You know what I love in a piece of fiction? Well, a lot of things, but when it comes to The Night That Finds Us All by John Hornor Jacobs, I love it’s sense of authenticity. Authenticity in place, in scene, in characters—Jacobs nails it all.

The Night That Finds Us All is set on a huge, hundred-year-old sailboat as it attempts to makes the journey from Seattle to London. Jacobs makes you feel the salt spray in your face, the wind singing in the ropes, the suffocating claustrophobia below deck. When his characters talk, it’s in the language of seasoned sailors, technical terms and jargon intermixed and lived-in. Like I said, authentic.

Samantha Vines is an alcoholic, world-weary sailor on the skids, broke and desperate. When she’s offered a job to tend the engines on The Blackwatch by an old crewmate, she takes the job. The ship is an ornately decorated wooden monstrosity, supposedly haunted, which Sam doesn’t take seriously, at least at first. Things soon turn south, however, and she finds herself doubting her sanity and facing challenges she could never have imagined.

This may not make sense, in fact it may sound downright silly, but when tragedies of both the human and supernatural variety begin to occur, those feel just as authentic as the sailing. Jacobs has done such a miraculous job of grounding his story, that he makes you believe the impossible as much as you believe in bilge pumps and mainsails.

Jacobs excels in creating nearly-overwhelming creeping dread punctuated with moments of sudden violence and terror. And because his characters are so genuine and fully-realized, it hurts that much more to see them suffering. Sam, in particular, is a winning narrator, fighting her demons with equal parts humor, obstinance, and gritty bravery.

The Night That Finds Us All is a bravura performance, a novel of horror on the high seas that will haunt you like The Blackwatch. The novel will be released on October 7, 2025, and is available for pre-order now.