Strange Sea

Strange Sea is a novel set entirely aboard the cruise ship Regal Enchantress, as it makes an idyllic voyage from Fort Lauderdale to Aruba. An international crew sees to every need of the two thousand mostly American passengers as they feast on fine food, dance in nightclubs and amuse themselves with sumptuous shows.

But on the second night out, a bizarre electrical storm throws their world into confusion. The captain and his staff are helpless in the face of a massive system failure that includes the loss of every digital function on board. In the Neptune Lounge, the storm also disrupts a magic act, causing a woman selected from the audience to disappear. When daylight comes, even the beautiful Caribbean has vanished, replaced by a murky parallel sea and a natural world that no longer makes any sense.

Strange Sea deals with loss of direction on multiple levels, as well as the solutions desperate people will choose to restore it. While the ship plows aimlessly back and forth, its supplies dwindling and the crew unable to find a bearing, the entire social structure descends into chaos. Variously inspired by religion, militarism, conspiracy theories or the pseudoscience of the New Age, four factions seize control of various parts of the ship and begin a grim fight for survival.

Caught up in this situation, three couples, Denise and Carter, Dale and Janelle, and Jim and Lyle, struggle to resolve threats not only to their relationships, but to their very lives. They soon discover that their real-world troubles have accompanied them to the strange sea. When her husband Dale is rendered sick by the effects of the storm, Janelle's efforts to restore him to health inspire her to use her organizational skills, honed by a nearly forgotten experience as a political activist for African-American causes, to overcome self-doubt and manage a faction devoted to humanistic principles. One of her followers is the hapless lawyer Lyle, desperate to reclaim his husband Jim after the transformation has caused Jim's survivalist instincts to go into overdrive.

At the center of the narrative stands the disillusioned professor Denise Broussard, whose crisis is compounded by a flicker on her smartphone that hints at the death of someone in the real world. Half convinced that the fleeting message refers to a suicide by her estranged daughter, who might also have been an object of seduction by her own lover and fellow voyager Carter, Denise makes common cause with Janelle, Dale and Lyle in opposition to a ruthless committee led by Carter and Jim. With the ship haunted by the bleeding specter of "Miss Renata," the Dutch woman who vanished in the magic act and who now seems trapped between worlds, suspicion falls on the enigmatic showman El Mago, who might be responsible not only for the failed trick but also for the transformations, both physical and emotional, of the sea itself. Yearning to escape from her mental distress, Denise places her trust in El Mago. As a war over hoarded food supplies breaks out between the factions, she goes off in search of a mysterious dreamworld that has been reported in the darkness of the lower decks, a realm where Miss Renata is said to preside as a sorceress who can soothe the torment of a suffering, wayward humanity.