Thanks to NetGalley for the ARC. Solid 4 out of 5 for me.

If you want a mildly mind twisty, dark fantasy romance, then this is the book for you. A relatively quick read, but it kept my attention with the mind games between all the characters.

You've got a ship with an all-female crew, whose memories begin to get muddled after the appearance of a person of the gentlemanly type. The love/list triangle definitely has a manipulative nature to it, as does the primary duo with possessive traits. You get some doses of sultry spice but it's not the focus of the story.

Overall a fun and different read

Full honesty - I was interested in this book initially because of the incredible cover art. I'd never read Rae Knowles before, but this is their second book. Merciless Waters is set in a fantasy time, but feels kind of regency era in its language and the clothing described.

This book is not only a vividly written literary horror book, it also features a beautiful sapphic romance. I'm more of a romance reader than a horror one and found the romance between Lily and Jaq to be filled with small moments that really made for a rich and well rounded relationship storyline.

This was a nice, and relatively quick read if you're looking for a break from what you're used to! Thank you to #NetGalley for letting check out an advanced copy and for introducing me to this new-to-me author!

First off, many thanks to NetGalley for letting me read this book as an ARC! I greatly appreciate it!

I don't think I've read a pirate book since I was in high school, but the sailing element here was pretty cool! The writing was lovely, too!

A lot of the background characters had really interesting stories, and it bugs me that one of them wasn't given the leading role, because neither Jaq nor Lily really caught my attention. Lily is toxic as all hell, and not in a likeable way, and Jaq's obsession with her makes very little sense. How could anyone be attracted to that? Like, I get she's pretty, but girl, get a life.

I did like the story overall, though, even if I wasn't a fan of the characters. The way Scylla works is super cool! And the ending was so interesting! I didn't see that coming!

I give Merciless Waters 3.5 stars out of 5!

Thanks to NetGalley for an arc in exchange for a fair review.

I wish I could have connected with this book more. The surface it seems like it would appeal. A trapped crew, supernatural happenings. It might have been because the book drops you in the middle with very little explanation of what’s happening. By the time you realise the book is almost over and you find yourself wishing for more room to explore the world.

The writing was lovely, very lyrical and whimsical. Ambrose was a delight. I found myself disliking Lily greatly but I imagine that was the point. To hate her but love her as much as Jaq did. It was very much a toxic sapphic relationship which I enjoyed. The world defensively needs more feminine rage.

I did enjoy this book but it’s probably not one I will return to.

Unique. Sensuous. Haunting. Diverse characters and a great premise to the story. And I love how this book is both very modern and, at the same time, deeply immersed in traditional Eastern European folktales.

Yet I'm still not sure how I feel about this book. I loved the story. And the writing was beautiful—very eloquent. However, there were times where I felt the pacing was too slow—too many words to describe too many superfluous things. Sometimes the vision was clear. Other times it just meandered.

But, in the end, it is a worthy read and a fitting story for Halloween.

Nautical folk horror is a new one! Rae Knowles is a superb creative. She writes steamy sapphic lust, female rage and revenge, and an almost cultish crew of 7 on a ship called Scylla.

Here’s what I loved: Slavic dark fairy tale, strange and toxic love/lust, haunting and beautiful imagery and prose. And it was significantly less trop-ey than I thought it would be.

Here's what I didn’t love: This is not really the story to write in such a few pages. I wished I could understand more of the characters, and that there was more to carry us to the ending. I think if it had been longer I could have fully experienced what the author wanted us to. I was a little bit at a loss connecting some of the characters' motives to their actions. But with more context (i.e. more pages..) this could also be resolved.

Overall, I still recommend this book, my complaints are based on my own tastes and I believe this novella is still a creative piece worth your time!

“I offer you endlessness. Eternity with your love. Would you so quickly toss that away for a moment of vengeance?”

“Merciless Waters” weaves mythology into a beautiful and haunting tale of a group of women sailing aimlessly on the sea on their ship Scylla, when they rescue a man from drowning. Knowles has crafted a gorgeously written sapphic novelette with rich, eloquent prose that tells a tale of love, loss, jealousy, memory, sisterhood, and vengeance. Achingly exquisite at times, this novel starts off so strongly but unfortunately loses it’s brilliance as it goes on.

The individual stories of the girls are where this starts to unravel, as they are all told with the same pacing and tone, with no variations in speech pattern even though they are different ethnicities and even a different species. The bloodthirsty revenge the women want doesn’t seem to fit as their intensity never changes once they regain their memories, save for Yinka who becomes depressed. This and a lack of motivation for many characters makes the bonfire scene incredibly anticlimactic.

The MC then completely loses the qualities that make her stand out in the beginning, so by the end she is reduced to a weak woman trying to hold onto someone not worth holding onto. She lets Lily dictate her life and possibly eternal death for fear of losing her, but to stay with her after everything she does is lunacy. To bind yourself to someone who wanted to risk losing you forever for one moment of vengeance is unimaginable, yet Jac acquiesces.

By the time the ending comes around it seemed like Knowles just wanted a neat way to tidy things up; however, it was entirely too rushed and forced, making it incongruous with the bewitching beginning half of the story. It’s terribly unfortunate.

A huge issue I have with this novelette is that the first page after the dedication says, “Content warnings are provided at the end of this book”. Why would you place content warnings at the END of a book, especially when some of them could be very triggering? It makes zero sense to have something that may be a triggering issue for someone to place the list at the end of the book. I hope that is changed in the future.

Another minor issue is that Jac frequently braids her hair, and Lucinda appears with braided hair, which is not keeping with the mythos. It’s even stated by Lucinda the evening before green week that they need not plait their hair to blend in, so this seems odd that two characters would wear braids in the story, especially Lucinda. Then Jac goes to tie up her hair in the middle of the festival but Lily instead braids it for her. Even with Jac presenting more masculine, she is still a rusalka and their hair was always unbound.

Little things like this being incongruous with the folklore or details about the Adriatic Sea being icy (it’s not), are or what took me out of the story each time, which is a shame. Rae Knowles has a gift as a storyteller, it just needs some focus and fact checking at times which is missing here. It needed more editing or beta readers to catch the little details that slipped the author’s attention.

It’s regrettable that the middle became so cloudy and the end so rushed as the start of the novelette was aesthetically exquisite.

**Thematic Spoilers**
Merciless Waters is centered around the Slavic myth of Rusalka, undead female water dwelling entities who were drowned, either by violent force or by suicide. Usually men are to blame for their demise, though not always.
They must live out their designated time on Earth as rusalki, luring men into the water where they died using their enchanting voices and beautiful appearance, and then drowning the men by entwining their long hair around their feet and becoming slippery so they could not breach the surface. Some would even tickle the men and laugh as they choked on the water and died. The rusalki are thought to only come completely out of the water during certain times of the year (early June is known as Rusalka week, Rusalnaya or green week) or in summer, and can then be seen sitting on docks or on the decks of ships, or even to lounge in the boughs of trees. They may only eternally rest if their deaths are avenged.

The name of their ship was a creative nod to Greek mythology; Scylla was a fair maiden who was turned into a terrifying sea monster, with the upper body of a beautiful woman and the lower half an abomination of nightmare material; “A goddess above and a monster below”, which is how Jac describes Lily in the water. There are various accounts as to how this occurred, but they all have one central motive-jealousy.

All in all this has so much potential and the gorgeous first half is why I will give this a 3/5 stars. Hopefully the author takes note and makes some revisions.

Thank you to Net Galley and Brigids Gate Press LLC for access to an ARC for an unbiased review.

With Merciless Waters, Rae Knowles (The Stradivarius) dishes up a deliciously demonic, sapphic Anti-Disney fairy tale, complete with talking sea snake. It’s a delightful, and delightfully subversive, read.

Jaq lives on Scylla, an enchanted ship that wanders the adriatic sea in an eternal present. She and her shipmates, a multicultural group of women, are led by their captain, Lucinda. Jaq seems to understand as little about this state of affairs as we do. We know that they drift endlessly. We know that the previous crew of men is trapped in Jaq’s little ship in a bottle, shrunken down by some magic. We know that Jaq is hopelessly in love with Lily, whose affections are mercurial.

And it is likely that life upon Scylla would go on in the same way forever if it weren’t for the rescue of Reginald, a man found floating, nearly dead, at sea. The women allow Reginald to live, and Lily seems to have fallen under his spell, and soon the entire ship is disrupted as Reginald tries to take command.

The greatest danger to the crew, turns out to be the return of memory, to the time before their sanctuary on Scylla, stories that are told in brief vignettes that allow Knowles to stretch well beyond the confines of the book’s limited setting, telling multiple stories of tragedy.

What Jaq eventually learns is that the whole crew are Rusalki, magically undead and whole while on Scilla, horrifying and rotten beneath the waves. And this death in life appears to be a kind of curse, broken only by finally taking vengeance on whatever forces led to their initial deaths.

There’s only one problem: For Jaq, this life is not punishment. In fact, life aboard ship, with Lily, is the freest and happiest she has ever been, and living forever in an eternal now with the woman she loves sounds pretty alright.

Unfortunately, Lily has other ideas, and the book becomes almost an ethical thought experiment that weighs the relative merits of vengeance and forgetting (if not forgiving).

At a hundred pages, Merciless Waters is a bite-sized delight, beautifully written, and suffused with a kind of mad joy, even (or especially) when the women are behaving very, very badly.

It's been a long time since I marveled at prose the way I did while diving into this haunting nautical tale. It's a dark, twisted story told in beautiful words. It was extremely atmospheric, and just right for this time of year!!

I loved the exploration of feminine rage and the lush imagery. Will definitely be revisiting this book in the future!!

Merciless waters is a horror novella that follows an all female pirate crew stuck in an endless present. The story centers around Jaq whose lover Lily saves a man adrift at sea. who once upon the ship things begin to change for the women. There is revenge, ritualistic sacrifices, murder, sexual content, and violence against women.

The writing is beautiful. I easily got swept away by the imagery that her words evoked. The aquatic atmosphere is very telling within every page. I love the scene where Lily and Jaq are in the water. It is a beautiful moment between the two before things begin to change more on the ship.

I did like the little bit of horror snippets we get. Lily and Jaq tearing the men to pieces to eat them was perfect. There should have been more in my opinion. It had gore and violence but it was almost blink and miss it kind of. It was kind of sudden but it left an immediate impression for me. I wish this was more what the book was about.

I was not a fan of Lily through out the book. She knew that the ship was for females only but when she found the man at sea instead of leaving him to his fate, she brings him on board and immediately decides to have a tryst with him ignoring Jaq's feelings on this. then when she is told to get rid of him she wants to ignore the advice. Lily was a very selfish character from beginning to end.

I would have liked to know more about the other women on the ship. We only get glimpses of them in a short amount of time. I am giving names for them but they could have easily have been called woman 1, woman 2, etc with as much personality as they were given.

I am all for revenge novels and Lily and Jaq both have reasons to go after the men who wronged them but the other women we are giving no motivations for. I would have liked this more if the revenge was explored more or left out all together.

The ending was a closed circle for the novella but it left me unsatisfied. There is a lot more that could have been explored with the concepts we are introduced to. I feel like this should have been a longer book than what we were given.

Overall it was a good read and I do recommend for the writing alone. And I want to Netgalley and Brigids Gate Press for giving me an eArc for an honest review.

I read an eARC of Merciless Waters by Rae Knowles. Thank you NetGalley and Brigids Gate Press, LLC.

This is a relatively short horror book about a woman who lives on a ship manned by all women in a magical world set in a time when that simply wasn’t done. When we meet her, she knows something bad is going to happen. Turns out that the other women, including her partner Lily, have rescued a man from the ocean. Our protagonist knows that Lily will take the time to sleep with the man, and she immediately starts thinking of ways to kill the man.

This turns into a goal, especially when his presence appears to make people start to remember before the ship, starting with their names. Soon the women of the ship start doing self-destructive things such as jumping in the water with the intent to drown themselves. As the captain takes them to learn why this is happening and how to start it, a snake on the ship starts telling our protagonist stories of some of the women remembering on the ship.

In the end, she and Lily must decide if they will follow their memories to their final destination.

The book was odd, and the beginning didn’t grab me. Once the stories of the other women started being told, I found myself interested and invested in the crew and wished we had a few other crew members' stories as well. The ending truly made the book for me, though I had guessed most of the revelations by that time.

Aboard the ship Scylla, there is no future or past. Jaq, her fickle lover Lily, and their all-female crew exist in an endless present.

Fantastic queer horror with unparalleled atmosphere.

Certain parts of this novella made me feel like the author was trying to do too many things at the same time, but overall the story was really well-written, and I love sailors, feminine rage, folk horror and lesbians all very much. Also the ending was really fascinating, as well as the morals of the characters.

A very strange tale but a satisfying ending, quite a bizarre read in all honesty, a mixture of horror, fantasy and dark romance/erotica. Some great characters although I didn’t exactly find Lily likeable, and with a sapphic main couple, themes of feminism and revenge.
Very well written with an intricately unravelled storyline, this was intriguing and interesting.

Came for the awesome cover and stayed for the journey, it was a little confusing at first, had to go back and read the blurb to remind myself what it was supposed to be about. But once I got into it it was easy to keep turning the pages to find the answers to all of my questions.

The snake on the cover is a real character named Ambrose and I LOVE him, he carried this book on his back and he deserved better in this story

‘A simple truth known long to men and only now discovered by womenfolk. We crave violence. So we swallow violent
men.’

***Content warnings at the end of the book which is odd, but definitely check them as it is quite a gory and dark book.

The cover is stunning and I love pirates and ocean stuff in novels, but the writing did not work for me.

I struggled to picture things and this took a long time to read given it's short page count. This reads like young adult or middle grade, apart from the graphicness. The only well-written parts were when the main character was plotting murder.

I do love me some feminine rage stories! Merciless Waters is a sapphic, Slavic mythology inspired horror about jilted lovers, grief, revenge, and sisterhood. Oddly. I really quite enjoyed this but would’ve loved if the story was more expansive.

Thank you to NetGalley for an ARC of Merciless Waters in exchange for an honest review!

Thanks to Netgalley for a copy for an honest review
I found ‘ Merciless Waters’ a quick and interesting read I enjoyed reading it.

I look forward to reading more from Rae Knowles.

Rating 4 stars

I’m not entirely sure what to make of Rae Knowles’ MERCILESS WATERS. I finished the book days ago and I’m still unclear. Based on the description, I expected a spooky magical tale about redemption and vigilante justice. But what I walked away with instead was a whole lot of confusion.

My biggest complaint is the relationship that’s at the heart of MERCILESS WATERS. Extraordinarily *toxic* is the only way to describe the dynamic between Lily and Jaq; where one gets a perverse joy out of taunting the other, who conversely lives and breathes for a partner that doesn’t appear very into them.

The book’s ending and the “big reveal” were both also supremely bizarre, and I don’t mean in a delightful, surprising way. It felt as if Knowles decided to throw together some haphazard, inconsistent pieces of a conclusion together and call it a day. I would have much rather seen the story’s *real* antagonist vanquished; or at least left behind by the protagonist.

I wish I could say otherwise, but I’m not sure I’d recommend this read.

Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for an ARC in exchange for an honest review. All opinions my own.

Merciless Waters is Rae Knowles' second novel. It follows a crew of seven women aboard a ship named Scylla and their captain – Lucinda. Scylla sails endlessly through time and the Adriatic Sea. Its passengers have no past, and they do not need it. All they have is the endless present. One day, Jaq notices a man floating in the sea. She almost let him meet his demise, but Lily took notice of him and scrambled to get him out of the sea. The man, Reginald, brought nothing but trouble to the women of Scylla. Jaq and Lily have always been lovers, but Reginald's presence threatens to throw off the balance of their relationship and the peaceful lives of the rest of the crew. Reginald and Lily's blossoming relationship inspires Jaq's growing murderous intent. While Jaq brainstorms how to eliminate Reginald from Scylla, a crew member starts to remember her life from before her arrival on the ship. The restored memory might bring forth a new purpose for the cunning women of Scylla.

Knowle's writing is picturesque, with almost Victorian quality. Based on the descriptions of their clothes, one would think they lived in the 1800s, but Knowles's writing gives the story a sempiternal feel. It does not matter which historical period they belong to since they live in the eternal present. Since the story takes place on a ship, the story is lush with aquatic atmosphere. We are aware of the unforgiving waters, of the waves rolling beneath the ship. During one scene, Lily and Jaq are underwater. They effortlessly float in water, not needing air, and make love. That has to be one of my favorite scenes.

Merciless Waters is a literary horror novel, in the same way as Our Wives Under the Sea. It is a retelling of the Slavic myth of Rusalka. Originally from Ukrainian and Russian folklore, rusalki are feminine entities that reside in streams, rivers, and lakes. They are water nymphs. Rusalki are a part of Slavic folklore of other countries (Bulgaria, Poland, Serbia, Croatia, Czech Republic). They are beautiful, always naked, with long, wet hair, and hang around on trees near bodies of water. They are known to lure people, mostly men, in with their singing and dancing. Their origin is not exact. Most sources claim all women who drown, either forcefully, accidentally, or by their hand, become rusalki. My book on Slavic mythology says rusalki may be servants or even daughters of the Water Spirit (vodyanoy). Since I am not a fan of Greek myth retellings, I decided to try out Slavic myth retellings. I am a Slavic woman, after all. I admit I am delighted by Knowles' book.

Merciless Waters is a gorgeous, sensual sapphic novel about the churning desire for revenge. I dare not say anything more because it is a short book, under 200 pages. I highly recommend this to everyone tired of Greek myths or anyone who is a fan of literary sapphic horrors with fantastical elements. Release date: 14th November 2023

Thank you to Netgalley and Brigids Gate Press for the review copy!

This one is for all the Pirates of the Caribbean lovers that wished it was an all female crew! Daisy Jones’ Locker, perhaps?! This novella was a delicious salty snack of feminine rage. The setting of Scylla and the Adriatic Sea had me wanting to jump right into the pages. Spicy horror anyone?

Also where does one find an Ambrose, asking for a friend?