Who doesn't love a good character-driven horror novel? Personally, this is my favorite storytelling format – in general, but also for horror in particular. Naturally, that meant I had to give Black Tide, written by K.C. Jones, a chance.

Mike and Beth thought they had walked onto a romance story set. They met by chance, in a moment that sparked a series of other delightful memories. Unfortunately, they will quickly learn it wasn't a romance they walked into – but a horror.

The next morning the couple wakes not to shyness and awkward conversation but destruction. While they slept, the world burned as an astronomical event caused waves of destruction. To make matters worse, this was only the beginning of something worse.

“Stories explained the unknowable before the advent of science. What happens when science is left shrugging its shoulders?”

To be very clear, Black Tide is favorable compared to Cujo and A Quiet Place. So if you don't enjoy horror or the more graphic elements that come alongside these stories, you're best staying clear.

Personally, I probably should have let the Cujo comparison warn me off a bit. Sometimes it got to be borderline too much for me, and I'm not generally bothered by graphic elements. It's more than the specific type of elements got to me, if that makes sense (I'm trying to avoid spoilers here).

Still, I have to admit that Black Tide is a well-written novel. I love that the characters are the ones to push every plot revelation forward. This human connection made the horror feel more natural – for better and worse. It's why this storytelling format works so well in this genre.

Like any true horror, you'll probably find yourself screaming at the main characters. They don't always make intelligent decisions. This isn't great for their survival odds but for providing us with more information, so I suppose that's the trade-off.

Long story short, Black Tide was an interesting and compelling read. One that had a delightful amount of atmosphere and character development.

Black Tide is a tense and horror-filled read. Black Tide follows two strangers who have a drunken one night stand on the same night the world around them quickly changes after a mysterious meteor shower. There is a constant,. creeping sense of dread that builds throughout the novel creating a compelling reading experience.
Thank you to Netgalley and Tor/Nightfire for the opportunity to read and review this title. All opinions and mistakes are my own.

3.5 stars. This is a cosmic apocalypse novel and the vibes for the cosmic insane aliens that make you lose your minds, but also want to eat you are there, but I struggled with Beth's POV. I liked Mike's, but I didn't warm up to Beth until probably 100 pages in and at that point I already felt like this was teetering on a 3 star, but I loved how hopeful and positive this book became. It could've taken the route of The Road and made us all so depressed that we wanted to curl into a ball and reflect on life for several days, but this novel shifts the perspective from starting with the feeling to ending with the intensity of the what if I don't die today and there is so much to live for? I liked that shift quite a lot and I think that's what won me over in the end. Review to come.

Beth is a young house-sitter who's trying to get her life together, and Mike is a former film producer contemplating suicide and battling his grief over his wife leaving. The two meet by chance and spend one night together before the world ends. When a meteor shower brings in a host of hostile alien creatures, the two find themselves stuck on the beach and fighting for their lives. I received an invitation to read a free e-ARC through NetGalley from the publishers at Macmillan-Tor/Forge. Trigger warnings: character death (on-page), parent/spouse/animal death, suicide attempts/ideation, drowning, blood/gore, body horror, severe injury, fire, guns, dementia. NSFW content.

For some reason I thought I was going into a water horror novel in the style of Creature from the Black Lagoon (1954) or even Sweetheart (2019). Instead, I got a discount alien sci-fi novel that flounders around in its overly-complicated mythology with a couple of main characters I prayed would get eaten. The first chapter was a shock when I realized the narrator was supposed to be a 20-something woman. I don't know how to explain the difference, but the narration came off utterly male, which I quickly corrected to female-written-by-a-male. She sleeps with a guy who's much older in the first chapters, which frankly comes off like old-man wish fulfilment. ‘Human car wreck’ isn't a personality, and it's never clear exactly how Beth has managed to ruin everything she's ever touched. I hate that I find Mike more sympathetic, but there's a lot more attention to his sad history and emotional recovery than there is to Beth's.

That being said, neither of these characters are in any way likeable, and it's not even clear why they're the main characters because they spend most of the novel doing absolutely nothing. They're not clever, skilled, or particularly good at surviving, which I guess is kind of the point, but they never get any better at it either, and the major character development seems to be mostly in deciding whether they want to live at all. I'm not much of an alien fan at the best of times, and while there are vague attempts to explain that this isn't an invasion so much as an accidental mashup of universes, there are too many weird things running around. I can handle the attacking teeth-monsters (even though it makes no biological sense for them to have eyes at all if they're invisible) and even killer plants, but I draw the line at carnivorous sky jellyfish. It's too many weird things in a book that's already pretty weird. The action of the novel stays in one place--a car on the beach--for way longer than is actually interesting, as the characters just kind of shrug and say 'I guess we're stuck here?' By the time they realize they might actually need to do something to survive, the book is basically over.

I review regularly at brightbeautifulthings.tumblr.com.

Great premise! Felt very fresh and original. Loved the characters. They all felt very relatable. The plot is filled with suspense and tension. However, my enjoyment of the story went down after what happened to the pet dog. He was a main character and a good boy. It was disappointing with what happened with him.

Black Tide was a cosmic horror novel and the premise was good! But overall, this book was just ok. I didn’t hate it but I didn’t love it either. I just didn’t really care for the characters safety throughout. I didn’t connect with the characters and I think that was the biggest downfall for me. I don’t want to say much because I truly think the less you know the better. Giving it a three stars because I did enjoy the premise.

Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for an advance copy in exchange for my honest review.

Wow! This is a summer blockbuster movie in book form! I laughed, cheered and cried and loved every minute I spent in these pages.

Beth is tired of being a fuck-up. Of living couch to couch trying to find the next drink, the next gig, to fund another day.

House and dog sitting seems like a perfect chance to live as someone else. A chance to clean up her life and stop disappointing her parents. Maybe sober up a bit.

This is the time she’ll turn everything around. Until her mysterious neighbour, Mike, appears. A man she’s only seen in the shadows of his home. Outside of his house! It doesn’t seem right to let him drink that bottle of champagne by himself.

One bottle turns into many and Beth wakes up in Mike’s bed to a broken world. A kaleidoscopic nightmare. An astronomical storm that created a fissure between two realms.

Two strangers forced to rely on each other to live another day. In a battle for survival on an isolated beach. With many forms of eldritch horror ready to consume them.

I’ve read and seen similar themes in books and movies but this had a truly unique claustrophobicness. It was absolutely action packed, and I loved the tension in the one-night stand turned apocalypse buddies story so much.

Thank you to Tor Nightfire and NetGalley for an arc of this title.

Black Tide was okay. The book lacked in something and I am not quite sure what that was. There were parts that had me creeps out but then some of the writing took me out of the story. Overall, this was at entertaining.

This book follows Mike and Beth, two strangers who become stuck together on a beach in a dangerous situation. It's hard to give more explanation than that without giving too many spoilers.

Overall, I found this to be an incredibly unsatisfying read for a variety of reasons.

1. I found the writing to be incredibly awkward to follow. There were several sentences that I had to reread several times to be able to parse them. Some of the phrasing was weird and inconsistent. I also noticed barely any difference between the two characters' inner monologues. Sometimes I would start a chapter, accidentally skip over whose POV it was, and would not be able to tell you who it was without searching out which pronouns were being used for the other person.

2. The backstories to Mike and Beth did not help the story in any way. In fact, I wish we had spent less time on their back story and more time on the situation at hand. Beth being a trainwreck had absolutely no bearing on the story other than her complaining in her inner monologue.. nothing she lamented about in the beginning of the book had any bearing on the ending. It also drew on a tired trope and made me not care to read about her character.

3. The pacing was absolutely glacial. This was a short book and it took me a long time to slog through. I did not find it to be very creepy so the scenes where they were waiting it out were more boring than high-tension. I wish we had more things that moved the plot and setting forward rather than the large amounts of exposition between small events.

Thank you to the publisher and NetGalley for the gifted eARC!

Overall this was a fast paced horror thriller, it did lose me for a very short time in the middle of the book, just too much too quick, especially with every object getting named within a chapter...don't know how else to say that without spoilers.
I think this book would make a great movie 🎬

Ahoy there me mateys!  I received this horror eARC from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.  So here be me honest musings . . .

The story begins with following Beth, who is a mess of a person.  If there is a bad choice, she will make it.  I had a hard time with the beginning of the novel because I didn't find Beth to be likeable at first.  I also didn't like the continuing analogy of her being a "car wreck."  I did find her job of house-sitting for the rich to be kind of fun.  Beth is bored and looking for trouble so she goes to seduce the neighbor, Mike.  But the one-night-stand happens to coincide with the end of the world.

Mike and Beth initially don't know what is going on because they were focused on other things.  I enjoyed that set-up.  The two (and the dog) go to the local beach to collect meteors that fell that night.  While there, they begin to learn what really happened and also end up trapped in the car.  For a story where the characters are stuck, I actually found a lot of tension and suspense.  Both the characters and the reader are learning as the day progresses and that was a lot of fun.  Plus I enjoyed the reason the world ended and how Beth and Mike deal with it.  The strangers have to rely on each other to survive.

There were some negatives.  Things do not go well for Jake the dog and really was the dog necessary?  He seemed added in to elicit sympathy and be a plot device.  Also a third character is thrown into the mix and that is where both the plot and especially the ending did not appeal to me.  The book is filled with unbelievable things that are still fun but when third character arrives, the unbelievability involving the human behavior is ratcheted up and I didn't like it.  It is personal preference though.  Others might enjoy that twist.  Oh and there is a random sex scene in the latter part of the book that could have been tossed out for the better.

Overall though, I really enjoyed the tension of being trapped in the car on a beach with otherworldly creatures.  The ending was vague and the characters seemed hopeful.  But I don't think things bode well for them.  Arrr!

A little dark and twisty. I give it 3 stars. I am so grateful for this ARC and I will deff buy this book to read again. I liked it a lot.

I really enjoyed this one. Very character driven and creepy. The sound that the creatures make I swear I keep hearing. Someone opened my door and it squeaked and I jumped, I was so into this book. It reminded me of that movie The Mist but with a much better ending. I loved the plot and the character development.
Duel POV between Mike and Beth and at the end Natalia. It was a bittersweet ending.

This didn't go exactly how I thought it would but it was an enjoyable summer read. I was hoping for more of the sci-fi horror and less of the character driven drama, but I still really enjoyed the concept for this story. I think this would make an excellent sci-fi horror movie!

Black Tide is a book about an alien invasion, sure, but it’s first and foremost about people. Beth and Mike’s paths cross early on in the story, and both are complete messes in different ways. Beth, for her part, can’t keep her life on the rails. Mike, on the other hand, is a stable guy on the outside, but he doesn't have much interest in this little thing called life.

These two characters are the kind that you don’t particularly love, but you do find yourself rooting for. You want them to be better. The fascination is in seeing them thrown into the apocalypse as complete strangers and watching them learn more about each other—and, more importantly, about themselves.

This book lives by Murphy’s Law: If anything can go wrong, it will. Every chapter brings forth a new life-or-death problem. It seems like these characters can never catch a break, and even when they did, it felt like they took one step forward only to take 10 steps back. The aliens themselves are living nightmares, and the stakes were incredibly high throughout. We see real consequences to people’s actions.

Not everyone will love Black Tide because of the ending. I enjoyed that it was open-ended, that those left standing still had a journey ahead of them, but that doesn’t mean everything works out for the good guys. But if you’re into the kind of horror/sci-fi movies that scare you and make you think, the kind that remind you we’re fragile creatures with a whole lot left to lose, then Black Tide is for you.

This is the perfect book for readers in the mood for a creepy creature feature. After meeting over the fence and sharing a bottle of champagne, two strangers become trapped on an isolated stretch of coastline. Something happened the night before and the world has changed. Things are shrieking in the dunes that separate them from the road. The tide is coming in. The book gets off to a slow start but when things started to really happen it had me holding my breath and crossing my fingers for the characters.

Black Tide by K.C. Jones is a poignant, introspective novella about two strangers adrift in life who are trying to weather a storm (or in this case, an alien invasion) together. It’s a really beautiful metaphor about not “swimming alone” in life or else you risk drowning.

While the story excels as a character drama, it’s the sci-fi components that unfortunately didn’t work for me. Without getting into too many spoilers, there are multiple alien species invading and some of the far-flung sci-fi elements felt rushed and half-explained, and the implausibility of it all broke my immersion from the story.

Perhaps this can boil down to an issue of length, but I felt either the aliens should have more subtle or the novella should have been expanded into a full novel in order to flesh out its more intricate concepts.

I enjoyed this book as a whole, though I had a couple moments where I had to step back and take a breath because it was stressing me out how stuck the characters were in a very small and very dangerous situation. Looking back on various details now that I'm done, I do wish I knew more than I was allowed to know about the overarching theme, and also I could have used a tiny bit more closure on one of the characters, but I'll leave it at that. The conclusion of the book feels open-ended enough to warrant a sequel, but I get the impression that's not the plan, so oh well. I was entertained and would read another book in the same universe if there were to be one.

Beth takes a job house/dog sitting in an upscale beachside neighborhood in the PNW. The only other person braving the fall season is the mysterious neighbor, Mike. One evening Beth sees Mike outside drinking champagne and invites herself over. Neither knew the next morning would be the beginning of the end of the world.
Mike, Beth and Jake (the dog Beth is watching) venture out on the beach to check out the damage of what they think was a meteor shower. They get stranded on the beach and all hell breaks loose. They end up taking in a young girl, Natalia, and Jake proves we really don’t deserve dogs. There is an open ended ending, which aren’t my favorites - I like to know how things end. Overall, I enjoyed the book.