Scuttler's Cove (2025) by David Barnett

Homecoming horror at its best

Readers unfamiliar with Scuttler's Cove may wish to read my notes only after reading the novel.

Scuttler's Cove (2025) by David Barnett is propulsive summer horror. It is also homecoming horror: a protagonist pulled back to their place of origin by tragedy and mystery bound up with family, geography, and lore.

Scuttler's Cove presents a spectrum of oppositions: between characters and their economic lives, as well as characters and their loyalties.

Scuttler's Cove is also about enslavement. Could anyone imagine that religious rituals aimed at honoring or propitiating a god or gods are really a form of domination of that entity? Or that ending such rituals is a form of liberation: that the “old ways” were never justified?

Scuttler's Cove is a novel with an ancient apple tree at its center: a mirror for locals and summer vacation landowners to greet their true reflections.

Scuttler's Cove is a novel about the power of money. Some lose it, some accumulate it, while others sew it up as coinage in a slaughtered hog as an overboard dowry to awaken the sea goddess Endellion.

Scuttler's Cove climaxes on the eve of Endellion’s reunion with the god of apple trees and spiders: Nans-Avallen.

Scuttler's Cove is a novel about putting things right, and a novel about knowing one's place in the procession of putting things right.

Lizzie said thoughtfully, almost to herself, ‘When you’re young, Merrin, and especially when you’re a girl, other people think they know best about what you should do and what should happen to you. They think that because things have always happened a certain way, then they should continue to happen that way all the time. But that way, nothing ever changes for the better. And I have a feeling that you, Merrin Moon’—she playfully poked Merrin in the nose—‘will be one of those people who does something different with her life, not just what everyone expects or predicts.’

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Author David Barnett gets the local/outsider tension just right, articulated concretely through character behavior and very human motivations.

The themes of homecoming and setting-things-right have recurred throughout the history of horror fiction. The strongest stories and novels exploring these themes push from you-can't-go-home-again to recalibration/rebalancing. Hard-fought material and spiritual rebalancing is at the heart of Scuttler's Cove.

Jay

21 March 2025