Ben Jones, The Rope Eater

What an impressive debut! Disaffected Civil War vet Kane drifts aimlessly into a job on an Arctic vessel called the Narthex, where he discovers that his crewmates are a collection of eccentrics, murderers, and freaks (the engineer even has three hands). The purpose of the voyage is obscure and mysterious, but it has something to do with the plans of creepy ship scientist Dr. Architeuthis, whom Jones names after the Latin for “giant squid.” That might all make the book sound rather silly, but it isn’t. Jones knows his era and setting well—he immersed himself in it as editor of Apsley Cherry-Garrard’s The Worst Journey in the World, a nonfiction account of the disastrous Scott expedition to the Antarctic. (See this month’s Letters to the Editor). Rope Eater is a Melvillean literary take on adventure fiction; it’s dreamlike, macabre, and tinged with ominous overtones of doom, like the voyages of Ernest Shackelford as narrated by Edgar Allan Poe.