The Burial Tide, by Neil Sharpson

She wakes to the sound of singing, and finds herself in the dark. To begin with, she doesn't have a name or any memory - but Mara has been buried alive. Forcing her way out of the coffin and up through the wet ground, she finds three more fresh graves besides her one, and a community who aren't entirely forthcoming about what's been going on...

This is a brilliant, fast-moving and properly horrible novel, sort of John Carpenter's The Thing set on Craggy Island. Each short chapter is from the perspective of one the small group of characters and labelled with their name. In the opening pages, when Mara can't recall who she is, her chapters don't have titles; later, when some stuff happens that I won't spoil, there's a chapter title with multiple names. It' a simple but effective way of underlining the horror.

The small island community, off the Irish mainland, feels at once very specific and completely ordinary, which grounds the more outlandish elements of the story in the stolidly real. Mara quickly makes friends with two young people who are, each in their ways, not quite part of the island community. The three friends share a quirky, flirty relationship, and it's often funny. We like them, we want to be part of their gang, so any threat to them feels all the more visceral.

Like Mara, we have to puzzle out who these people really are, and why they're so guarded about the secrets they're keeping. There are some compelling mysteries to unpick - why one young man hides his horrible scars, why a woman immediately lies about the death of someone else, who it is lying in those three other graves and how they really died. Even Mara is not what she, at first, appears.

While the story is told from the perspectives of its characters, and so see things from inside their heads, it's often a very visual story, full of moments that would work well on the screen. I think there's an excellent, breezy horror movie to be made from it. In fact, it's so lucidly told in dialogue and visuals that I almost feel I've already seen it.

What's particularly brilliant is that all the different threads are neatly tied up by the end, and the book doesn't outstay its welcome. The result is compelling and deliciously horrible, but satisfying, too. We're left with an image at once satisfying and haunting, as one prominent character forgets the awful events they've been part of and so are set free.