Black Tide
Ratings4
Average rating4.3
It was just another day at the beach. And then the world ended.
Mike and Beth didn’t know each other existed before the night of the meteor shower. A melancholy film producer and a house sitter barely scraping by, chance made them neighbors, a bottle of champagne brought them together, and a shared need for human connection sparked something more.
After a drunken and desperate one-night-stand, the two strangers awake to discover a surprise astronomical event has left widespread destruction in its wake. But the cosmic lightshow was only a part of something much bigger, and far more terrifying. When a set of lost car keys leaves them stranded on an empty stretch of Oregon coast, when their emergency calls go unanswered and inhuman screams echo from the dunes, when the rising tide reaches for the car and unspeakable horrors close in around them, these two self-destructive souls must find in each other the strength to overcome past pain and the fight to survive a nightmare of apocalyptic scale.
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Black Tide brings together a “human car wreck” and a depressed movie producer at the end of the world to save each other from themselves and some new inhabitants to Earth. This is a small-scale, focussed sci-fi horror that plays out primarily on a distant beach in the Pacific Northwest as our two misfits get trapped by lost keys and terrible maws full of razorblade teeth.
In some ways, Black Tide gives off 80's action vibes (think Alien, or Predator), and it's quite self aware - no sooner had the comparison with Alien popped into my head than one of our main characters name dropped Ellen Ripley. The book nods to the movie world in a few other places, which should be expected with a producer among our very small cast and feels like Jones writing what he knows for his first novel (he graduated with a degree in Film Production, afterall). As such it makes Black Tide feel cinematic and something I could certainly imagine getting optioned for a feature film.
My one tip to new readers would be not to be put off by the prologue; I found it a little bit navel-gazey and relied a lot on telling rather than showing. After the slightly painful meeting of our two MCs in the first couple of chapters, things pick up exponentially.
This isn't exactly your typical alien invasion story and it shines for it, adding a bit of cleverness into the mix that you don't always see in horror. There's plenty of tight, tense scenes; uneasy moments, and; injuries a-plenty, all mixed up with human resilience, fortitude and badassery.
