BOOK REVIEW: BLOOD CRUISE BY MATS STRANDBERG

20/7/2018

by tony jones

“On the Baltic Sea nobody can hear you scream”

If you believe the hype tagged onto Amazon’s by-line for “Blood Cruise” it is “a thrilling summer chiller from the new Stephen King” which already has a large number of positive reviews from media outlets across Scandinavia. I suggest you tread carefully, this 560-page door-stopper really is not worth the hype and is really heavy going. However, it’s worth noting that Swedish author Mats Strandberg, also co-wrote the bestselling YA supernatural fantasy trilogy “Engelsfor” which although it’s relatively unknown in the UK is an excellent read and it’s easy to see why it’s popular in the Nordic countries. Comparing a relatively new author to Stephen King really does them no favours, especially if the product falls miles short of King’s own standard. I have no idea what they could possibly hope to gain from such comparisons. How many authors have been called the ‘New’ King and become a cropper? The graveyards are full of them.

“Blood Cruise” is set entirely over a 24-hour period on a booze-cruise linking Sweden and Finland and so spreading such a thin story over 560-pages is just too much. Folks go on this boat to get drunk, dance, party and abandon their lives for the day. The plot follows a mixture of passengers and staff with individual chapters named after the character, such as “Marianne” who is one of the bigger and more sympathetic of the bunch we follow. There are about ten in total, with a few of these being added as the novel progresses. The majority of them were fairly dull, which did not add much punch to the story, and because it is set over such a short period there was little in the way of back-stories to liven the one-dimensional group up. You might think a 24-hour story might ramp up the intensity, but for whatever reason it fell flat, maybe something was lost in translation.

The supernatural infestation kicks in after about 20% of this long novel and there too many similar scenes which were repetitive and bland. The problem with setting such a story on a boat is that there are only so many, very limited, ways it can play out. In the end you can always choose to jump overboard! (as one character does…) The passengers are lame ducks and easy to kill as there are so few places to hide, and because it happens so quickly there is not any sense of building dread. As I already said advance publicity has naively compared Mats Strandberg to Stephen King who wrote the book on slow and gradual vampire infestations in “Salem’s Lot” or the brilliant Robert McCammon doing it over a week in “They Thirst” or more recently Guillermo del Toro and Chuck Hogan in “The Strain” trilogy. This novel has absolutely nothing to compare it to major works in the genre, and certainly not the three I just name-checked. In “Blood Cruise” we have guys and girls singing karaoke one minute and running for their lives a few minutes later after buying a pint and no way of defending themselves apart from using their high-heels as weapons. But hey, this is Sweden, so at least there is a Eurovision connection in there somewhere! But for such a big book it really lacked tension and I could not help feeling that the Formica table setting of a boat did not help.

Funnily enough, one of the ‘characters’ is the boat itself the “Baltic Charisma” which was one of the more interesting sequences. “Blood Cruise” did have a few good ideas, seeing some of the same characters after they became infected worked well, and the way in which longer infected saw the recently converted as ‘newborns’ was a nice touch but many of these are simply lost in the sheer length of the book. The transformations themselves, teeth falling out and all, were also pretty cool. Ultimately though the back-story of where the infestation originated was nothing new and it did not particularly grab me or convince in any wider supernatural way.

Jumping from character to character became tiresome, at some points the chapter links were very small, and I began to confuse a couple of them as they merged together. Once the infestation started to rock most of the characters were in the same predicament so it really did go on too long and it lacked any character who stood out as a hero or someone to root for. “Blood Cruise” did pick up a slight head of steam in the last hundred pages, but there are just so many vampire novels out there, lots of readers now avoid them unless they have something new to offer and this does not. It’s effectively vampires on a boat (560-pages of it) and there is no point in disguising it as anything else. You’re very welcome to disagree, but I would also say his YA trilogy “Engelsfor” is considerably more challenging than this.

Tony Jones