Men at Sea

Teasing the reader with the promise of exciting new retellings of classic tales of the deep, this collection instead provides beautiful but ultimately banal renditions. The anthology’s eight stories overuse archaic descriptions that create oppressive tonal similarities despite each story’s unique plot. The retelling of Edgar Allen Poe’s “Descent into the Maelstrom,” a harrowing story of a man clutched by madness at the sight of the sea on a cliff’s edge, reads the same as William Henry Hodgson’s “The Seahorses,” in which a boy’s grandfather indulges his imagination with tall stories and a trip to his crew’s diving barge. Though each story is a dark and mysterious tale of man’s harrowing adventures with the open sea, the execution reduces them to a sludge of outdated notions. The book is nearly redeemed by Reb’s’s chiaroscuro artwork, a storybook style that entrancingly depicts deep emotions with its use of stark, macabre colors, harsh shading, and darkly cartoonish faces. Unfortunately, that’s not enough to save this collection of quasi-updated sea stories from sinking. (Apr.)