100 Fathoms Below
“This is the way a horror novel should be written. It’s fast-moving and doesn’t let up.”
“Without a doubt the most insidious dangers are the ones that hide in plain sight, camouflaging themselves inside the minds of rational men.”
The crew of the USS Roanoke is about to learn this is true.
It is 1983. The nuclear submarine has just sailed from Pearl Harbor on its latest mission: Get evidence that the Soviets have a new submarine that is better, faster, and deadlier than anything the US has.
“Not that this is an unusual op. The Navy was constantly sending boats to international waters near the Soviet Union. Besides, the Roanoke was a fast attack sub, a hunter-killer, and could hold her own if she found herself in trouble.”
This mission is dangerous enough, but what the captain and the crew of the Roanoke don’t know is that one of the crew has made a side trip to a brothel while on shore leave, a place housing a very seductive but unusual woman.
“Her jade-green eyes sparkled. Stubic didn’t remember her having green eyes before, but when she smiled and took his hand, her skin soft and warm on his, he didn’t care what color her eyes were. He took a step into the hallway and then another and the darkness swallowed him whole.”
The lady is an aswang, the Filipino version of the vampire, and when Stubic returns to his ship, he’s no longer the crewman the others know. Now he’s also one of the undead, and he’s in a submarine miles below the surface of the water with an entire ship of potential victims unaware of what he’s become.
“Stubic blinked in the painful bright light. Even if he’d had too much to drink last night, which he knew he hadn’t, it wouldn’t explain the marks on the side of his neck. Something had bitten him and he wondered whether his symptoms were an infection brought on by the bite. His head throbbed as if being jackhammered from the inside.”
Soon the Roanoke’s assignment will go from the routine seek-and-follow to a fight for life.
At one hundred fathoms, the depth at which sunlight no longer penetrates the water, a horror is about to come into being, and the crew of the Roanoke can’t call for help. Revealing their position will alert the Soviets. Rising to the surface will endanger those on land. They have to battle this alone.
Men trapped in a submarine with a vampire. Could there be a more ancient terror in a more modern setting?
It’s frightening enough to be in a haunted house while being pursued by fiends but in the smothering depths of the ocean—?
This is the way a horror novel should be written. It’s fast-moving and doesn’t let up. From the moment Petty Officer Stubic accepts the business card from a girl in the Waikiki marketplace, the reader has good idea of what’s about to happen, but none of it comes about in exactly the way expected.
Though equally ancient, the aswang has emerged into public entertainment media only recently, once in the television series Grimm, and it’s refreshing—in a horrific way—to see the introduction of an Undead hailing from somewhere other than Transylvania. Authors should sit up and take notice; African and Asian countries have their own supernatural folklore, an area barely plumbed by writers of supernatural novels.
Authors Kent and Kaufman definitely have a way with words, utilizing such phrases as the Roanoke “submerging beneath the waves, engulfed in the endless dark of the ocean,” or “This must be what it is like to be awake when they lowered you into the grave,” all designed to convey the claustrophobic atmosphere of a submarine’s interior, this adding to the terror when the aswang’s presence is finally verified.
100 Fathoms Below is a novel that can be enjoyed on several levels, appealing to followers of political suspense as well as those who like horror. The fan of military thrillers, such as those written by Tom Clancy, will enjoy the descriptions of events aboard a nuclear sub, and its pursuit of its Soviet counterpart. Stephen King aficionados will rally behind the descriptions of the aswang’s depredations and the aftermath.
Whichever genre the reader enjoys, this novel is the one! Steven L. Kent and Nicholas Kaufman have written a story filled with authentic descriptions of routine aboard a sub, while filling it with genuine horror.
Thanks for introducing a new vampire to the reading public, gentlemen, and for the story in which you’ve done it!