Merfolk by Jeremy Bates

You don't wanna be part of their world

Once upon a time Martin Murdoch was a semi-respected marine biologist, until his interest in cryptozoology turned him into a laughingstock. Murdock, you see, doesn’t believe in Sasquatch, he believes in their nautical cousin — an aquatic missing link with whom we humans share an ancient ancestor.

Mermaids. Mermen. Merfolk.

But poor Dr. Murdoch was the (willing) victim of a hoax. An internationally televised hoax. A hoax which earned him the nickname MerDoc (geddit?) and saw him banished from the scientific community.

Living comfortably (did I mentioned Murdock is also impressively rich?) in exile in Sri Lanka, Murdock is content to tend to his bruised ego in private, while still indulging himself in the belief that merfolk are, in fact, real.

And then the evidence that could blow this whole case wide open turns up in the form of a skull extracted from the stomach of a great white shark. A humanoid skull. Except according to the DNA test, that ain’t no human, baby!

Convinced that this is the smoking gun he’s been waiting for his entire adult career, Murdock assembles a rag-tag team on an expedition to vindicate himself and prove once and for all that merfolk actually exist.

However, no-one ever suggested merfolk would be friendly, did they?

Merfolk was the first Jeremy Bates book I read. I’ve read several since and probably because it was the first but also because the idea of a horror story dealing with mermaids remains all too appealing, Merfolk remains my favorite that I’ve read so far.

Overall, this book satisfies in every way. It’s a fairly slow build to the cave-diving expedition where Murdock and his team go hunting for real live merfolk (which is when the genre horrors of it all really click into place) but it is never dull.

Bates knows how to keep his readers engaged and the whole book is a breeze to read, with pretty much every chapter ending on a cliffhanger that ensures you won’t want to put it down.

One technique Bates uses throughout Merfolk (and indeed in most if not all of his other books I’ve read thus far) is alternating the narrative between two timelines, so we’re not just experiencing the present, which is the (spoiler!) ill-fated expedition to locate wild merfolk, we’re also getting additional context on our characters from what they’ve been through in the past.

But the meat and potatoes of it all is the hunt for the merfolk, right? The ingredients are all ripe: a bunch of eccentrics, a boat, and a dangerous mission into the monsters’ domain. It’s a fun old-school adventure romp that delivers exactly what you’d want from such a setup.

I mean this as a compliment: Merfolk reads like the novelization of a Michael Crichton movie — in the best way possible.

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