFd. Neither Antonio nor the other characters seem able to remember what they've experienced from scene to scene. A third of the way through the book Antonio tells us that "for the first time in my life, i found myself afraid of what might be lurking beneath the gentle lapping of the waves against our shore" - but he's been feeling this way since page 1, repeating it endlessly, and he's seen what's beneath the water and was driven out of his mind by it, so he's already afraid; when the archaeologist summons him to the ruins to tell him about a horrible discovery, immediately after Antonio has crawled out of the sea following an encounter with an eldritch tentacle monster, Antonio dismisses his concerns. "Whatever it is you've found up there," he says, "it can't be as bad as all that". Yet Antonio has spent the last 30 pages telling us how the world is about to end and that he's witnessed unspeakable eldritch horrors waking beneath the sea. Which is it?
Later, Antonio wakes from a nightmare to find Elena, the marine biologist, in his house trying to comfort him. Why is she in his house? We have no idea. Why, when he tells her about seeing the entity, does she act like she has no idea what he's talking about and tell him it was all a dream? Literally one scene earlier she had discovered an eldritch tome beneath the church written in a language nobody has ever seen but which she's able to immediately translate and which told her about an Entity older than time itself being summoned by a horrible ritual. The scene before that, she was on the bottom of the ocean floor being assaulted by shadow tentacles. But now, barely ten pages later, she has no memory of any of this and thinks Antonio must be simply dreaming. She has also apparently moved in with him.
It was at this point that I began to wonder if perhaps ChatGPT had a hand in the writing of this book. Looking back at the descriptions, they all talk in huge vagueries without ever really pinning down anything specific. There's lots of repetition of what's gone before, sometimes almost verbatim, and I was amused to discover that the words "cosmic horror" appear 39 times in the work, as though someone had prompted a large language model to write about cosmic horrors and it kept reusing the phrase to make sure you know it's on task. That's not to say that this was definitely written by ChatGPT, but it is to say that this is desperately in need of a second draft. Frankly, this should never have been published in this form.
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