Losing Latitude is a self published serial novel (in fact it’s the series that impressed me enough to write this personal blog entry.) A five part series of ninety six pages per installment Losing Latitude is experimental in more than one way.

The serial novel is tough to begin with. Even big name horror author Stephen King has had mixed results. The Green Mile was a huge success, but The Plant was a failure. Recently some smaller presses have also tried serials with mixed or inconclusive results. Apex Digest has run Temple: Incarnations by Steven Savile and Cain XP-11 by Geoffrey Girard, each a novella broken into four individual installments, but has declined to continue the serial line for now.

Losing Latitude part one is subtitled Death, Dads, and Demons. The story begins with seventeen year old Lilly, and her parents, trying to escape from their ship which is sinking under the fury of a storm. In a sudden assault by the storm on the ship Lilly is thrown against the wheel, then free of the ship altogether to be rescued by the Coast Guard. She wakes in a naval hospital in Guantanamo, suffering from painful, but not life threatening injuries, only to learn her parents were never found. Now all she has is a backpack full of things her father thought she needed to save in the rescue, a large insurance settlement, and a mysterious journal that caused her father to attempt to brave the storm in his search for some lost artifact. Alone in a hospital with the only people she knew lost to the sea Lilly feels she must find out why her father forced them into the storm, and put aside her anger at him for making her live on a boat for the last ten years to find out why the search was so important in the first place.

While the writing is decent, and the quality of the book, cover art, typesetting and copy editing is far above what has come to be expected of self published works the biggest flaw in this first installment is a vagueness of genre. The blurb bills the series as a work of suspense, but the prose lacks the language and familiar emotional manipulations typically found in suspense and thriller novels. There’s also mention of a demon and hints at a conspiracy making a reader think the tension will pick up at a later point in the series, and wonder if there might be a bit of paranormal in the future.

It’s likely that the first installment could have been improved with more focus, clearly defining the elements and empowering the prose. But the tale is far from a bad one. The settings are solid. The characters are the common man type that have given writers such as Stephen King and Dean Koontz their mainstream appeal. The format also has a great deal of potential in today’s faster moving, bite sized world.

This review, like the serial will be continued…