Sam Vines is struggling. Her boat is up on the hard and she doesn’t have enough money to get her back in the water. Turns out the snorkelers and the scubadivers are looking for the ultra-luxury boating experience, not the single-handed, rarely sober, snarky stylings of sailboat captain Samantha Vines. So it’s a good thing when her former crewmate Loick asks her to help deliver a massive, hundred-year-old sailboat from Seattle to England. Sam is the only one who can handle the ship’s engine, and did Loick mention that the money is good? It’s very good.
The Blackwatch is a huge boat. An ancient boat. It’s also probably (definitely) haunted.
Sam’s alcohol withdrawal (sobriety is important at sea) has her doubting her senses, but when one crewmate disappears and another has a gruesome accident, she knows that this simple delivery job has spiraled into something sinister.
Before I dive into my review for THE NIGHT THAT FINDS US ALL (which I loved), I guess I hit a little rough patch with reading? Just a string of DNF’s and/or books that I read & felt completely unmoved by.
And what I’ve been trying to really work on this year is this internalized pressure I put on myself to review everything I read. I’m not sure where this nagging voice comes from, but I’m doing my best to just push through it. All of this to say, if my reviews seem to be coming a bit sporadically or in bursts or whatever, I’m still reading all the time. But I’m trying to not be in a constant battle with myself over writing reviews, especially when I’m left feeling…not a whole lot about any particular book.
So I just really needed a win. A book that grabbed me from the get-go. I needed something that was fun & fucking wild, and I got that and then some with John Hornor Jacobs’s THE NIGHT THAT FINDS US ALL. Jacobs is one of those authors I’ve been meaning to read for ages & I’m so glad to have finally read one of his books, he’s an incredible writer!
I knew I was in for a seriously good time when I saw there were two quotes in the epigraph and one of them was this:
“If nautical nonsense be something you wish…”
–SpongeBob SquarePants theme song
So, yeah. Even though this is a nautical horror novel that spirals into a full-fledged nightmare, Jacobs has a ton of fun with this story & these characters, and I was loving every minute of this choppy ride!
Samantha Vineyard is a ship captain/engineer who has fallen on hard times (mostly of her own making). She’s an alcoholic, bumming around Florida, and her boat, the Victress, has been in dry dock for a few years. Sam can’t afford to get her boat fixed up & launched, so when her friend Loick calls her with an…unusual opportunity, Sam can’t say no.
That opportunity comes in the form of an engineering job on board the Blackwatch, a very old, very large sailboat (it also has an engine). The ship is set to be delivered from Seattle all the way to Europe, so this is a massive voyage.
And the Blackwatch? It’s haunted as fuck.
Or at least that’s what the stories say.
There’s a whole crew of people on the ship, some that Sam has a complicated history with, some she doesn’t know at all, and some who aren’t true sailors (three rich guys named Steve, who have all paid to sail with the crew). There’s an incredible sense of adventure that comes across in the early going of the book, which I adored. Certainly there’s an impending sense of doom hanging over the reader, but this book is fun! And the amount of research that Jacobs did shines through on every page. There is a TON of nautical/boat terminology that could be a bit dizzying to some, but I think it all works. I am by no means a “boat person,” but I did spend about eight years of my life working in a boatyard, so luckily for me a lot of this lingo was somewhat familiar.
While Sam has many responsibilities on the ship, she also has plenty of time on her hands. And while maybe-sorta trying to find a hidden stash of old rum, she comes across a nearly-ruined old journal. Through these decaying pages, we learn a lot about the cursed history of this wretched ship.
Things start to take a turn for the worse on this journey, and a boat that feels so massive in the beginning starts to feel suffocating & claustrophobic. Jacobs is extremely skilled at bringing the reader on board this nightmare vessel, feeling the sway of the deck under your feet. Your stomach lurching in the waves. Your hands dried out from handling sea-soaked dock lines. You’ll really feel like a member of the Blackwatch crew and you’ll be desperate to get in one of the lifeboats and get the fuck gone!
This was an incredible introduction to an author for me & I’m already planning which of his books I’ll read next (leaning towards THIS DARK EARTH but possibly A LUSH AND SEETHING HELL).
I loved Sam a whole lot. She is broken in a lot of ways, and she’s also someone who is relentlessly sarcastic. In the hands of a different writer, I can see Sam’s snarkiness being a bit over the top, but Jacobs gives her such a distinctive voice & you can’t help fall for this salty character. Sam’s battle with her sobriety was also a big part of the book & an aspect of this story I really appreciated.
THE NIGHT THAT FINDS US ALL was a total blast. Fast-paced, with mostly short chapters, and so much fun to read. I loved this one!
Grimdark Dad 