BOOK REVIEW: BENEATH CRUEL WATERS BY JON BASSOFF

12/7/2022

Jon Bassoff - Beneath Cruel Waters

Jon Bassoff returns with a bleak thriller loaded with bite and family secrets

Nine novels into a career which began back in 2013 Jon Bassoff continues on his own singular path, which frequently genre hops, veers into the darkest of places, whilst remaining refreshingly unpredictable. I have read most of his fiction and always look forward to discovering what curveballs he comes up with next. He is notoriously hard to pigeonhole and his type of horror is often blended with thriller, mystery or bizarro (and I have a feeling that is just the way he likes it). Of his recent output I was a massive fan of both The Lantern Man (2020) and the Drive Thru Crematorium (2019) which illustrate the quirky breadth of his fiction. However, if you want something even wackier then head to Jon’s previous novel Captain Clive’s Dreamworld, it was not by any means my favourite, but one cannot fault its creativity and originality.

Bassoff return to calmer waters (physically, but certainly not mentally) with his most mainstream novel for some years and, with a bit of luck, this psychological thriller has the potential to be a hit. Beneath Cruel Waters is a very entertaining non-supernatural page-turning thriller which had me on the hook from the striking opening chapter and I sped through in a couple of days. It was also blessed with a terrific sucker-punch and very sneaky ending in which the reader probably thinks they have sussed what is coming, before an outstanding final change of direction. This was a very cleverly constructed book and most readers (like I did) will enjoy being wrong-footed, with the most obvious answer not always the correct one, so follow the plot very closely.

I’m not going to contextualise the plot too much as it is very easy to head into spoiler territory by dropping too many hints. At the heart of the novel lies a long unspoken (the worst kind) family clash between a mother and son, which flicks back to when he was a child in the mid-eighties to returning home to Thompsonville, Colorado for her funeral. Memory is one of the key background themes to the story and how well we remember things from our childhood and the impact repressed memories might have on our adult life. Kansas firefighter Holt Davidson makes the trek home for the first time in over twenty years and for some reason, vaguely unsettled with undiagnosed anxiety, cannot stop rattling the skeletons in his family’s closet.

Beneath Cruel Waters beautifully captures his fraught state of mind who sees ghosts around every corner and cannot comprehend why his Jesus loving mother might hang herself at a remote house way off the beaten track. Although he hopes to make peace with her memory, instead he spends the night at his childhood home, rummaging through each room, exploring the past and the broken memories it holds. But nostalgic souvenirs are not what he uncovers, shocked he discovers a gun, a love letter, and a Polaroid photograph of a man lying in his own blood. It was relatively easy to figure out who the dead man was, but it was only one part of a significantly more complex mystery which plays out via the pacey plot.

Holt’s relationship with his teenage sister was both one of the great strengths and mysteries of the novel. On one level he remembers his bouncy and loving sister, who at some point takes a mental downturn and is institutionalised (with the ‘why’ being a key part of the novel). However, as a child he is too small to remember any of the finer details, except that it also impacted his relationship with his mother. All this is intertwined around memory, murky childhood half-recollections, and the idea that the past is never buried and along the way takes in mental illness, domestic violence, and looks at religion in a relatively non-judgmental way. As thrillers go I would not call this book a twister, as it was not difficult to predict the general direction it was heading, this did not make any less enthralling or satisfying.

In Beneath Cruel Waters, Bassoff intricately peels back the layers very slowly and drops secrets and details a little at a time so that experienced thriller readers can collect clues, bits and pieces of information, and formulate their own theories. As I said earlier, I thought I had cracked it, but still came up short. Ultimately this was a great, but extraordinary bleak read, and proves that we all have ghosts, especially in our childhood. Various points had me thinking of old haunts and places from my own personal life where you expect characters from yesteryear to appear from around the corner. If you have never read Jon Bassoff then this is a great place to start as this is easily one of his most accessible novels to date and then you can start having fun getting lost within his impressive and unique back catalogue.

Tony Jones

Beneath Cruel Waters
by Jon Bassoff

A wrenching psychological thriller in the vein of Tana French's In the Woods, Jon Bassoff's Beneath Cruel Waters reminds us that the sins of the mothers are the sins of the sons.
Holt Davidson, a Kansas firefighter, hasn't been back to his hometown of Thompsonville, Colorado, for more than two decades, but when he learns that his estranged mother has taken her own life, he returns for the funeral, hoping to make peace with her memory. He spends the night at his childhood home, rummaging through each room, exploring the past. But instead of nostalgic souvenirs, he discovers a gun, a love letter, and a Polaroid photograph of a man lying in his own blood.
Who is the dead man? Was his mother the one who killed him, and, if so, why? Who sent the love letter? And what role did his sister, institutionalized since she was a teenager, play in this act of violence? As his own traumatic memories begin to resurface, Holt begins an investigation into his mother's and sister's pasts--as well as his own.