When archivist Mara Clements arrives in Gull's Wane, Maine, to organize a century of county records, the boxes lead her to Mercy Station, a shuttered almshouse at the edge of the tidal marsh. Inside, she finds a brass key, a ledger of residents with names struck through in rust-red ink, and photographs where whole families are smudged into gray. A dust-caked reel-to-reel recorder, when threaded, plays a lullaby undercut by whispers that know her name.
As Mara rebuilds the index, people she meets—Abbie at the bait shack, Father Lorca from Saint Ravel—begin to vanish from photos, then from memory. The town speaks of the Forgotten, a shadow that gathers in the bell tower whenever the foghorn fails, fed by names written and erased. With the spring tides rising and her own journal pages turning blank, Mara climbs the stairs with a salt-stiff rope and a sputtering lantern, forced to choose which name to pull back from the dark, knowing the sea will take something in return.
A measured crawl through fog and file folders, anchored by a strong final choice, though the middle loops one too many times around Mercy Station.
If you like the clinical unease of Brian Evenson paired with the tidal melancholy of John Langan's The Fisherman, this will hit the sweet spot. The scares lean quiet, the horror accrues by absence, and the coastal lore is more bruise than blood. Readers who prefer suggestion over spectacle and archives over axe fights will be very happy here.
Gull's Wane feels properly tidal: bait shack gossip, church bells tangling with the foghorn, the marsh breathing, and Mercy Station rotting at the edge of it all. The folklore of the Forgotten is moody and convincing, yet the rules around the bell tower shadow stay so impressionistic that a few scenes blur into atmosphere more than consequence, which left me admiring the weather but wanting firmer stakes.
What grabbed me here is the meditation on naming as a kind of stewardship. The ledger is not just a prop; it is the book arguing that communities live or die by what they choose to record, and by what they permit to be erased.
The sound of the tape carries a moral, too, "a lullaby undercut by whispers that knew her name," which turns the comfort of memory into an obligation. Mercy Station becomes a shrine to the cost of remembering, and the tide a tax collector. The choice at the bell tower clarifies the theme without sermonizing, and it lingered with me like salt on the tongue.
Mara is written with the kind of practical curiosity that makes an archivist compelling without romance. She catalogs to make sense of her own hesitations, and the moment her journal begins to empty pulls her inward in a way that feels earned.
Abbie and Father Lorca read like neighbors you know by the way their voices carry across the tide, which is why their thinning presence hurts; their warmth lingers even as the town forgets.
As a piece of archival horror, this is deftly engineered. Chapters echo the records Mara sorts, with entries, fragments, and a recurring ledger that tightens the frame each time a name goes missing. The reel-to-reel motif hums through the book, and the choice to let photos blur rather than scenes shout keeps the dread steady.
The pacing is mostly sure, a touch foggy in the second act as Mercy Station history doubles back, but the sentences are salt-edged and economical, and the final ascent to the bell tower lands with a quiet thud you feel.
