Novella and novelette length stories are a fast-fading art, so it’s always exciting to see them show up. Rich Ristow’s Into the Cruel Sea is a fast paced tale set on a military base in Bermuda where Beth, a teen girl on the cusp of adulthood, is about to face the imaginable.

Into the Cruel Sea is, in a way, a coming of age story. Beth is commonly and brutally battered by her father while her mother pretends not to see, or worse blames her for her father’s rage. She’s a teenager stuck on a small island, if not physically then certainly mentally. The abuse and constant blame she suffers is pushing her hard into the worst kind of life. Already she’s an alcoholic, a smoker, and a pothead. Since she can’t do anything right she’s stopped trying, drowning her impotent rage in becoming numb, and, like so many others, by jumping into the arms of the first person to give her a bit of positive attention.

But Wade has problems of his own, and one strange day he viciously slaughters his parents before disappearing, literally, into the sea. But Wade has every intention of coming back, however changed he might be, to reclaim Beth with a shadow of the very abuse she wants to escape from.

Into the Cruel Sea does not make light of abuse or addiction, like some tales. It uses it as a very effective tool, on a back drop of what should be paradise, to push the characters to either their freedom, or their doom.