DEAD IN THE WATER

GOOD COD, DO I LOVE THIS ONE!

I know -- I recommend this book to EVERYONE who has an audience with me, here in the secret sub-sub-sub-basement underneath the Manoogian Mansion. YOU ARE ALL SICK UNTO DEATH OF HEARING ABOUT IT. At least that's true for the more experienced recruiters.

BUT SOME OF YOU ARE BRAND NEW RECRUITS AND HAVE NEVER HEARD ABOUT IT. So here is the full, complete review of this novel, written by Nancy Holder and published by Dell Horror in 1994.

PLOT SUMMARY: A group of holiday-makers on a dreadful little cut-rate cruise find that their filthy, rat-infested vessel is sinking. They pile into a lifeboat and -- after a fairly anxious wait in the blinding fog -- are saved by an incredibly plush cruise liner, where the captain escorts each one of them into a luxurious stateroom and sees to their every need.

BUT SOMETHING IS TERRIBLY WRONG. The survivors keeping seeing something nasty out of the corners of their eyes...something hard to describe...and it has pincers. And what's with the surviving crewman who came with them into the lifeboat? Why does he keep talking to an invisible figure he calls "King Neptune"? Howcum the ship keeps kind of, you know, giving a hitch and suddenly turning into a rotten wreck hung with stinking seaweed before snapping back into focus as a stunningly-appointed modern passenger liner? And the captain seems, shall we say...troubled? haunted? weird? Are they in more danger than they realize? WILL ANYONE SURVIVE?

CLIFFIE'S NOTES ON THIS HAUNTING, AND HAUNTED, NOVEL OF PISCATORIAL LOVE:

>> I know, I know, every book a human publishes on this subject gets classified as a horror story. I DON'T GET IT IT EITHER.

>> The relationship between FISH and DESTINY is crystal clear in this book. The closer you get to your happy ending, the more fish you see around you. Impossible to miss the message.

>>The captain of the liner proves to be in collusion with the pincered creature glimpsed all over the ship by the survivors. And wait'll you find out who SHE is. It's a fairly obvious reference to our recruiting methods, but well within tolerances because the story is also obviously fanciful, phantasmal and...fictional. (Or is it?)

>>I won't spoil the ending for you, but they try to make it horrifying. If you're taking it from the point of view of a fully human reader, it's not a pretty picture. Taken from OUR point of view, it's almost funny. Because only humans feel oogy when they think of being...DEAD IN THE WATER. Here's a tip for those antsy readers: Once you're DEAD IN THE WATER, you get to join us in Dagon's Roiling Intestine, where you will dwell in wonder and glory forever...