The Night Ship, by Alex Woodroe
21 Jan 2026The Book
Synopsis:
An apocalyptic world turned into a pitch-black sea of nothingness, but smuggler Rosi and her crew of survivors aren't alone. Something hungry lurks below...
Driving a logging truck through the Romanian mountains, smuggler Rosi and her crew come across a radio signal that hints at impending doom. As the world goes completely dark, their truck becomes a vessel sailing across a sea of nothingness.
But they’re not transmissions trickle in through the radio from similar isolated islands across the country, from amateur radio hobbyists and police cars and customs facilities.
Attempting to rescue survivors and find a way out, the group save more lives, but soon discover that something hungry lurks below, and it's sending up agents – and transmissions – of its own.
My Review
The Night Ship is a post-apocalyptic horror novel, written by Alex Woodroe, published by Flame Tree Press. A story that not only explores the aftermath of an apocalyptic event from the perspective of the survivors stranded in the truck that has become their lifeboat in the middle of a pitch-black ocean, but which also builds over the particular situation of the setting (1980s Romania) to deep dive into an exploration of paranoia and fear, and an examination of propaganda.
Rosi is a smuggler in communist Romania, riding in a logging truck together with her fiancé, Gigi; after picking up a stranger, Sorin, they stumble into a weird radio signal that communicates a warning of something terrible happening. After that, they find themselves in a world that has vanished into darkness, becoming a sea of nothingness, where their truck is a vessel, a ship they can use to crawl towards other radio signals, which might range from official warnings, to cult recruitment. All, while in the darkness, somewhere below, something keeps trying to reach them.
Woodroe keeps some of the classic elements that you would expect from this kind of story: the tense scenes trying to escape, the survivor groups with sketchy leaders taking advantage and the locations that might represent a refuge or a threat at the same time; all smoothly executed.
But The Night Ship is more than that, and part is because of the special nature of its setting: a society that has grown into paranoia as a consequence of the police state that has already affected our characters; even after the collapse, the old habits are difficult to abandon. One could say that for many of them, the pre-apocalypse situation wasn't much different from the current, having to carefully navigate the landscape if they will to continue alive.
The nature of the threat is always kept vague, letting those gaps that are much more horrific when filled by the own reader's mind; but also we can feel how that's not the only way our survivors might end giving up, as the tension comes from many different directions, creating a story that, at the end, can be one of resistance and trauma.
The Night Ship is an excellent novel, a piece that you will love if you are looking for a post-apocalyptic horror set in an already paranoid country, mixed with a bit of cosmic horror.
