Blood Cruise – Mats Strandberg
Built to carry 2,000, the Baltic Charisma has seen better days, now a second-rate booze cruiser plying the route between Stockholm, Åland and Åbo in Finland before returning home to port in Sweden and disgorging the hungover masses on the dock; fortunately, on this particular overnight journey only 1,200 are aboard, but that does not mean they cannot cause just as much trouble as a full complement.
Among the passengers are Marianne, in her sixties, retired, her ticket an impulse purchase the night before, Albin, adopted by Cilla and Mårten, she in a wheelchair, he a depressive drunk, Cilla’s sister Linda and her daughter Lo, once Albin’s best friend, heavy drinking Madde and Zandra, best friends since school, and Tomas, on a stag do and already blitzed, calling his soon-to-be-ex-wife and regretting what he impulsively says to her.
The ship under the command of Captain Berggren and Chief Engineer Wiklund, entertaining the guests and keeping them safe are Dan, a former Eurovision competitor now reduced to a karaoke host, Pia, head of security, able to calm any situation, barman Filip, unable to rest on board or ashore, and on this trip Calle, a former member of Filip’s team who has reinvented himself but has returned to introduce his former crewmates to his boyfriend Alexander to whom he intends to propose during the trip.
And almost unnoticed below decks are the woman and the child, pale, quiet, sickly, emaciated, concealing themselves in their caravan on the parking deck until the ship is underway, their thirst not for the cheap alcohol which soaks the blood of the other souls on board the Baltic Charisma but for something richer and rarer.
The fourth novel from Swedish author Mats Strandberg, an unscrupulous travel agent might try to sell Blood Cruise as a boutique experience, the high end of horror occupied by figures such as Stephen King, John Ajvide Lindqvist or Justin Cronin, but look beyond the hyperbolic desperation and the hefty page count and instead lift the polyester rug in the cabin to see the flimsy stained plyboard beneath, for the workmanship is more akin to James Herbert.
Lacking sophistication or nuance, at over five hundred pages the novel is divided into two distinct parts, the first establishing the dreary setup as the characters embark, bicker, and drink themselves stupid, make out and break up before the tone of the novel changes, the repetitive remainder devoted to running down corridors as the infection spreads and the body count rises, but further than this the plot never advances or changes direction, a floating slaughterhouse of inebriated sheep.
The Baltic Charisma an obvious misnomer, populated by shallow characters in deep water, awful people who exist only to consume alcohol as cheaply as they can while begrudging any around them whose position in life they consider better than theirs where even the less obnoxious among them aren’t all that interesting, Strandberg evidences no flair for dramatic prose to develop a genuine connection between his victims and the reader.
The crucial backstory for the mysterious woman and her son as bland and anonymous as the endless corridors which never convey a true sense of place or the isolation of the sea, Strandberg never captures the vital desperation of those being hunted, Blood Cruise a by-the-numbers holiday potboiler which commits the worst sin possible of a horror novel, that of being bland and forgettable.
Blood Cruise is available from now from Jo Fletcher Books
