The Tide Takes What's Owed
A 1920s Folk Horror Novel

About this book:

The RMS *Sovereign* is the pride of 1924—eight hundred feet of gyro-stabilized steel, Turkish baths, and crystal chandeliers, carrying the wealthy and the desperate toward a New World that promises to leave the Great War behind. But the North Atlantic has a longer memory than the passengers sipping champagne in the Grand Lounge. It remembers the keening of gulls, the taste of iron in the water, and the old bargains struck in tar and blood on the Yorkshire coast. When the barometer drops and the fog rolls in thick as oil, the ship's modern marvels offer no shield against the rhythm pulsing up from the engines—a sound less like pistons than a patient, grinding heartbeat.

Arthur Pendelton boards with three crates of Icelandic manuscripts and a ledger of debts he prays the sale will clear. He expects a rough crossing, perhaps a bout of seasickness. He does not expect the ice in his glass to taste of harbor rot, or the ship's carvers to have hidden kelp-tendrils and clawed fingers in the gilded paneling. He does not expect the crew to slip below decks on the third night to feed the mast a bucket of something dark and hot. And he certainly does not expect Beatrice Harlow, the sharp-eyed illustrator sketching the ship's hidden sigils, to tell him the truth: the sea does not care for steamships. It only knows weight. And it always collects what it is owed.

From the neon-lit corridors of First Class to the tar-stained shadows of the forepeak, *The Tide Takes What's Owed* drags the golden age of ocean travel into the cold black depths of folk horror. Here, the stabilizers cannot stop the roll of an ancient swell, the electric lights only make the shadows deeper, and the only way to survive the voyage is to read the fine print on the ancestral pact before the Abyssal Altar claims its due.