The fog came first, strangling the harbor at Graymarsh and slicking the cobbles of Marden Street. Then the murmurs began—thin as gnats—threading the sleep of dockhands, schoolchildren, and the parish clerk alike. Night after night a figure walked the tidal flats: a tall man in a salt-stained coat, a rusted ship's lantern guttering in his fist, leaving hoofish prints along Rivener Road. They named him the Boatman, oathbreaker and usher of grief, and every dog tucked its tail when his silhouette brushed the net racks by Quay House. The ossuary beneath Saint Brigid's shook like a kettle, the whale-bone gate at Kettle Point swung without wind, and the horizon to the west blackened like oil. His hour ticks loud.
For readers who taste ash in their dreams and wake with brine on their tongues, Murk and Malevolence opens a door best left barred. Those entering Graymarsh for the first time will discover an unnervingly plausible chronicle of communal dread—names in ledgers, charms chalked on doors, radio dead-air at WGRM 88.3—that reckons with how towns endure or perish, and the quiet bargains we strike when we fear the dark more than we fear ourselves.
I wanted the dread to live under my skin, but the chill kept lifting.
The book worries at communal bargains and the cost of looking away. It keeps asking who benefits when a town names its fear, as if saying "they called him the Boatman" absolves the hands that keep the harbor running.
The thinking is sharp, yet the argument can feel diagrammed, more sermon than story in stretches. I admired the ideas more than I was moved by them.
Astonishing atmosphere. The ossuary under Saint Brigid's shivers, the whale-bone gate at Kettle Point swings without wind, and the horizon slicks black like oil. It coheres into a coastal cosmology that feels discovered rather than invented.
I loved how practical detritus anchors the occult, from the net racks by Quay House to chalk charms that smudge in rain to a ledger line that trembles where a name should be. Graymarsh is a place I can smell, from brine to old rope, and its fear has weight.
Most of the cast is glimpsed at margins and thresholds, which suits a town ruled by rumor. The Boatman barely speaks, yet the hoofish prints and that rusted lantern function like a personality, reflecting the anxieties of dockhands and the parish clerk in short, bruised scenes. I admired the restraint, but I wanted deeper stays with a few voices so their bargains with fear could cut closer.
Graymarsh is rendered in sentences that glint like fish scales, damp and granular. The structure is patient, with chapters that behave like fogbanks; they roll in, slip away, and leave residue. The radio dead-air at WGRM 88.3 is a clever refrain, and the ledger snippets sell the fiction of communal bookkeeping. A few ellipses of time feel coy, but the last third tightens enough to sting.
Moody and fog-logged, this reads like a tide chart rather than a chase, the Boatman pacing Graymarsh while dread seeps into every doorstep.
