When Oceans Dream: A Novel of Cosmic Horror is now available as ebook.
When Oceans Dream is a cosmic horror novel set in a dying South African coastal town. As the ocean awakens, reality breaks down and people are drawn into the sea. Widower Gideon and troubled Nina witness this slow apocalypse unfold. This quiet, dreamlike story explores grief and letting go, where the world’s end feels less like destruction and more like finally coming home.
In Plaatjieskraal, a forgotten South African coastal town, widower Gideon Meyer shelters Nina Lowe—a young woman fleeing her shattered life. Two strangers nursing separate griefs find unexpected kinship at the end of the road.
Then the ocean begins to change.
Tides murmur in human voices. Fish swim through empty air. Reality forgets its own rules. And people begin walking into the water—not drowning, but answering a call older than memory.
As the ocean’s consciousness awakens, humanity slips away one by one, drawn toward something vast and patient as the tides. Gideon and Nina resist, seeking answers as their town empties. But some endings cannot be outrun. Some grief can only be survived by letting go.
When Oceans Dream is a quiet apocalypse—literary horror that unfolds with dreamlike inevitability. Cosmic horror stripped of monsters, leaving only wonder, loss, and the strange comfort of surrendering to something greater than ourselves.
When I wrote the novel I made a conscious decision to narrow the lens. This is a story told through just two primary characters—Gideon and Nina—rather than an ensemble. Limiting myself that way was both frightening and freeing. With nowhere else to look, I had to stay close.
Much of my craft focus while writing this book was on point of view, especially close third-person: learning how to inhabit a character’s perceptions without explaining them, how to let the world feel strange because it feels strange to them.
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Print publication and availability will be announced