While driving a logging truck through Romanian mountains, Rosi and her crew listen to a radio signal hinting at impending doom. The world soon grows completely dark, leaving the smugglers and their truck cruising through a sea of nothingness.
They’re not alone: radio transmissions filter through the radio used by amateur hobbyists, police cars, and customs facilities … the conditions are the same in similar isolated islands across the entire country.
While rescuing survivors and searching for a way out of the nothingness, the smugglers discover something hungry lurking below, and it’s sending up agents—and transmissions—of its own.
Why we’re excited about this book:
Alex Woodroe takes her Romanian heritage to heart, which in turn shows up in her fiction, often in fresh and horrifying ways. The author of Whisperwood, Woodroe has short fiction featured in such publications as the Haven Speculative Magazine, NoSleep Podcast, Obsolescence: A Dark Sci-Fi, Fantasy, and Horror Anthology, It Was All a Dream, Horror Library: Volume 7, Picnic in the Graveyard, and Dark Matter Magazine among others. Woodroe is also the acquisitions editor for Tenebrous Press and runs her own freelance editing company. With her latest, Woodroe presents a drive through bleak nothingness with this paranoid post-apocalyptic nightmare. Michael Boulerice (Feeding the Wheel) calls The Night Ship “A high-gear hurtle through the vast of night with a remarkable cast of characters, human and otherwise.”, and Michael Bettendorf (Trve Cvlt) says: “The Night Ship evokes a sense of fear with undercurrents of paranoia of the unknown, fusing the existential dread of cosmic horror with the gripping mystery of a fast-paced thriller. There’s a sense of claustrophobia despite the expansive landscape, and a messy intimacy that brings these characters to life.”
Releasing from Flame Tree Press 20 January 2026, The Night Ship by Alex Woodroe is available for pre-order now.
BOB PASTORELLA