If you’re looking for a cross between H.P. Lovecraft’s The Call of Cthulhu and The Addams Family, search no further than this month’s book-of-the-month, Tidepool. I’ve been in the mood for Gothic fiction lately, and the haunted seaside town of Tidepool with its washed-up, mutilated corpses and black-gowned Victorian grande dame, Ms. Ada Oliver, did not disappoint.
I will admit, the book got off to kind of a slow start for me. By halfway through, though, I was hooked, as invested as Sorrow Hamilton in uncovering what became of her brother, Henry, once he left pre-WWI Baltimore to promote a business venture in the shabby, tight-knit coastal community of Tidepool, never to return home again.
The townspeople are unfriendly and evade all Sorrow’s questions regarding her brother’s whereabouts. The streets and buildings reek of fish and rotting offal. Sorrow is about to give up, go back to Baltimore, and let her dad send in detectives to handle the case when she finds she first has to reckon with Ada Oliver: a powerful, wealthy heiress with a mysterious past, and an even more horrifying secret she keeps locked away in the basement of her hilltop mansion.
Sorrow has to decide if the price of discovering the truth behind her brother’s disappearance is worth risking her own life in Tidepool’s deadly grip, and I, for one, was not expecting the twists and turns she took as a character by the end of the book.
A compelling work of not-so-believable but viably creepy horror that is sure to keep you reading late into the night and hardly daring to peer into the ocean’s depths the same way ever again. I recommend you seek out Tidepool’s darkest secrets…if you dare.