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LOVELY, DARK & DEEP [2024] By Megan Stockton
My Review 4 Stars Out Of 5

I became a fan of Megan Stockton with “Bluejay��, and had no reservations about buying her latest novel. This one is billed “Occult�� Suspense/Horror. The threat comes from the sea, thus the author’s decision to set the story on “Six Mile Island�� in the wake of a powerful and destructive storm rolling in which will drive nearly all residents from their homes and onto the mainland for safety is both smart on the author’s part and scary as hell for us readers.

First a word of praise for Stockton’s ability to build tension in her readers tight as a bowstring ready to snap. This frightening outing is claustrophobic in feel and movement from the first page, and the author creates an acute sense of immediacy by using the first-person perspective of her main characters with alternating chapters, each chapter titled with the POV.

We first meet our young boy Fisher snooping around at the shoreline where the Sheriff (Lyra) and her fawning Deputy (Landon) are scoping out a dead body on the beach. The author’s talent for writing descriptive detail had me mildly nauseated reading the description of the corpse. The bloated, ruptured corpse still looked 9 months pregnant and was covered in crystals, not to mention sans sex organs. The “John Doe�� is taken to the local coroner and we all know how that goes, do we not?

Five fishermen had gone out on a boat two years earlier and never returned to the island. Their bodies, nor their gear or their boat were ever located. A sailor named Felix, one of our main characters did not go out on the sea that day.

I was initially just a little confused because the boy Fisher was having a conversation with his father on the island while his dad had the boat anchored. His mother (Juno) was bearing the brunt of the kid’s continued heartache and wrote in his diary that his mom did not understand how much he needed his father to come home.

The Sheriff (Lyra) was in her forties, and trying to handle a significant romantic crush from her Deputy Landon, who among other considerations was likely at least fifteen years her junior. Significantly, Lyra was not healed from her breakup with Felix. There was no fanfare when she broke it off with Felix, but inside she felt like it had left something irreparable inside her. The reader finds out a little later that “Felix�� is a woman, and that she is still in love with Lyra.

The storm is bearing down and now the Police Station gets a distress call from Barbora Todd, one of the women whose husband never returned. But, Barbora has a young baby which is a mystery to everyone. She is hysterical because her baby is suddenly missing. This requires a police investigation, which solves the crime��. until it doesn’t.

This is not a long novel, but Stockton makes every paragraph count. There is hardly a moment you are not saying to yourself “What the---?�� The sheriff locks Barbora Todd up in the Police Station because of physical evidence of foul play relative to her baby. Landon had obviously wanted to kill the mother, but when she was in custody, he did (accidentally?) shoot her in the head while Lyra was out. He had a tall story about a man who was sucking on Barbora’s throat who was not human.

This fast-moving plot is rich with well developed characters and spot-on descriptions of all the blood, carnage, and strange inhuman creatures that are being encountered along the way. Fisher becomes convinced he is hallucinating his father and sends his mother Juno from the safety of the Church back to the house to lock the doors. The Coroner Phillip calls and wants to come to talk to the police about his autopsy on John Doe. Landon goes to see Phil (without) his gun because of the shooting incident and Landon later returns but he is not the same man who left to see Phil.

The sense of claustrophobia, the fear of the unknown, the certainty of a bite on the neck by the “infected�� meaning you would change into the unrecognizable…the immediacy she successfully created by the first person POVs of the main characters and then their urgent trips around town to check this person, pick up that person, it was nerve wracking. It kept the tension palpable.

Perhaps most of all, and the only criticisms that might remain is that the ending was hopeless and bleak, and there was the question of the etiology of the “ancient species that hungered from the sea��. The author’s afterword in the form of “Three Years Earlier�� offered details about the men who were lost at sea. I interpreted it to be the author’s idea or construct of what “Sirens�� might have been and how that the sailors were lured from the safety of their vessels. In any case, another original, solid, and exciting horror yarn from Megan Stockton.


“Ancient Species That Hungered from The Sea��