NOWHERE TO PUT THE BODIES

The trawler Saint Brendan is six days out and deep in debt when her skipper drags a foul, forbidden seamount — ground that men once knew to leave alone. The net comes up heavy. What it holds is not fish.

At first the thing seems dead. It lies in the hold, cold and still, and the crew of seven tell themselves it is only a strange catch, a curiosity, a problem for the dock. Then a man goes missing in the night. Then another. And slowly, terribly, they come to understand what they have brought aboard: a creature from two thousand feet of black water that hunts in the dark, fears only fire and the fiercest light, and learns — patiently, intelligently — to take apart every wall they put between themselves and it.

The light runs down. The radio is the only thread to a world that does not yet know what is coming. And as the crew falls one by one, the survivors face the unspeakable arithmetic of the open sea, where there is no land to run to, no help that will arrive in time, and nowhere — on a small boat in the middle of the ocean — to put the bodies.

Nowhere to Put the Bodies is a relentless, bleak survival horror novel about debt, dread, and the things the deep keeps. Told in spare, unflinching prose, it tightens toward an ending as cold and final as the sea itself — and a question with no comfortable answer: when the thing you hauled up cannot be killed, what does it cost the last man alive to make sure it goes down with him?