Into the Cruel Sea

Novella and novelette length stories are a fast-fading art, so it's
always exciting to see them show up. Rich Ristow's Into the Cruel Sea
is a fast paced tale set on a military base in Bermuda where Beth, a
teen girl on the cusp of adulthood, is about to face the imaginable.

Into the Cruel Sea is, in a way, a coming of age story. Beth is
commonly and brutally battered by her father while her mother pretends
not to see, or worse blames her for her father's rage. She's a teenager
stuck on a small island, if not physically then certainly mentally. The
abuse and constant blame she suffers is pushing her hard into the worst
kind of life. Already she's an alcoholic, a smoker, and a pothead.
Since she can't do anything right she's stopped trying, drowning her
impotent rage in becoming numb, and, like so many others, by jumping
into the arms of the first person to give her a bit of positive
attention.

But Wade has problems of his own, and one strange
day he viciously slaughters his parents before disappearing, literally,
into the sea. But Wade has every intention of coming back, however
changed he might be, to reclaim Beth with a shadow of the very abuse
she wants to escape from.

Into the Cruel Sea does not make
light of abuse or addiction, like some tales. It uses it as a very
effective tool, on a back drop of what should be paradise, to push the
characters to either their freedom, or their doom.

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