FROM THE BELLY Emmett Nahil
From the Belly is a wicked tense tale braided with fate, legacy, and wonder. The writer, Emmett Nahil, is a New Englander who cofounded a video game company called Perfect Garbage Studios. Nahil is a horror and speculative writer and artist. On the periphery of the writing is a historical, queer, and rhythmic atmosphere that bodes well for a soundtrack. Some of the songs on my list for this book are “I Must Not Think Bad Thoughts” by X, “Dreams” by DESCENDENTS, “The Ocean” by AGAINST ME! and “Search and Destroy” by the STOOGES.
The outside cover is designed by Chris Shehan, a comic book artist with expertise in the horror genre. The art exposes the weird sensation the reader can glean of what it must be like to be on the ship as it transforms throughout the story. The visual pulls through what Nahil conveys through his protagonist: to be in this place, with this directive to kill whales is unsettling and destructive. The book is peppered with rich illustrations by Megan Llewallyn, a medical and comic book illustrator, which gives even more depth to the body horror and makes the most poignant and transitional scenes erupt from the page.
Nahil’s story asks the question: What can one do when their past, present, and future all haunt them with the heart thumping pressure of inevitable death? Isaiah Chase, a crew member on a whaler ship named The Merciful navigates this question as the horrors persist and take over with each turn of the page. Isaiah stumbles through his journey in a haze. His surreal and dark dreams are something his father suffered with as well. Isaiah worries he’ll fall into the same traps his ancestors did. The book ponders: will he ever be able to understand his lineage? Does anyone? (As a human, this is something I ask myself often. Even if Isaiah did have all the answers of his father’s experience, could it be fully understood?)
The dangerous reality is that the profession of hunting whales puts all the characters at risk of fighting the vast sea and losing everything. Even without dreams, there could be a gnawing feeling that something just isn’t right onboard the ship as storm clouds for Isaiah and the crew approach from all directions. The most powerful and thrilling moment is when Isaiah collides with the namesake of the book, a man who is discovered in the belly of the whale. The crew discovers this still-alive man, and it stays a true pleasure for the reader each moment Isaiah draws near him. The man has explosive presence and control while being shrouded in mystery that causes apprehension in anyone who crosses his path.
Isaiah and the man are drawn to each other. They want to save each other from their fates. The man may know it is foolish though, and says to Isaiah, “Men don’t change. Only grow to be more so who they always were under the skin.” As Isaiah continues to swallow down his reality with delusional optimism, a reality where he and everyone on the ship can survive, the mood aboard the ship shifts. The moody, salty, sea changes the crew and its captain from the inside out.
The connection between Isaiah and the man from the belly of the whale coupled with the atmosphere, are the best parts of the book. An aspect of the book that might frustrate a reader is the number of characters that are never known in depth. While it makes sense to have many crew members on a whaler ship, the use of names can get confusing and distracting when the biggest known significance of each character is what their role on the ship is (possibly, in part thanks to the capitalistic society for the brainwashing of people’s worth being in their work) without many grounding characteristics to differentiate them.
Another nitpicky gripe is the number of adverbs (many writing mentors harp about avoiding adverbs). The descriptions sometimes lose their flow, and it causes a neurotic urge to edit them out of the copy in my hands. “…Isaiah had the sense that he was telling him half-truths, that there was something slightly off kilter. But this was the first time he seemed truly contrite…” Though that could just be me, and despite these things, I do think the man in the whale redeems the glares of the -lys and keeps a hook into the reader to want to see the scary yet juicy connection play out.