Kyle Winkler’s The Ship of Death is on sale today, published by Avon, an imprint of HarperCollins, and available now in trade paperback, ebook, and audiobook editions through retailers including Barnes & Noble.
The novel is assembled entirely from found documents: game session reports, emails, forum posts, personal journals, and eventually police records, following Cole and Lorraine, a couple who make ends meet playtesting board games for hire. After signing an NDA they do not think twice about, the pair receive an unmarked, independently produced tabletop role playing game called The Ship of Death, and it does not stay contained to the table. Per the publisher’s synopsis, the game demands increasing physical and mental space in the couple’s lives until the line between playing and living it dissolves, eventually pushing them toward an attempt to possess a stranger’s soul to see the game through to its end.
Winkler, an associate professor of English at Kent State University at Tuscarawas, has built a smaller, stranger body of horror fiction with previous titles including Grasshands and Tone-Bone. The Ship of Death arrives with blurbs from a notably wide range of names, among them Wil Wheaton, Benjamin Percy, Dan Chaon, and Sequoia Nagamatsu and has borne comparisons to House of Leaves and Jumanji.
The Ship of Death lists for $18.99 in paperback and is available now wherever books are sold.
