What do You think about The Night Boat (1988)?
The Night Boat was Robert R. McCammon’s third published novel, first appearing in 1980. Now Subterranean Press has brought it back as a (sold out) limited edition, and also made it available in e-book format for the first time. It betrays some of the faults of a then-new writer, but also has considerable power in its portrayal of Nazi submariners, as terrifying 35 years after the end of World War II as they were in the days when they lurked in the deep waters of the Atlantic Ocean — if not more so.David Moore, the principal protagonist of the novel, lives on Coquina Island in the Carribbean Sea, where he owns a small hotel on the largely undeveloped island. He is a scuba diver as well, and, as the book opens, he is diving alone on the edge of a shelf, in an area known as the Abyss. He is curious and a bit acquisitive, having once discovered a brass compass in the deeps. This time, though, he discovers much more: a U-boat surfaces when he inadvertently sets off an unexploded depth charge.The boat seems to be a virtually unprecedented historical find, and a significant salvage discovery. Once the boat has been settled fairly securely in the island’s harbor, Moore returns with the island’s police constable, Kip, to explore the submarine’s interior. It’s a terrible experience for them, for the remains of the crew are still there, mummified. Worse, there is an atmosphere of evil in that submarine, a threatening, dark presence that almost seems as if the crew is still alive. They leave the boat in a rush when they see movement they can’t quite explain that they ultimately decide was caused by bad air leading to a sort of hallucination. But the boat leaves them both uneasy.And with good reason. The submariners appear to be Nazi villains and zombies all rolled up into figures of horror that the islanders have never seen and can barely comprehend. The local voodoo practitioner; the Carib Indians that dwell on the island; and Moore and Kip, fighting their logical, educated selves every step of the way, must work together to rid their home of this threat — and not just their home, for who knows what havoc a German U-boat could have on the local shipping lanes if they returned to battle, still living in a war the rest of the world left behind long ago?There are some problems with this novel. For instance, the viewpoint character shifts without warning from paragraph to paragraph. McCammon also occasionally relies on pure gore to make his point, when he is actually much better at frightening his reader through suggestion and oblique references to horrors that are far more terrifying when not gazed upon directly, but only hinted at.But despite these problems, The Night Boat is a fine piece of horror fiction in more ways than are immediately obvious, for the terrors visited upon the submariners are just as real, and just as well-portrayed, as are the terrors the submariners visit upon the islanders. The reader’s imagination cannot dwell comfortably for long on the idea that these men were somehow alive down there under tons of water and sediment for decades, any more than it can long think on the terrors the submariners visited upon others. It is easy to see how McCammon so quickly became established as one of the finer horror writers working in the 1980s.3.5 stars rounded up to 4. Orginally publisehd at http://www.fantasyliterature.com/revi...
—Terry Weyna
I've watched a lot of zombie movies and read more than a few zombie-themed horror stories over the past ten years or so. Out of them all, only two really stand out. The first was the short story A Sad Last Love at the Diner of the Damned in Book of the Dead for a particularly gross paragraph that likened castration to opening an over-stuffed Zip-Lock bag of ravioli; the second was The Night Boat, which didn't have any single passage that was a visceral as that, but collectively was every bit as descriptive and terrifying. This book gave me nightmares, which is no easy task.If anyone has ever seen the old Peter Cushing movie about nazi zombies (or is it zombie nazis?), The Night Boat is going to be a turn-off at first glance; how many ways can you serve up undead fascists in the Bahamas? The biggest difference between the two - and the book's primary advantage over the movie - is the power of the reader's imagination to conjure-up a good scare and the author's ability to invoke it through building a sense of foreboding and dread with repetitive descriptions of mundane things. Early on in the book, before the zombies begin running amok, the author describes the sound of something heavy thudding dully against the interior of the recovered German U-Boat, over-and-over, from the point-of-view of several different characters. In an of itself there's nothing particularly scary about it, but given the reader's omniscience, it's very effective in evoking the image of cursed, undead sailors hammering futilely against the rusted metal walls of their maritime crypt.The ending was a bit of a disappointment, and without giving too much away all I will say is "Deus Ex Machina." It made sense in the overall context of the story, but given that the actors involved didn't really appear at any point earlier in the story, it didn't wrap things up neatly so much as just end them.Eh, no one is perfect.I give "The Night Boat" four gory stars out of five!
—Jeff
This isn't a bad horror novel, but it's a pretty forgettable one, which is probably why McCammon pulled it from circulation. I think that judgement a bit too severe, given it's genre writing in the first place (lighten up McCammon). But hey, it's his call. The book actually starts out well, with McCammon effectively mixing some exotic elements (Nazis, voodoo, zombies), into some decent dread. The problem is that once the zombies (or more appropriately, flesh eating mummies) show up, the wheels start to come off. Like so many horror novels of this period, there's a rush toward apocalypse, which, to my mind, often moved such novels out of the horror box and into some sort of sci-fi/fantasy/adventure zone. In any event, the sense of horror quickly evaporates, and you have an ending that borrows heavily on Moby Dick and Jaws. (The last 50 pages felt like a 100.) One of the major problems with the novel is that the main character, David Moore, is bland and uninteresting. McCammon attempts to make him a haunted and fated type, but as the novel draws to an end, you can't help but feel that most of the secondary characters are more interesting (and many of them ARE interesting). McCammon can write, and it's clear he did some research here (especially with U-boats). The dialogue (at least until the by-the-numbers ending), was also pretty good. Given that much of dialogue comes from Caribbean characters, that's no small feat (especially for a young writer). Recommended only for fans of 1980s horror (which I am), and McCammon completists. (Good cheesy cover art.) If you're just a casual reader of RM, his later books are better. 2 1/2 stars, which I'm rounding down since the author has such low regard for it. I think he's wrong, but whatever.Cover Art: 3 Stars.
—Steve
