I was only going to the seaside to collect a batch of old documents for someone. I never expected that on my very first night, in a little tavern where someone had died, I’d hear the words “Reefbone Lamp.”
By day, Wuman Harbor sells fish and salt, repairs nets and patches boats. It looks no different from any other rundown port town. But when night falls, the rising black tide, the abandoned salt warehouse, and the old lamp at the end of the seawall that shouldn’t be lit make everyone look as if they’re hiding something. Some people disappear. Some pretend not to notice. Others would rather alter the accounts, place names, and death registers than let an outsider ask one more question.
I only wanted to earn a little money running errands, but I ended up stumbling into a decades-old case buried in the harbor: county records with missing pages, an ancient well that “eats people,” a seawall of white bones exposed at low tide, and the ruins of a royal city beneath the sea that shouldn’t exist at all. Even more frightening, I gradually realized that the real secret of this place wasn’t in the sea, but on the shore, in the people who seemed the most ordinary, quiet, and law-abiding.
They didn’t just know what was in the sea. On the contrary, they had known for far too long.
And the Reefbone Lamp, now burning again, wasn’t there to light the way for the living. It was drawing the things that should have sunk long ago back to shore, little by little.
If you enjoy seaside folklore, local ghost stories, investigations into old cases, Cthulhu-esque mysteries, and tales where the deeper you dig, the more wrong things seem, then The Reefbone Lamp is the kind of story that will chill you more with every page and keep you reading without stopping.
It's fascinating. I haven't read a first-person novel in a long time. It's full of tension and the plot is compact.