The Boy from the Sea by Garrett Carr

First published in Great Britain in 2025; published by Knopf on May 13, 2025

A great joy of reading is the opportunity to imagine ways of living that are unlike our own. The Boy from the Sea is a character-driven family drama. The family lives in Donegal during the 1980s. Males in Donegal are expected to fit into a stereotype of working-class men who are stoic and silent, who hold their thoughts and problems close, and who avoid calling attention to themselves. They obey cultural norms that, with some subtlety, govern their responses to social situations.

The men have no idea how to communicate with their wives and children and are afraid that any meaningful attempt to do so will be seen as a kind of weakness or failure. The female characters admire their men and keep a sharp eye on their children to be sure they follow the model their fathers have established. The need to "fit in" and for their children to do so is uppermost in the adult characters' minds.

Ambrose Bonnar is a fisherman, as are most of the men in Donegal. He is respected in the community because he knows his place, keeps his head down, and follows the social rules. His best friend is a fisherman named Thomas. Ambrose is married to Christine and they have a son named Declan. Christine has a sister named Phyllis; their aging and declining father is Eunan. Phyllis made a less fortunate match than Christine and comes to depend on her sister for financial assistance. That dynamic contributes to the drama.

For a time, Ambrose fishes with Thomas; they drag a net fastened to both their boats and split the catch. They make decent money by Donegal standards but times are changing. “No one yet admitted it but the North Atlantic cod fishery was collapsing and there’d soon be next to none.” They resent the ability of other Europeans to fish in their waters but resent even more the restrictions imposed by governments to curtail overfishing.

The partnership ends when Thomas buys a larger and faster boat. Ambrose would like to do the same but learns that Christine has failed to make some mortgage payments because she knows their community’s bank won’t foreclose. The bank might not foreclose but it won’t lend more money to a family with delinquent payments. Ambrose can’t compete with bigger trawlers and fears it is only a matter of time before he will need to stop fishing and join his brothers in England, where other Irish men have fled to find jobs as laborers for pay that isn’t available in Ireland. Ambrose doesn't want to become “the person you had to become to be the kind of person who goes to England,” a change in personality akin to “giving up the drink or finding God.”

The story opens with a local man’s discovery of a baby, floating into the bay in a barrel that has been cut in half and lined with tinfoil. Some Donegal residents suspect that the man actually found the baby on the beach, but his story of wading into the bay to retrieve the barrel is more colorful.

After being passed from family to family for a short time, Ambrose and Christine decide to raise the baby as their own. That decision will spark jealousy from Declan, who doesn’t want to share his father’s attention with a boy who doesn’t share the same blood. Ambrose and Christine name the boy Brendan. Brendan’s true origin becomes a source of gossipy drama near the story’s end.

The boy from the sea becomes a local legend. As he grows, he gives simple blessings to town residents, saying things like “Hopefully things will work out for you.” Not much of a blessing, perhaps, but one that is appreciated by people who value restraint, who mistrust promises and overstatements.

The story offers a few eventful moments (too few to spoil by discussing them here), but The Boy from the Sea is probably not a good choice for readers who are only interested in plot-driven fiction. The novel’s value lies in its depiction of Donegal and its residents. The story is narrated in the third person by an observer using the term “we,” but context suggests that the narrative voice is that of Donegal. It is the collective voice of lifelong inhabitants who share the same perspective on how life should be lived. The community is open to forgiveness of those who stray from its core values, but only when the time seems right. “Life was a sort of procession and we all marched in it together, you had to keep up.”

More precisely, the story seems to be narrated by the men of Donegal. “Donegal men had strikingly big key fobs, we tended to have many padlocks in our lives.” When Ambrose decides that Declan is grown and doesn’t need him anymore, the narrative chorus deems this “a grim way to think and we would’ve told him that had we been the types to meddle.” The men distinguish themselves from the “alternative lifestylers” with shaggy hair and sandals who come from Europe to enjoy the sea. To the men of Donegal, the sea is their life, something to be respected. They have little tolerance for leisure or for those who have time to enjoy their lives.

Garrett Carr paints a sharply focused picture of Donegal residents as people who know their place in the social order, who are intent on not troubling others. When Eunan had a stroke, he was aware of what was happening “but said nothing as he hadn’t wanted to make a show of himself.” If they complain at all, they turn their complaints to the weather or other topics that will not spark controversy. They know their lot in life is to bear whatever misfortune comes their way and they are proud of their ability to do so without complaint.

The women are similar but, in private, are more likely to give voice to feelings of resentment. When Phyllis and Christine watch a documentary about the likely aftermath of nuclear war, they agree that Donegal is too unimportant to be bombed. “Yes, it’ll be nuclear winter for us,” said Phyllis bitterly, “we’ll be expected to put up with it.”

In a beautiful scene, Ambrose and Christine reconnect after Ambrose is nearly lost at sea in the novel’s most harrowing moment. As they explore each other’s bodies, they remind each other about the source of their scars: fishhooks and rope burns for Ambrose, kitchen knives and rescuing Brendan from a barbed wire fence for Christine. Carr collapses lifetimes into those scars. The concept of two lovers reminding themselves of all they have done by revisiting their scars is striking.

Carr’s prose is fluid and strong; his characterizations are insightful. Declan would like to be a chef but he comes to accept that being a fisherman is his destiny. Brendan, having his roots in the sea rather than Donegal, is the character most likely to chase a dream, but it isn’t clear until the novel’s end that Brendan has one.

The ending doesn’t definitively resolve the mystery of Brendan’s origin but it offers a likely answer. It also suggests that fates to which we have reconciled ourselves might be changed if we have the courage not to be governed by expectations. These are powerful themes. As a debut novel, The Boy from the Sea establishes Carr as a writer who merits an audience.

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Anima Rising by Christopher Moore

Published by William Morrow on May 13, 2025

Few writers bring as much humor to the supernatural as Christopher Moore. Anima Rising combines mythology, primarily drawn from Inuit culture, with a continuation of Mary Shelley’s story about Frankenstein’s Monster. Set in Vienna beginning in 1911, Moore’s primary characters are the city’s most famous residents: Sigmund Freud and Gustav Klimt, with lesser but important roles assigned to  Egon Schiele and the visiting Carl Jung.

Klimt is walking near his studio when he sees the body of a naked girl in a Vienna canal. Klimt likes nothing so much as the nude female form, so he decides to sketch the drowned girl. He prevails on a boy to help him load the body into a newspaper cart so he can take it home. When she coughs, Klimt realizes that she has come alive. At his studio, one of his regular models, Wally (short for Waltraud) Neuzil, looks after her. Klimt decides to name her Judith.

Like Klimt, Schiele, Jung, and Freud, Wally is a character drawn from history. She was Schiele’s lover and muse and is the object of his Portrait of Wally. A free-spirited woman ahead of her time, Wally has a delightfully snarky personality.

Soon after Klimt rescues Judith, the body of a man named Thiessen is found in the canal, absent his head, which had been torn off. Klimt senses a connection between the events and decides to keep Judith from the authorities. Wally is happy to have Judith as a friend and protector even if she regards Judith as a lunatic.

We learn from letters written by Robert Allen Walton, the captain of the ship Prometheus, that in 1799 the ship became stranded in the ice while searching for the Northwest Passage. The captain happened upon a man pulling a sled that carried a large crate. The man was Victor Frankenstein. He had been chasing the monster he created.

Frankenstein tells Walton that the monster was lonely, so it killed a woman with the plan to reanimate her and make her immortal using Frankenstein’s methods. Walton discovered that the woman was in Frankenstein’s crate. Sadly for Frankenstein, the monster boarded the ship, killed him, and took the crate and its contents on a sled pulled by a pack of dogs, but not before Walton learned that an infusion of the woman’s blood would help him defeat death, at least in the short term.

Judith is obviously the monster’s murder victim and intended bride (or sex slave, as she describes her status). She recalls nothing of her past until she submits to hypnosis by Freud and later by Jung. During the story that emerges from her memory, Judith has harrowing adventures in the arctic, including disagreeable coupling with the monster and close encounters with polar bears.

With the help of hypnosis, Judith realizes that she died four times during her existence, the last death having preceded Klimt’s discovery of her body in the canal. She has lived with the Inuit, in the Underworld, and in Amsterdam before ending up in a Vienna canal. She also discovers that she is sharing her body with two gods she met in the Underworld, Sedna and Raven.

Judith is not with Klimt long before she is joined by a malamute named Geoff. Geoff is inhabited by Akhlut, a creature from Inuit folklore that combines a wolf with an orca. Geoff grows even larger when Akhlut crosses over from the Underworld. Akhlut can swallow a walrus whole if he is of a mind to, although Geoff prefers to snack on croissants.

The novel crosses mythology and philosophy with nineteenth century literature and early twentieth century Eruopean culture. Jung contemplates how Judith’s experience (which he regards as a fantasy until he sees Geoff turn into Akhlut) fits within his theory of the collective unconscious. Freud, of course, leaves Judith wondering if she is experiencing penis envy — unlikely, since Judith is stronger than human men and has little regard for penises, given that they have usually entered her without her consent.

The plot involves Judith’s desire to discover her true identity — the one she was born with, before Frankenstein’s monster killed her. Her sessions with Freud and Jung provide clues, but late in the novel an unexpected source provides her answer. When she learns her true name, Judith realizes that of all the identities she had adopted, “the closest thing she’d had to a surname was ‘the Murdering Prostitute,’ which didn’t look right on a library card.”

The story makes an important point about the history of men using women — not just for sex, although Judith is repeatedly raped — but also as unloved child bearers, as laborers, and in Judith’s case, as the source of life-prolonging blood she is forced to share with men. Yet Klimt will eventually be rewarded for treating her (and Wally) with kindness. As a comedy/adventure novel/horror story, Anima Rising balances its dark observations with humor, excitement, and a happy ending.

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My Friends by Fredrik Backman

Published in translation by Atria Books on May 6, 2025

Fredrik Backman has such a gentle sense of humor and writes from such a humane point of view that he might be unique among contemporary authors. My Friends examines life from the perspectives of  four fifteen-year-old friends, from the perspectives of two of the friends after they reach middle age, and from the perspective of a snarky 17-year-old girl on the cusp of adulthood. The story revolves around the last perfect summer than the teenage friends spent together and the effort that one of those friends, now well into adulthood, makes to help the teenage girl.

One of the four friends is now a famous artist who, having nearly reached the age of 40, is about to die. The artist signs his paintings C. Jat but is known throughout the novel as “the artist” or Kimkim. His most famous painting is of the sea — that’s all rich art collectors notice, apart from the price tag — but to Louisa, the 17-year-old, it is a painting of kids on a pier that rich collectors never seem to notice. Louisa loves to draw. She has a postcard of the painting, but she sneaks into an art show where the painting is being sold because she needs to see it in person.

When the police chase her (they assume that she intends to deface the painting with the spray paint in her bag), Louisa hides in an alley next to a homeless bum who kindly misdirects the cops. The bum is quickly revealed as the famous artist when they begin to paint graffiti on an alley wall together.

The artist has been living with Ted, one of the childhood friends. The novel implies that they are lovers but their relationship is built on love regardless of how they might express it. The artist instructs Ted to buy the painting of the sea and give it to Louisa so she can sell it and live a good life as she pursues her own art. Louisa wants to reject the gift because she has always lost everything — including her parents and a best friend who died. She is certain she will lose any money that might come from the sale of the painting.

Ted wants to rid himself of Louisa but his loyalty to the artist compels him to assure that Louisa takes the painting. They continue their argument on a train journey that will eventually take them to the town where Ted, the artist, and their two friends — Joat and Ali — spent their last summer together. Along the way, Ted tells Louisa the story of that summer. The story is about childhood friendships and lasting bonds, but it is also about child abuse and how friends save each other. Some of the story is about death, the ways people process the loss of a friend or family member. And it’s about way in which friends recognize and encourage talents that young people might otherwise be too insecure to pursue.

Backman is given to platitudes. He hits the reader with new ones on nearly every page. “The world is full of miracles, but none greater than how far a young person can be carried by someone else’s belief in them.” “That’s the worst thing about death, that it happens over and over again. That the human body can cry forever.” “Because art is a fragile magic, just like love, and that’s humanity’s only defense against death.” And so on. Some of them are insightful. Some are schmaltzy. Many are redundant. Still, a cheerful author with good intentions can brighten days made dim by the relentless onslaught of insults that passes for discourse in America.

Because the book is crowded with platitudes, it takes some time to tell a simple story. The plot involves Ted’s journey with Louisa to a destination where she can find assistance selling the painting. Each of them tries to abandon the other along the way, but they learn that they are not good at abandoning people. Ted takes a beating — not the first in his life and the reason he doesn’t like to go outside. Louisa shows off her aptitude for theft. As the journey unfolds, Ted tells Louisa about the kids in the painting, all of whom are damaged in some way. Their goal that summer is to make the artist paint something (they execute various schemes so they can acquire paints and a canvas) because they know that unchaining his potential is the only way he will survive the harsh reality of life.

The platitudes add up to a theme. Backman argues that we are at our best as children because we understand the importance of close personal bonds, loyalty, and trust. We love our friends as we will never love again. In adulthood, we spend our lives trying to regain the wisdom we had as children. We fail miserably. We don’t mean what we say and we don’t say what we mean. But we try to improve because regaining the childhood capacity to love is all that will save us. The life-changing power of art is another theme. The ending brings a pay-it-forward theme.

In my experience with kids, as well as my memory of being one, teens rarely express profound thoughts. Nor are they as kind, or at least as aware of the need for sensitivity of their friends’ feelings, as the kids in Backman’s world. Still, it’s a fun story and, notwithstanding an excess of schmaltzy platitudes, My Friends teaches lessons that merit the reader's consideration.

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Epitaphs from the Abyss vol. 1

Published by Oni Press on May 6, 2025

Older readers who were captivated by comic books in their younger years may have fond (or chilling) memories of EC Comics, particularly the Tales from the Crypt and The Vault of Horror series. While the original comics were a bit before my time, enthusiasts of the comic book form sought them out, either as originals (if they could afford them) or in reprint editions.

In the 1950s, Tales from the Crypt and similar titles were cited by legislators and do-gooders who wanted to censor comic books because they featured gruesome horror and crime stories. Also, the artists who drew for the series tended to notice that women have breasts and shared that discovery with happy readers. (The censors’ certainty that Batman was gay and doing God-knows-what with Robin is another story. It was a dark time, as are most times in America’s history.)

Oni Press has revived the EC Comics concept with new stories that follow the tradition and artistic style of the original Tales from the Crypt. The first four issues of Epitaphs from the Abyss are collected in this volume, including reproductions of the alternative covers for each issue.

While the stories in Tales from the Crypt and The Vault of Horror were introduced by the Crypt-Keeper and the Vault-Keeper respectively, the new host (or ghouLunatic, as they were known back in the day) is the Grave-Digger, who promises that every tombstone tells a tale. My favorite stories in the volume are:

“Killer Spec,” written by J. Holtham, art by Jorge Fornes. A broke screenwriter living in LA discovers that his roommate has written a perfect script. He slashes his roommate into a bloody mess and steals his script but pays a predictable price for the crime. The pedestrian story is noteworthy for its art, which fits nicely into the gory, detailed realism of the original series.

“Senator, Senator,” written by Chris Condon, art by Peter Krause. A GOP senator who once believed in a woman’s right to control her own body is forced to change her views by grim enforcers of conservative doctrine.

“Family Values,” written by Stephanie Phillips, art by Phil Hester. A man is forced to kill one member of his family to prevent intruders from killing them all. The reason the dilemma is forced upon him sets up a neatly twisted ending.

“A Hand In It,” written by Jay Stephens, art by Leomacs. A morgue attendant plots to use a serial killer’s dead body to murder her husband until her plan backfires.

“Dead from Exposure,” written by Jay Stephens, art by David Lapham. Legends of a “bog ape” that bears a remarkable resemblance to Swamp Thing attract a man who exposes hoaxes on television. The exposure of the fake monster doesn’t go as planned.

I admired the ghoulish art in “Gray Green Memories” (story and art by Tyler Cook); the story, not so much. On the other hand, I enjoyed the vampire story told in “Blood Type” (written by Corinna Bechko) and the story of blues musician Robert Johnson’s deal with the devil in “The Crossroads Repetition” (written by Chris Condon); the art, not so much.

Other stories have interesting takes on anti-vaxxers and people who text while driving and racists who argue that hating members of other groups is natural.

The featured cover art for each of the four collected issues is sensational. The macabre art captures the horror that exuded from the EC covers of the original series. The alternate covers are an uneven mix.

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The Children of Eve by John Connolly

Published by Atria/Emily Bestler Books on May 6, 2025

Antonio Elizalde, an antiquities dealer in Mexico, has been known to trade in treasured items that cannot be sold on the private market. With the assistance of Roland Bilas, an American, he has arranged to transport certain items that ostensibly belong to Blas Urrea, a drug lord. They are assisted in that endeavor by Wyatt Riggins, who brings the items to the East Coast of the US.

The nature of the smuggled property is a mystery during the novel’s first half, so I won’t spoil it here. I will credit John Connolly, however, for setting up a likely answer that turns out to be incorrect. I was pleased by that because the seemingly obvious answer would have taken the story in a common and uninteresting direction.

The smuggling is funded and managed by Devin Vaughn, who takes his criminal guidance from Aldo Bern, although in this case Vaughn has acted behind Bern’s back. Vaughn has experienced financial setbacks, including the loss of a large cocaine shipment to Customs agents, and his investors may be coming for him. Vaughn took a big risk by stealing from Urrea. Both Vaughn and Bern need to fear Urrea's reach if he discovers Vaughn's responsibility for his loss.

Bodies begin to collect after Urrea engages Eugene Seeley to recover the property and to take the lives of everyone who participated in stealing it. Seeley is ably assisted in that project by a woman known only as La Señora. The woman is adept with blades (she cuts out the hearts of her victims, not just because Urrea wants them but because she finds the work satisfying) but she doesn’t seem to eat or sleep or bleed.

When Riggins gets a text message that simply says “run,” he disappears, leaving behind his girlfriend without saying goodbye. The girlfriend, Zetta Nadeau, retains Charlie Parker to find Riggins.

I am not typically a fan of supernatural elements in thrillers, but I make an exception for Connolly. The creepiness factor in The Children of Eve adds chills to the thrills, and Connolly brings such elegance to his prose that I forgive him for bringing the underworld into his stories. In addition to La Señora, Parker’s dead daughter Jennifer lurks in the background. She has troubles of her own — it can’t be fun to transition between a world she no longer inhabits and a world she isn’t ready to enter — but she plays only a small role in the story. Jennifer has picked up a friend in the spirit world; it seems likely she’ll need one.

Readers who are unfamiliar with the series might be puzzled by the intrusion of the supernatural, but it doesn’t distract from a plot that rolls along as a private detective novel should. Parker searches for Riggins even after Nadeau encourages him to stop because he wants the satisfaction of solving the mystery. For his trouble, he takes a beating that ends with a hospitalization (a common fate for Parker and most other fictional PIs). But Parker isn’t a tough guy so the story isn’t riddled with fights and shootouts. His friends Louis and Angel are true tough guys, but they rarely need to be violent. A mean look from either of them will persuade most people to cooperate.

The story is self-contained. New readers can start the series with this book or almost any other without worrying that they’ve missed too much. Parker’s living daughter, his ex-wife, and his current girlfriend all make brief appearances, but Connolly gives the reader all the information they need to understand those relationships. Parker blames himself for not protecting his dead wife and daughter. That’s probably all the reader needs to know to grasp his personality. The story sets up a future installment that promises to explain why Jennifer’s ghost feels a need to watch over her father at night. While I’m not a big fan of the supernatural, Connolly has me hooked on the mystery so I’m looking forward to that revelation.

Connolly’s plots are always intelligent and his stories always move quickly, but the quality of his prose sets him apart from lesser thriller writers. My favorite sentence in the book might be Connolly’s description of a sales clerk at a weed dispensary: “His hair was bunched in an intricate topknot that would force him to censor his photos in later life so his children didn’t laugh in his face, and he wore a sparse beard that appeared to be growing back after he’d accidentally set its predecessor alight.” Wonderful sentences like that one are sufficient reason to try out a Connolly novel if you haven’t already.

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