The Stranger at Graving Dock Three
A Gothic Novel of Steel and Salt

About this book:

The rain off the Firth carries more than salt—it carries secrets. When traveling welder Thomas Carrow arrives at the dying St. Jude's Shipyard with his Leeds-built arc welder and a case of slag scars, he expects ninepence an hour and ten days of plate work on the *Ellen Rhys*, a hull rotting in Graving Dock Three. But the yard doesn't want mending. The iron remembers what it was before the furnaces took it, and the salt is calling it home. Every weld Carrow lays cracks before the slag cools. The dock walls breathe inward. And the old gatekeeper whispers that No. 3 has swallowed better men than him.

Carrow doesn't believe in ghosts—ghosts don't hold an arc, and they don't pay. He believes in tensile strength, in flux and current, in the discipline that turns fire into seam. But something in the black water beneath the caisson gate resonates with the copper windings of his transformer, and the *Ellen Rhys* hums with a vibration no tide can explain. As the spring tide rises early and the yard's few remaining men vanish or break, Carrow realizes he isn't repairing a ship. He's sealing a wound in something far older than steel.

Atmospheric, visceral, and forged in the tradition of industrial gothic, *The Stranger at Graving Dock Three* is a novel of fire and salt, of men who shape iron and the iron that shapes them. For readers who love the brooding machinery of *The Terror*, the salt-cracked prose of *Moby-Dick*, and the quiet dread of a hammer falling in an empty hold—this is a story where every rivet tells a lie, and the only way out is through the weld.