When the factory trawler Krossvík limps into Breaker's Inlet with one body zipped in a blue bag, the island town shrugs toward the ritual they think they know: tallow candles, codfish stew, borrowed hymns. But the dead man, Ólafur Jónsson—deckhand, sometime fiddler, letters from Akureyri folded into his boot—will not keep still. In the morgue freezer the bag frosts from the inside; the bell buoy 6A Orpheus tolls at dead calm; the harbor dogs won't bark. Evie Markham, a night orderly fresh off the 3 a.m. shift, is handed the gurney and the problem by dawn: walk the stranger to Penumbra Light before evening tide, or the inlet will be taken in his place.
Evie gathers a ragged cortege—Cal Buxton, a lobsterman with a rusted skiff and a secret ledger; Rae Okoye, valedictorian counting down to a scholarship in Boston; and Marta Rúnarsdóttir, a visiting pastor who recognizes the dead man's stitched name and refuses to say how. Their route is mapped in folkways and prohibitions: cut the dulse rope, carry salt in the mouth, never look back at the icehouse door. Every mile unearths what each has knotted tight—disappearances, debts, unasked-for desires—while the town's carved figureheads creak from museum rafters and the moon slides higher than it should. By nightfall, with the lighthouse stairs slick and the wind talking in old vowels, Evie must choose whether to pay the inlet's old tithe with a name, a mouthful of breath, or a life. Grim and oddly tender, Last Rites for Ólafur is a brine-laced novel of working-class hauntings, found family, and the stubborn manners of the dead.
Lucas Radcliffe is a British-born writer of horror and weird fiction and a former night-shift orderly. Raised in Salford, he moved to the New England coast in his twenties, where fishing harbors and fog-bound islands seeped into his work. He studied folklore at the University of Manchester and holds an MA in creative writing from the University of East Anglia, grounding his stories in ballads, shorelore, and the uneasy rituals of ordinary life.
His short fiction has appeared in Nightmare, The Dark, and numerous small-press anthologies, and he edits the micropress chapbook series Brine. Radcliffe's interests range across folk horror, maritime gothic, and intimate supernatural terror, with a focus on working-class lives and the uncanny textures of place. He is the author of In the Cradle of Nightmares and Last Rites for Ólafur. He lives in Portland, Maine, where he teaches community workshops on uncanny literature and place-based horror, and walks a rescue greyhound named Lumen along the Eastern Prom.
Salt-bitten and tender, this reads like Brian Evenson meeting Priya Sharma by a cold lighthouse: austere sentences, coastal myth turned practical, and a quiet dread that lingers like spray.
I bounced off this one.
La ambientación es lo mejor: sal en el aire, la campana 6A Orpheus sonando cuando no debería, y esas reglas que organizan el camino hacia Penumbra Light. El folclore guía cada tramo con precisión, como si el mapa estuviera hecho de hábitos de trabajo y miedos viejos.
A veces, sin embargo, las reglas del mundo sobrenatural se sienten opacas y me alejaron un poco de la tensión. Aun así, la sensación de deuda entre pueblo y mar, y la terquedad de los muertos, construyen un clima que vale la travesía.
What lingered for me were the people hauling the gurney. Evie's exhausted kindness feels earned, not ornamental. Cal's secret ledger tilts him from stock lobsterman into someone I kept recalculating, and Rae's countdown-to-leaving jitters crackle against every superstition. Marta is the book's quiet blade, her refusal to name things making the moral stakes bite harder. Dialogue glances off like rain on slickers, short and exact, giving the quartet room to keep secrets without the narrative going muddy.
A smartly engineered procession novel, bracketed by dawn and tide, with chapter breaks keyed to folkways that double as stage directions. The sentences are lean and purposeful; the restraint lets the weirdness breathe without crowding the reader.
Momentum dips a touch after the first third as the rules accumulate, but the structure holds, and the lighthouse ascent snaps everything taut again. A measured, sea-cold piece of horror craftsmanship.
I am in awe of this novel. The rituals feel knotted to tendon and tide, not decorative, and that bell buoy tolling at dead calm shivered me right to the bone. The dogs that refuse to bark, the body-bag frosting from the inside, the borrowed hymns that do not soothe but keep time: it all hums with consequence.
This is a story about cost, about who keeps the ledger when towns prefer forgetting. The working lives matter. The codfish stew and the cold metal of the gurney matter. I love how the book insists that grief is not abstract here but measured in hours, backs, and seawater. The community is prickly and stubborn and also, somehow, a net that holds.
Evie's procession reads like a hard prayer. The prohibitions are deliciously tactile: "carry salt in the mouth," do not look back at the icehouse door, honor the cut rope. Every step toward Penumbra Light feels paid for, and every companion brings a truth they would rather have left in the dark.
The prose tastes of brine and iron. Figureheads creak in museum rafters, the lighthouse stairs go slick under a moon that will not settle, and the wind speaks in vowels older than the town. I kept pausing to breathe because the pages felt colder as the day warmed, which is such a startling and perfect trick.
By the end, I was grateful for how tender the book is about labor and debt, breath and name. Horror that minds its manners until the moment it must not, and then it asks a price with perfect clarity. Magnificent.
