mixed media

Book Review: THE SHIP OF DEATH by Kyle Winkler

| Jessica Crawford

The Ship of Death by Kyle Winkler is a 256 page standalone novel published by Avon in 2026.

Genre

Horror

Description

The dice roll. Darkness answers.

House of Leaves meets Jumanji in this brilliantly original and twisted novel composed entirely of found documents, following an unwitting couple ensnared by a sinister tabletop role-playing game

Cole and Lorraine playtest board games for some extra cash as they save up to buy a home. But after a series of bizarre coincidences, and signing a strange NDA, the couple finds on their porch a mysterious indie developer’s tabletop role-playing game called The Ship of Death. The game relies heavily on the players’ imaginations, and takes up an ever-growing amount of space: in their kitchen, and in their minds. As its true sinister nature becomes clearer, and its forces capture more in its web, the boundary between the game and reality begins to dissolve. . . and the pair are instructed to possess a stranger’s soul.

Told entirely through game reports, emails, game forum posts, personal journals, and police reports, reading The Ship of Death feels like a dangerous dice roll. It’s a sleep-stealing, possession-inducing work of intense, intelligent found cosmic horror that announces Kyle Winkler as a spectacular voice in the genre.

My Thoughts

The description of this book sounded like it would be right up my alley.

Cole and his wife Lorraine are playtesting a new tabletop roleplaying game called The Ship of Death. The mere scope of the game has them super excited at first, but then the lines between the real world and the one in the game start to blur. The result is cosmic horror. The players meet shady characters that seem to have leapt straight out of their imagined story, and find themselves compelled to carry out horrifying actions from their roleplaying in real life. The entire story is told with a mixed media format—emails, journal entries, forum posts, etc.

So why wasn’t this a home run for me? I like weird books, but this wasn’t my kind of weird, I guess. There are so many things from the game world that have you repeating, “Huh? What does that even mean?” (e.g. The Saltation of Banal Objects, The Curation of Auguries from Flesh, Sustenance and Religio-Social Habitudes, etc). And this is intentional, it adds to the creepy factor and has the characters questioning everything. But it just didn’t hit for me.

I feel like I haven’t said anything that wasn’t already in the book description, but the only other information would be unnecessarily going into too much detail of the story. 256 pages presented in mixed media format is actually a fairly short book. It’s a quick read that is mysterious, tense, and dark. As far as characters, I liked the psychic Cole consults, but it’s difficult with all of the others because even if they are essentially good people, they are no longer in control of reality and do some not very good things.

Again, all of this is a great idea in theory, but in execution left this reader a bit underwhelmed. But your mileage may vary!

Book Review: DEAD ELEVEN by Jimmy Juliano

| Jessica Crawford

Clifford Island is a memorial. Something tragic happened, and the people never moved on.

A grieving mother finds herself traveling to a little known island for reasons not even she can fully explain. When she goes missing, her brother travels there to try to piece together what happened. The people of Clifford Island seem stuck in the 90’s; in fact, they seem to be reenacting the same day over and over again, but no one is talking about why.

Jimmy Juliano’s debut, DEAD ELEVEN, is a decent psychological horror story. I found it a bit silly in some ways–like when a pastor says something along the lines of “I let God guide me,” the POV character thinks, “OMG, was that a threat?” simply because the author wishes to set a tense, vaguely threatening tone. This is just one example of characters drawing exceedingly random conclusions for the sake of the story.

But overall the story was original and compelling. Is the odd behavior of the islanders the problem, or is it the solution to something much, much darker?

She got to her mailbox and raised her right hand to Gloria, who, of course, was dead and tethered to her own mailbox.

Chilling, creepy, and strange (in a good way), this story wasn’t executed perfectly, but it was interesting nonetheless. It presents multiple points of view in a mixed media format. I appreciated the exploration of expressions of grief, and the threat of an ancient Evil, but could have done with less of the teenagers’ sections of the book.

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