Where the Tide Leaves its Dead

Where the Tide Leaves Its Dead

By night, the sea returns the dead. By day, the jungle devours the living—and Casey Jones is trapped between both.

On a remote Pacific island, the tide drags ashore the drowned—sailors, pirates, fishermen—reanimated as relentless hunters serving an ancient ocean god. Armed with scavenged weapons and accompanied by his fierce, loyal hell pig Puaka, Casey fights to survive each night’s rising horror. But the island offers no safety. Inland, cannibal strongholds, volcanic wastelands, and fractured survivor cults turn every step into a gamble.

When Casey and his companion Izzy follow whispers of sanctuary to a coastal settlement, they find not refuge, but a brutal militia, a blood-soaked arena, and a cult feeding the living to the god beneath the waves. As the tide swells and the dead gather into an unstoppable force, survival may no longer be enough. To end the nightmare, Casey must risk everything—and face the god itself.

Blending survival horror with Polynesian mythology, Where the Tide Leaves Its Dead delivers a raw, atmospheric descent into a world of monsters, myth, and sacrifice.

Dive in—before the tide turns.

Excerpt from the book

Something skittering over his foot—dry, clawed, and fast—snapped Casey awake.

He lay still for a heartbeat, one leg hanging out of the hammock and resting on the damp jungle floor, waiting to see if whatever touched him came back. Nothing did. Apart from the dried, papery leaves of a withered palm shivering high above the canopy, the jungle was quiet.

Casey swung upright and untied the fishing-net hammock—his bed, his rucksack, and the snare he used whenever the ocean sent its dead crawling inland.

His two spearguns hung where he’d stashed them on the old mango tree, nestled in the thick vines strangling the trunk in their hungry crawl toward the sunlight. The whole tree looked like it was losing the fight.

Puaka snored nearby, loud and happy, the hell-pig’s long forked tongue hanging out the side of her mouth like she’d melted in her sleep.

Then the cicadas kicked off. Thousands of them. A rising, metallic chant that made the air vibrate against Casey’s skin, as if the jungle had set an alarm for itself.

Casey slapped a mosquito on his cheek, smearing blood across his fingers and the blond stubble on his jaw. “Morning to you too,” he muttered.

He pulled on his arm guards—neoprene sleeves cut from old rental wetsuits, each stitched with strips of cuttlebone he’d scavenged from the beach. People joked and called them the Gauntlets of the Beachcomber, but they kept his arms from rope burn when hauling waterlogged sea corpses in to their graves. They also stopped the odd coral blade from taking a chunk out of him, which was more than most sleeves could claim.

With a grunt, Casey hitched up his stained jeans, buttoned his floral shirt, and shrugged into his cream fishing vest, every pocket stuffed with something that might keep him alive for another day.

From Puaka’s saddlebags, Casey slid out his spade. A grown man couldn’t ride a pig, but you could damn well load one up. The saddlebags had come off a dead horse months back—only after Casey had dug half the beast out from underneath itself. They still smelled like rotten horse.

Casey drove the spade into the snuffed fire pit, the blade tearing through roots and warm soil, breaking apart a knot of wriggling earthworms as he dug down to the ash. Beneath that, the volcanic stones still radiated heat. He wrapped a towel around his hands and lifted the scorching rocks out of the pit, tossing them aside. Then he pulled out three steaming parcels wrapped in banana leaves and dropped them onto a cleared patch of dirt. Steam hissed and curled into the morning air. Chicken. Cassava. Rice. Still too hot to touch properly. That was good, he thought.

He didn’t need Salmonella crawling through his guts and turning his life into more of a nightmare than it already was.