This novel is fantastic; a wonderful mashup of The Hollow Places by T. Kingfisher, Cujo by Stephen King and Seeking a Friend for the End of the World! The writing style propels the story which makes this twisted tale un-putdownable. The characters are likable and relatable despite not having incredibly complex or intricate backstories or even a lengthy book. I absolutely loved it and hope to read much more from K.C. Jones!

As a house sitter out of need, Beth is used to moving around and being a disaster. When housesitting for a couple on the Oregon coast, she keeps herself busy by walking their dog and trying to imagine what life might be if she had one hell of a house. When she sees Mike drinking Don Perignon on his porch, she invites herself over. The two spend the night together, desperate for human connection. The possible embarrassment of the one-night stand is dwarfed dramatically by a meteor shower, and a terrifying invasion. Losing their car keys in the sand leaves them stranded on the empty Oregon coast while the two have to find a way to put aside their self-destructive natures to try and survive unspeakable horror. 

Black Tide is suspenseful, smart, and believable, which all make it even more terrifying. KC Jones is an excellent writer, and the character of Beth feels painfully real in a post-COVID world. I will say that I had a hard time with this one as the world is basically on fire right now and my brain wants so badly to avoid apocalyptic settings.  Still, the book is hopeful even with the anxiety and fear flooding through. 

Black Tide is available May 31, 2022.

The comp titles – Cujo and A Quiet Place – immediately piqued my interest, and a beach setting sealed the deal.

Like Cujo, much of this story is spent with the two main characters trapped in a car. As in A Quiet Place, silence is the best way to avoid these invading creatures. A little over two hundred fifty pages, this is a well-paced, quick read, and the action starts almost immediately. At first glance, Beth and Mike aren’t people you’d bet on to survive an alien invasion. Beth is irresponsible and basically a trainwreck, and Mike is teetering on a life and death decision in his personal life. But you play the hand you’re dealt.

After both characters have bizarre experiences during the night (dreams? hallucinations?), their day gets even worse when they go to the beach and discover they weren’t dreaming or imagining things. Their world has been invaded and the beach is being attacked. The descriptions of the alien creatures are creepy and very visual. Some of the scenes are fairly graphic, so if you’re a reader who prefers to avoid gore you might want to skip some paragraphs. The characters run into one obstacle after another in their attempts to survive, and there are plenty of tense scenes to sink your teeth into. Most are within the confines of a small car, and with two adults, a dog, and sweltering temps during the day it can feel pretty claustrophobic.

I like the way the author chose to end the story, leaving a feeling of hope for the characters because the odds sure aren’t in their favor. Black Tide is an intriguing blend of sci-fi and horror providing terror-filled visual scenes for fans of the genres.

I received a complimentary copy of this book from the publisher through NetGalley. Opinions expressed in this review are completely my own.

I liked the first half better than the second. I wish it had been more atmospheric and Jake deserved a better end, but it was good. I’ll definitely be checking out the author’s next book.

My thanks to Tor Nightfire for providing me with an ARC.

The world goes to Hell overnight in KC Jones’s Black Tide.

More than one boundary is crossed when “human car wreck” Beth hops a late-night fence for a late-night romp with a suicidal film producer. After a champagne-soaked one night stand, Mike wades out into the ocean for what is meant to be a one-way trip while Beth experiences strange dreams. But when the sun rises the next morning, it’s on a whole new world. Strange “alien bowling balls” litter the ground and shimmering, tentacled creatures float in the sky. It’s not good.

But this is only the beginning of Beth and Mike’s troubles.

When Mike and Beth track the sky fall up the Oregon coast, they unexpectedly find themselves stranded, the keys to Mike’s Subaru lost—by Beth, who’s chugging mimosas like the world is ending (which, of course, it is)—on a beach held in perimeter by monsters. The two are now stuck together in the worst possible circumstances, and have to survive both one another and the end of the world. When shrieking, invisible monsters shred everything else in sight, the two must hold themselves and each other together, no matter the cost.

Normally, science fiction—even the scary kind—is not my bag, but Black Tide is addictive, consuming, and bizarrely relatable. Maybe it’s being trapped in a car with a stranger you can’t live without. Maybe it was Beth’s willingness to sacrifice herself to save a dog. Maybe it was the mimosas. Either way, this book was unstoppable, un-put-down-able, and while the world may have ended, my appreciation for Jones has just begun.

In KC Jones’ debut novel, the apocalypse is nigh. Before the meteor shower, Beth and Mike were simply strangers brought together by chance. After a drunken one-night stand, the two wake up to discover that what they thought was a meteor shower left a slew of destruction behind — including otherworldly threats. Stranded on the beach with no car keys and a rising tide, the pair find themselves fighting for survival as horror after horror closes in on them.

Right off the bat, Jones hooks readers with an intriguing first chapter. His writing style lends itself to the ominous tone throughout the book, with small moments of humor peppered in. But largely, the story hinges on the steady increase of tension. Jones does well spreading information evenly without losing the suspense. He withholds information, using each reveal to pile on the stakes. His writing cleverly mirrors the slowly rising tide in the story.

Jones’ decision to write from both Beth and Mike’s POVs also strengthens the story. Naturally, readers get a sense of each character’s personality and how it affects their responses to everything that’s happening. As they assess and work through each obstacle, readers gain more and more insight into each character. One thing that stood out for me is how Jones used Mike’s film experience to sprinkle in tidbits of story structure without ever really giving too much away. Another aspect I was also glad to see work in Jones’ favor is that neither Beth nor Mike is especially optimistic. Given the impossible circumstances, they’re realistic about their potential fates, but they aren’t entirely without hope.

Black Tide is the perfect choice for horror fans searching for their next read. It makes a great summer read and one for the spooky season. Jones makes full use of his beach setting, creating a palpable sense of claustrophobia that’s eerie and unsettling. The included gore is visceral but never gratuitous. Jones weaves in equally punny and self-deprecating humor that offers many laugh-out-loud moments. He answers major questions through Beth and Mike without making them all-knowing, leaving just enough information to keep readers satisfied and reiterate that, like Beth and Mike, they won’t ever fully know or understand the truth. It’s a well-paced story filled with suspense and a build-up that keeps readers on edge and wanting more.

Simplistic but readable

This was an okay creature feature read. Set on the northern Oregon coast, it alternated viewpoints between the two main characters - Mike, a troubled movie producer and Beth, a troubled professional house sitter.

After a heavy-duty meteor shower (or was that all it was), Mike, Beth and of course the faithful dog head up north on the beach and there they find MONSTERS and not just one kind.

This was a quick read, or it should have been. It took me a few days to get through it. So probably not a book I would recommend.

I received this book from Tor NightFire through Net Galley in the hopes that I would read it and leave an unbiased review.

This was an action-packed apocalyptic sci-fi/horror novel. It doesn’t take long for things to get horrific and stay that way for the duration. It has been described as being similar to the movies, A Quiet Place, and that is honestly a very accurate comparison.

This is a one-setting book told in multiple POVs, with two narrators that both did a great job. I was rooting for the characters as they fought for survival against these otherworldly creatures. My pulse was pounding and the tension was high as I wondered the whole time how the hell they were going to get out of this.

With all of the action and terror, I did expect a little more from the ending. It was a bit ambiguous and a little lackluster after the mini heart attacks I almost had during the rest of the book. It is left open to a possible sequel if the author chose to do that, so I’m not sure if that’s the reasoning for it or not. I would definitely read the sequel if that became a reality!

Thank you to @netgalley @tornightfire and @macmillan.audio for the advanced copies of this book in exchange for an honest review!

This was a heck of a read and I really needed a thriller/suspense/dystopian book that was worthy of a 5 star review. I am glad this book only had a few main characters and a dog, so characters were not hard to figure out. Some other suspense books take longer to figure out the main character, which is is annoying and y9ou just want to get to the juicy bits of the story.

This book has a lot of juicy bits!! Beth is a mess of human being and does not really have her life figured out. But she ends up dog sitting in Oregon and there is a good looking stranger next door, I do not want to spoil the first meeting of Beth's encounter or how they come to rely on each other when disaster strikes.

"Sorry, humanity. You needed a Sarah Connor, or an Ellen Ripley, or even a Katniss Everdeen. You got me." - Beth's thought process.

I find this amusing and spot on when Beth said this. A reluctant heroine.

This was a fantastic dystopian/end-of-the world book and I highly recommend it. I will be getting this after publication day! Looking forward to the author's next book, if it is as good as this one.

Thanks to Netgalley, KC Jones and Macmillian Tor Forge NIghtlife for an ARC in exchange for an honest review.

Available: 5/31//22

Powered through this one in a couple of hours! I loved the characters and the alternating viewpoints. Just enough backstory to keep them interesting while not taking away from the pace of the novel, which was breakneck! My heart was racing!
Only one thing though, and I don't even want to post it here. It happens at the end, a sacrifice that didn't need to end that way...

Fun thrilling read, gripping from the start, interesting characters! A must read for people who really enjoyed the movie A Quiet Place!

3.5 stars. Billed as a horror novel, I'd say this is more of a character driven sci-fi/horror blend. That being said, I really liked the characters of Beth and Mike. Beth is a total mess, but tries her best to be a badass in the face of the world ending. Mike manages to turn away from his depression and find the will to live.

It was just another day at the beach. And then the world ended.

Mike and Beth didn’t know each other existed before the night of the meteor shower. A melancholy film producer and a house sitter barely scraping by, chance made them neighbors, a bottle of champagne brought them together, and a shared need for human connection sparked something more.

After a drunken and desperate one-night-stand, the two strangers awake to discover a surprise astronomical event has left widespread destruction in its wake. But the cosmic lightshow was only a part of something much bigger, and far more terrifying. When a set of lost car keys leaves them stranded on an empty stretch of Oregon coast, when their emergency calls go unanswered and inhuman screams echo from the dunes, when the rising tide reaches for the car and unspeakable horrors close in around them, these two self-destructive souls must find in each other the strength to overcome past pain and the fight to survive a nightmare of apocalyptic scale.

Thanks to NetGalley and Tor Nightfire for the free ARC in exchange for my honest review.

This is a well written invasion story charged with anxiety. The two main characters are reasonably realistic, especially in their reactions to the events. And the actual events are the kind of crazy you get sucked right into with horror. There's no explanation for why things actually happen and I wasn't disappointed by that because it seemed unnecessary. The anxiety was in whether the protagonists would survive and the story worked well that way.

It turns out not every beautiful meteor shower is an actual meteor shower! It might be a wrinkle in time space continuum that drops stinky alien bowling balls on our shores and shakes our understanding of this world and other planes that we didn't get to see yet.

Human wreck of a person as her mom calls her Beth, and fallen from grace Hollywood producer Mike met on eve of this extraordinary event. Beth was housesitting to have a roof over her head and Mike was planning to end his misery. Instead, they hit it off (thanks to bottles of Dom). In the middle of the night, hoping to execute his plan Mike experienced this crazy event. Beth experienced another, yet more scary version of the same event in her sleep. Next morning was when Pandora's box was opened. Apocalypse might be here already and everyone on the West Coast of the US were oblivious to it until invisible started to do visible deeds.

What happened on the beach that Beth and Mike were stranded after casually going for a drive to see more of these "meteors" was a nightmare fuel. I would love to see this book as a movie. My imagination went little wild with the way events and things were described, so I wonder if others imagine the same! It's an interesting horror sci-fi if you are interested in this genre.

Black Tide is a great survivalist beach read for any fan of Jaws, Alien, or the Walking Dead! Two strangers with melancholy back stories find themselves trapped together on a beach fighting for their lives against alien-like creatures afraid to get in the water. One of the main settings took place in vehicle (ala Cujo), but this didn't take away from the story. The monsters reminded me of something from Quiet Place, or Alien itself, as they could become invisible and operated on sound or sight. Overall, while I'm not a huge fan of these types of stories, I thought this one was done well. I could actually see a tv show being made out of this (flashbacks of our characters' history vs what's happening at the present time). The only reason I didn't give this 5 stars was the ending- I wanted more closure and information about the creatures.

Beth is a self-described car wreck. Wasting a life wandering. She’s trying to change and so far she is doing well housesitting. On the Pacific Coast where billionaires from Silicon Valley have built massive homes by the beach. This time it’s for a couple who is out of the country. She also is dog sitting. And doing a responsible and safe job of it. Which for her is boring but no one has gotten hurt yet.

Mike is the next-door neighbor. Dealing with his own demons. When he and Beth meet over the fence and share a lot of champagne, they wake up to chaos and the world turned on its head.

They thought it was a simple meteor shower. It was not. And now they are stranded with no help and a lot of screams along with a dog who is not happy!

Aliens, strange lights, people disappearing in horrible ways, all of that, and more. For myself, there were a lot of plot holes, and I would have probably left Beth and the dog!

NetGalley/ May 31st. 2022 by Nightfire

Thanks to Edelweiss/NetGalley and the publisher for an ARC in exchange for an honest review.

Let's clear something up before I go into this. I didn't think the book was *bad.* Did it drag? Yeah. Could it have been a novella without losing anything? Absolutely. Was the kid at all needed as a character? No.

Was it bad? Also no.

So we have your standard alien invasion: bad signs in the sky just before hell breaks loose, stuff falling from space(?), then creatures showing up and our heroes figuring out how to take them down. The "tide" part of the title is a bit deceptive, as the book takes place on a beach but has little to do with the actual water. Which was pretty disappointing to me. Stuff from space is scary, sure, but what about the things that live just below us? Where they're naturally a part of our world in the first place, then just decide, "You know what? F those people on land. I'mma kill 'em."

The aliens themselves had biological factors that didn't make much sense. There was a lot going on with them that seemed contradictory, but it's an invasion book. I suspended my disbelief long enough to get through and not hate it. It kind of felt like a movie you'd watch on the SyFy network, along the lines of "Lavalantula" or "Piranhaconda." (I have watched both with popcorn in a bowl and a cold soda at my side.) The alien origin also was unclear, and if Beth's dream in the beginning of the book had actually proven true--some kind of weird dimensional overlap--that would have been neat. I wouldn't have expected it to be explainable right away if at all. However, the invaders were rather typical overall.

As for the characters, they were average at best. I didn't like Beth much at the beginning, but by the end she'd grown on me. That said, Mike's voice was definitely the least distinctive. I constantly mixed up his narration with Beth's if her name wasn't in a dialogue tag so often. Natalia was a useless last-act addition, and Jake was my favorite. The little golden good dog who derped his way right into my squishy canine-loving heart. And then K.C. Jones killed him, and the rest of the book was pointless to me.

YES. The dog dies. Sure, it happens off-page technically, but I don't care. You gave me a dog who was fantastic, made him fluffy and beautiful, and then he died. That's such a dick move as an author.

Honestly, Jake's death knocked off a whole star for me. The aliens and Mike did the rest of the damage. If someone needs a popcorn read that's quick and doesn't take much thought, this is a good remedy.

I don't read a lot in this genre, but this book definitely felt creative; unfortunately, the monsters were so creative that I couldn't quite remember how they worked at times, which made it hard to feel the tension of the story. Still, the author's writing was visceral and claustrophobic at times.

Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for a free advance reader copy in exchange for an honest review!

3.5 creepy stars rounded up to 4!

This one was a fantastic mix of creature feature horror, a beachy atmospheric setting, and constantly questioning if the main characters are fully sane or if they are imagining what was happening. Written to evoke many different emotions in the reader, the scenes that stuck with me the most where ones that our main character was feeling so trapped and claustrophobic that I was beginning to feel very anxious and boxed in as well. While there were definitely points throughout that I felt lulled just a little bit, overall this was a pretty quick read and fit a lot into it's 275 pages.

If you're someone who has previously enjoyed bird box, the venom movies, or the black winter series by darcy coates, I highly recommend giving this fun horror novel a try. Publishes Tuesday, May 31st!

Thank you to Netgalley and Tor Nightfire for providing me with an ARC for review!

Thank you so much, NetGalley for the ARC on this wild little sci=fi=horror theme park ride......
Quite a non-stop, breathless whirlwind of a day at the beach that turns grisly, horrific, and suspenseful to excruciating degrees.
Tearing through this book, the print equivalent of one of those summer butter-popcorn movies, reminded me of that amusement park ride that just looks like a big boat that simply sways back and forth like a pendulum. Once you get on it, you realize it's plunging your center of gravity so relentlessly, you and your fellow riders are screaming for mercy..
You couldn't find two more damaged souls than Mike and Beth - he's a suicidal failed ex movie producer tormented by tragedy and she's a wandering housesitter with a long sad history of alcoholism and abuse. They manage to stumble into a one night stand on a stretch of Oregon beach.......and awaken to an impossible but all too real nightmare - a ghastly alien invasion apocalypse, complete with an onslaught of vile, terrifying creatures, fully equipped with snapping jaws, razor teeth and tentacles.
From that point on, it's a perpetual, breathless, bloody Worst Day At The Beach for Mike, Beth and Jake, the big sweet dog left by the homeowners Beth was sitting for. One nightmarish reversal-of-fortune piles up after another as the trio find themselves trapped and hunted by a variety of monsters.
And in the midst of the fierce siege they're under, a surprising and most unlikely ally joins them in their increasingly desperate struggle to survive.
Author KC Jones was obviously more than inspired by the "A Quiet Place" films and Stephen King's novella "The Mist" (both book and film).........his main contribution here comes from compressing all the horror into one single afternoon, which renders any reader incapable of putting the book down for even a minute.
For anyone who fondly recalls the chills and thrills they had from those summertime fun rides like "Jaws" and "Aliens", this one should zoom right to the top of your TBR list.