Tidepool by Nicole Willson

Tidepool doesn’t quite make a proper stand in for a beach trip, because despite it being a small coastal town, it’s about as uninviting as they come. By design. The locals don’t want you visiting and uncovering their dark secrets. The town is drab and reeks of seafood that’s gone off with an underlying base note of fear. And yet, one young man sees a business opportunity there, a chance to make Tidepool into a new Ocean City or maybe even some day Atlantic City.
Ambitious. Deadly so. The young man checks in, never checks out. And soon enough his adoring and now anxious younger sister comes looking for him. She isn’t going to like what she’ll find. In fact, she will be forever changed by it. And you know why?
Because something lives beneath the sea, something hungry, something that must be fed at all costs. Yeah, it’s that kind of a story and it has those tenacled Lovecraftian connotations.
So it’s fun, in a way doomed towns provide a gloomy atmospheric kind of fun. Tidepool traps its visitors like a nightmare, it won’t them gone but also doesn’t really want them to leave.
There’s some plot confusion here, because the locals, especially the sheriff, oddly oscillate between expelling the newcomers and locking them in. It isn’t the ambivalent thing about the narrative, there are also some questionable actions undertaken by the leads, but one must remember a. they are very young, the main protagonist is just 21 and b. they are not very worldly and that it’s over a century ago.
Also, if you name your main character Sorrow, you can’t really respect her to come to a happy end. It’s a Chekhov's gun of a moniker.
Overall, it’s a pretty good gothic tale. It has a lot of gothic clichés (pale people in black living in a mansion and all that) and works them nicely. It’s also ever so slightly underbaked, too lite tonally, occasionally veering into the light when it should resolutely stay in the shadows. The ending is a fine example of that. It’s like the mood is almost…tantalizingly almost…right. Which is, I suppose, another way of saying the book and the author show lots of promise and need to mind the estrogen and sunshine infusion in the text, if it’s meant to be a work of dark psychological genre fiction. The narrative is at times ever so slightly, very slightly amateurish, but well on the way to becoming professional in quality. Pretty entertaining, overall though. Tenacles and all. Thanks Netgalley.