Tim Curran’s waterborne DEAD SEA is the story of the Mara Corday, a 720-foot container ship on a three-week voyage. Among its small crew is George Ryan – a virgin to trolling ocean waters – and he’s about to get quite an indoctrination once the boat enters an abnormal mist. As a result, one guy goes crazy and throws himself overboard. Then things get weird.

The ship comes under attack by a giant worm; later, the craft explodes, leaving some floating on a hatch door, others in a lifeboat. The horrors don’t end with the shipwreck, either, as odd noises sound, serpentine fish surface, devil-ray bats swoop in and shark-like creatures circle, ready to strip the men from skin to skeleton.

When a long-abandoned freighter floats out of the fog, they find diaries from a nearly a century ago which hint of the horrors’ origin, and rather disturbingly at that. The means of the menace is so outta-left-field in a genre that so often relies on filling in blanks of a template, it’s appreciated.

If it all sounds like an infusion of elements from the works of William Hope Hodgson (to whom it’s dedicated), Edgar Allan Poe and H.P. Lovecraft, you’re right. And that’s good pedigree. You can also throw in the John Carpenter flick THE FOG in there and – if it weren’t so recent – Dan Simmons’ THE TERROR, of which I was most reminded in reading DEAD SEA.

But Curran still makes this tale his own. He demonstrates a knack for great imagery; a man’s nausea is described as feeling like he “swallowed a bucket of butterflies,” a blister swells “up like bread dough” and the fog itself “stank like a wind blown from the throat of a corpse.” His characters also feel authentic – the human ones, at least – whiling away their time by swapping salty jokes.

The men’s various creature encounters show Curran’s long on imagination, but he’s also just long. My only bone to pick with DEAD SEA is in its length; some of its power is diluted by one act too many. But when so much of small-press horror ultimately disappoints, this Elder Signs offering satisfies. In tales of terror, that should be all that counts. Bon voyage. –Rod Lott

Buy it at Amazon.