Borealis by Ronald Malfi

Borealis is a wonderfully dark novella masterfully written by Ronald Malfi. It takes place on board of a trawler on the Bering Sea when the crew finds a young woman running naked on an iceberg. The fact that she was able to survive being naked on an iceberg probably should have been the first indication to the crew that they should sail as far away as possible from her. After taking her in, the crew is infected by physical maladies and a madness that creeps up on all of them with the exception of Charlie Mears, who is the only one who could see that she is responsible for the deaths and terrible things happening to the ship and crew. Charlie comes to the realization that he has to kill her at all costs before she reaches the mainland and spreads her evil on land.



The setting for this novel matched the mood and atmosphere of the story. It had a feeling of strong desolation and despair. The trawler has to sail through frozen waters around them, and anything that goes wrong with the boat has the possibility of putting the crew in serious danger, which happens when the woman starts to work her aura on them. The trawler becomes like a creeping death. This story reminds me in a lot of ways of H.P. Lovecraft’s In the Mouth of Madness. It’s like a slow descent into insanity with Charlie the only person who can keep it together. This was an enjoyable horror novella that I would recommend to readers of the genre.