[Review] SACCULINA — Unexpected nightmare fuel

no mermaid titties found here.

Right. It’s time for another Tiktok-recommended book review, this time in the horror-thriller genre.

I’m admittedly not much of a thriller fan (very much for lack of intrepidity), but this was featured in a Booktok video recommending ‘short’ and ‘fast-paced’ books you can read in one sitting. Being the only one readily available on Scribd, the path the eBook gods intended for me was clear.

I’ve never read anything by Philip Fracassi before, so I had no idea what to expect going in. The Canva-grade skull-and-waves cover is giving Ghost Ship (2002) slay, but it’s hard to tell if it’s going to be a supernatural horror or murder mystery.

The plot is simple: When Jim’s brother Jack is released from prison, the two brothers, their father Henry, and Jack’s best friend Chris decide to go fishing in the ocean. After a couple of hours of disappointment, they rejoice when Chris gets their first catch. Their excitement is short-lived, however, when they realise that something is wrong with the fish they caught. Very wrong.

❛Ocean ain’t never safe, Mr Lowell❜

Having just finished The Hunting Party by Lucy Foley (review coming soon!), I thought this would be a nice comedown from all the drama. Well, Sacculina provided everything but respite.

Without words or time to waste, Fracassi’s descriptive but efficient prose herds you quickly onto that tiny fishing boat in the middle of the vast ocean, with nothing but fathoms of darkness around and below you.

At first, I wasn’t able to pinpoint why I felt afraid. The sea is relatively calm, there’s sunlight, there’s plenty of food and beer, and they’re close-ish to the shore. Still, Fracassi was able to impose a foreboding sense of loneliness and dread, so intense and palpable that I felt seasick.

And then I realised why.

In other closed-setting books like Stephen King’s Misery, Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None, and even Magaret Atwood’s dystopian The Handmaid’s Tale), the protagonists, despite being trapped, still have multiple routes for escape: running, killing, rebelling, etc. They had choices.

On a fishing boat in the middle of the ocean? You can’t run, you can’t hide, you can’t even call for help. You have like, three other people with you, two of whom you don’t know very well. If danger strikes, your only options are between being killed onboard or drowning. Chances of survival are close to zero — that is if the other passengers don’t stab you in the back first.

❛What’s up, pop? See some mermaid titties?❜

The unique circumstances enabled by the setting allow Fracassi to dial up the tension from 0-100. The story was a tad slow to its feet in the set-up, but when it goes, it REALLY goes. I mean— Holy. Fucking. Shit.

Once the group realises they’re being hunted, hackles rise, panic soars, and desperation skyrockets. The ensuing chaos only compounds the horror and utter hopelessness of their situation, especially when they find themselves overwhelmed by the unconventional antagonist.

Sounds cookie-cutter so far? Not at all. Fracassi said ‘screw your cookies, I’m baking a cake’.

The garden-variety horror elements are skillfully layered with subthemes of brotherhood, camaraderie (or lack thereof), and complicated family history — all elements I did not expect from such a short story.

The characters also feel like regular, flawed human beings. They are borderline unlikable in the most mundane of ways, shaded grey by a tragic backstory they can’t seem to escape from no matter how hard they try.

Surprisingly enough, the thick, oppressive atmosphere is deliciously perforated with a fair bit of comedy. Many scenes and dialogue bits prompted an unexpected chuckle or hard exhale through the nose, mostly little quips and snipes the characters make at each other. I’m not sure if the humour was intentional, though. Could just be my coping mechanism, lol.

❛Their new world was death now.❜

I have to hand it to Fracassi: to cram all that backstory and action into an itsy-bitsy, teeny-weeny, yellow polka-dot 99 pages is quite a feat, one he achieves with flair, pizazz, and a somersault for flourish. Like, damn, that ending really stuck the landing. It was set up so well and closed on the perfect sentence.

I enjoyed this nail-biting thriller way more than I expected to. So short and easy to read, too! I say you definitely get a bang for your buck for the hour or so you will spend devouring this.

A quick Google reveals that Fracassi is apparently a short-story whizz who frequently dabbles in cosmic horror and “modern-weird”. I’ve also seen his debut collection Behold the Void and the newer Beneath A Pale Sky being talked about on Booktok/Booktube here and there. Needless to say, I added them to my list straight away.

Subscribe to find out if I become an official Fracassi fangirl!

Read my previous rant on Romeo and Juliet 👉 The REAL reason Romeo and Juliet died.