Fiction Reviews
Atomic Coffin
(2026) Benedict Anning, Bantam, £20, hrdbk, 308pp, ISBN 978-0-857-50888-1
Submarines, like spaceships, offer excellent settings for a good horror yarn, whether that involves xenomorphs or Some Unnameable Terror. Both are essentially thin metal tubes travelling through the void, with few if any means of escape for whoever is trapped inside. In his first published novel, Benedict Anning marinates this idea in a Red October sauce, producing a story that combines a good grasp of the nautical details (or at least so it seems to me) with a growing sense of dread.
Set before the fall of the Berlin Wall, the main protagonist is Heidi Sperling, a British spy operating in East Germany, code-named ‘Thistle’, who comes across some vital intelligence that requires her immediate extraction. Leaving her life in the GDR abruptly behind, including her girlfriend, she reaches the coast where a Royal Navy submarine is waiting to take her home. Or so she thinks. However, the powers-that-be have other ideas and the boat’s Captain is ordered to investigate the anomalous object that Heidi’s information indicates is sitting on the edge of the continental shelf in the GIUK (Greenland-Iceland-U.K.) gap, a strategically significant choke-point through which Russian naval forces must pass to reach the Atlantic. The mysterious object turns out to be a massive Russian submarine which has been sitting there, with no relief for its crew, for over three years.
As someone who can speak and read Russian and who is not otherwise operationally engaged, Heidi is more or less press-ganged into the dive team who manage to swim across to the Russian sub and gain entrance. Once there it’s all shades of the Marie Celeste, with the added creepiness of a gramophone playing a disturbing Russian folk song that echoes through the corridors.
Or does it? Music is threaded throughout the story, functioning as both a safe space away from the submarine confinement, as when Heidi puts on her Walkman headphones in her bunk, and also as an indicator of the permeability of the boundary between what’s inside her head and what’s ‘out there’, as when she repeatedly hears the opening snare drum rat tat tat of Jefferson Airplane’s ‘White Rabbit’. The sense of ‘reality’ fragmenting is further enhanced by interleaved chapters in which Heidi/Thistle is being held down and interrogated, ramping up the overall atmosphere of acute paranoia.
Indeed, it quickly becomes apparent that something is Very Wrong as she and her team work their way through the Russian boat and from this point on, the pace picks up significantly. One might well wonder if the story is going to plunge into The Thing / Who Goes There? territory but Anning is not so crude or explicit as that, although, without giving too much away, things do get quite bloody. Overall, he does a commendable job of dancing nimbly around the source of the horror but I did feel that a few more breadcrumbs could have been scattered about, not least to contextualise the interrogation episodes, which fade from view as the story reaches a tense climax - think Ripley racing through the Nostromo at the end of Alien!
Although at times Heidi’s acute anxiety and fear becomes a little too ‘one note’, this is a well-written and gripping read that bodes well for future works by this author.
Steven French
See also Mark's review of Atomic Coffin.
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