If you’re looking for an entertaining, tightly focused horror tale with interesting, diverse characters and a strong arc for the protagonist, you should consider Seann Barbour’s new novella, It Came from the Floodwaters, coming March 13. It starts out with people trapped in their Savannah apartment building by rising floodwaters, throws in some spooky notes, and then quickly escalates to pulse-pounding action with a high body count. But because the Big Bad is particularly interested in one special person, there’s also lot of creepiness woven throughout the story, along with the adrenaline rushes.
Although tightly focused geographically, there are actually a lot of viewpoint characters. It starts off with Tam, a would-be painter who’s paying their bills with shifts at a grocery, polyamorous but happening to be alone during the hurricane; then quickly sketches their May-November neighbors Henry and Brittney, mother and son Brianna and Cody, gamer Stephen and his roommate Kyle, survivalist Lionel, newlyweds Victor and Margaret, Ethan and his barking dogs, and his long-suffering neighbor Jon, unsympathetic roomies Cindy and Maeve, and restless Mark, who leaves his sleeping wife Jennifer to check if he can do anything about the power going out. When the flood breaks the glass doors of the lobby, something awful comes into the building.
There’s a lot of POV-switching as various characters meet gruesome but quick deaths. Not all the characters are sympathetic; lots of them seem nice, or at least neutral, but some readers may struggle a lot to identify with the gamer and the survivalist who are each secretly thrilled with the opportunity to prove themselves.
However, we return again and again to what Tam is doing and thinking. While Tam is making friends and alliances, and seeing and fleeing horrible things, and occasionally fighting back, they also keep thinking about their history, and their relationships.
The Big Bad drains people, and acquires minions, but isn’t exactly what the characters or most readers would expect from a vampire. In dreams and speech, it tries to convince Tam that they have a special destiny together. (This reminded me a lot of the scene in Fright Night [1985] when Jerry Dandridge corners Ed: “You don’t have to be afraid of me. I know what it’s like being different.”) But Tam has spent their life trying to resist being defined and put into boxes by other people, and this gives them some strength to try to resist.
It Came from the Floodwaters is quite different from the Barbour book that I read and enjoyed in 2024, The Thief and the Wild, which focused on one character but had a much more complicated plot and really explored some of the tensions between nature and civilization, and chaos and order. But this short, sharp horror-adventure kept me entertained, and I will certainly be interested in whatever Barbour writes next.
It Came from the Floodwaters (139 pages), by Seann Barbour, will be published on March 13.
Content warnings: Deaths, loss, manipulation, macho toxicity, dream seduction, anti-LGBTQ+ attitudes by minor characters.
Disclaimers: I received a free eARC for review from the author.
