Moontide: About the book

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International Horror Guild Award
nominee

Titanic meets The Perfect Storm meets The Sixth Sense on a haunted schooner off the drowned coast of Maine. Part nautical thriller, part mystery, part romance, Moontide is a ghost story with a jigger of horror, a generous splash of psychological suspense, and a supernatural twist you will never see coming.

Moontide, by Erin Patrick
Wildside Press, December 2001 (available now!)
Hardcover, $37.95 US / Ł29.95 UK
ISBN 1-587-15359-9

[ Jacket synopsis | Excerpts ]
[ What people are saying ]
[ About the publisher | About the author | About the editor ]
[ Where to order ]

Melanie Gierek hit bottom after her family died in a car wreck in Chicago. When the funeral was over, she got in her battered old car and drove east, toward Maine -- that was where her best memories were, from the summer she spent on the windjammers with her parents.
     The car died as she reached the coast. Melanie found herself taking work on a schooner, the Louisa Lee. And facing a situation she should never have encountered.
     Even under ordinary circumstances, boarding a nineteenth-century sailing vessel means taking a step out of time. But the Louisa Lee is no ordinary schooner, and when Melanie crosses that gangplank, her wayward life takes an outré turn.
     The job should be the answer to her prayers: Louisa Lee is a ship of grace and otherworldly beauty, a luminous addition to the Maine windjammer fleet. But Melanie finds the ship possessed of a sentient malevolence. When it turns treacherous, far from shore, there is nowhere to hide and nowhere to run. The cold, mysterious captain and hardbitten cook are no help, the eccentric passengers dress and act as if they were at a costume party, the ship's radio sings in the voices of the drowned, and the first mate is on a drunken, obsessive quest.
     To solve the mystery of the ship and save her own life, Melanie must hunt down the past -- but the chilling truth of Louisa's origins is only the beginning. Her dream cruise becomes a harrowing passage into the supernatural . . . and the fathomless depths of a tortured human mind.
     Set amid the breathtaking scenery of coastal Maine, driven by the hypnotic pulse of the sea, Moontide is a work of lyrical darkness whose stunning climax will take you from the edge of your seat to the edge of the world.

"Storm and dark congeal, giving shape to a thing of calcified malevolence. A knife-sharp prow impales the air; sails and rigging emerge behind it. A jagged, impossible tear in the clouds lets slip a shaft of moonlight, and the vessel's sides absorb it, glowing white as bone. Her blank transom slants in and under the hull like a grisly slide for the keelhauled.
"Her deck seems empty. Manned by memories, she has death for ballast, her timbers caulked with regret...."

Read the Prologue

"Alone, in the night, in the dark, with only raging wind for company, she found her sins and failures diminished. She heard things in the wind's roar: voices she didn't know, or voices long forgotten, or the voice of her own mind. An old Polish lullaby ran round and round, soft, suggestive. It mutated into the dirgelike opening chords of a Hunter-Garcia song. Then the sounds her mind concocted at the edge of sleep, the yips and cries of a brain gnawing on itself...."

Read Chapter One

Gerard Houarner, Stoker-nominated author of Dead Cat Bounce, The Beast That Was Max, and more
"Erin Patrick's haunting debut invokes the sea that too few of us have seen but we all instinctively know: a chartless void haunted in equal measure by the shades of the dead and the pain of the living; a place of fog and wind and mystery. You won't soon forget the last voyage of the doomed schooner Louisa Lee.": Stoker Award winner David Nickle, coauthor of The Claus Effect
"Erin Patrick has crafted a wonderful fantasy with a high measure of skill. A ghost story with a difference!": Mike Resnick, multiple Hugo Award winner, author of The Outpost and much more
"Erin Patrick writes a dreamy nautical ghost tale full of softly haunting lyric wonder.": Vera Nazarian, author of Dreams of the Compass Rose
"Fascinating, intriguing, and hauntingly beautiful in detail and plot, Moontide takes you on a terrifying journey to the depths of madness. I highly recommend this extremely enjoyable and satisfying debut novel!": Karen E. Taylor, Stoker-nominated author of The Vampire Legacy Series, Pinnacle Books

International Horror Guild Award nominee

About the publisher:

Founded in 1989, the World Fantasy Award-winning Wildside Press publishes fiction in a variety of genres, particularly mystery, horror, fantasy, science fiction, and thrillers. Their entertaining Website includes press releases, guidelines, tips for authors, information about their books, and often special offers and discounts. There's an active message board where you can talk to other readers, and they're launching an exciting line of free e-books.

About the author:

Erin Patrick has been enchanted by Maine windjammers since she first set foot on one in the nineteen-eighties. Add a lifetime fascination with ghost stories, from M. R. James to Shirley Jackson, and a book about a haunted schooner becomes a pleasurable inevitability. A poet and musician, she lives on the Atlantic coast with four cats.

About the editor:

Alan Rodgers edited the critically acclaimed magazines Night Cry and The Twilight Zone. Also a fine author, he won a Bram Stoker Award for his novelette "The Boy Who Came Back from the Dead" and has been nominated for another Stoker and the World Fantasy Award. His horror novels include Fire, Night, Blood of the Children, and Bone Music.

Here's where you can order Moontide online:

(Booksellers please order from Ingram as a back order)

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Check AllBookstores.com's search-and-comparison service to find the best prices (they often have store coupons, too, and they approximate shipping charges and tell you which states sales tax is added in). Books-a-Million currently has the lowest price (US$23.91) if you join their Millionaires' Club (only $5/yr--you usually recoup on your first order). B&N also has lower prices for their Readers' Club members.