Review: The Burial Tide - Neil Sharpson

Genre: Horror Published: Zando Press, September 2025 My Rating: 4.5 stars

"Leave the dead. Look after the living."

The Story:

A woman wakes up inside a wooden coffin six feet underground, with no memory of her identity or supposed “death”. She desperately claws her way to freedom, emerging on the frozen ground of Inishbannock - an island just off the coast of Ireland.

Not everyone in the small isolated island-community welcomes Mara’s return though... With the help of a handful of islanders, Mara navigates her way through a maze of strange occurrences, superstition, folklore and secrets kept for decades, as she slowly recovers her memory, piece by piece.

Realization dawns that she is part of a cycle that has happened before, and that her survival will depend on who she deems to be friend or foe...

What I loved:

I will be forever cautious with books that center an amnesia-trope, but Sharpson convinced me to give this one the benefit of the doubt by the strength of his first chapter. Mara’s escape from her own grave after being buried alive sets the stakes sky-high and Sharpson keeps that dread and momentum going throughout. Alongside Mara, I couldn’t rest until I had the answers to the mystery at hand and I loved the journey of psychological dread, folk-horror, and a little bit of creature-feature that we went on together.

One of the first standouts of The Burial Tide is its great sense of setting and atmosphere. The inhospitable isle of Inishbannock is almost a character in itself, with its icy tides eroding away at the rocky shores and dense fogs obscuring truth, secrets and monsters from view. There’s an immediate claustrophobia, resulting from this tight-knit rural community that is clearly not showing their full hand to our protagonist. With no way back to the mainland, Mara is forced to pick and choose her alliances among the islanders carefully. Sharpson misdirects and shifts those alliances effectively, leaving you constantly uncertain if any of the characters can be trusted. It’s one thing to fear a monster, but it’s another to not know who (or which side) the monsters actually are…

But it’s not just psychological dread that justifies this novels categorization as “horror”. There’s an original take on Irish mythology and folkhorror, as well as some genuinely skincrawling supernatural creature-elements in here.

What I didn’t love:

I have only a single point of critique to this story overall. With Mara and her search for the truth so clearly at the center, I think the novel would’ve been even stronger, had it been told from her POV only. Although there were some great scenes from different perspectives (the one inside the cabin!! If you know, you know…), I felt the multiple POV’s took away a bit of the claustrophobia that strengthened the book otherwise.

Overall, this was one of the strongest pieces of horror of this year. Dark, monstrous, inescapable and dripping with uncanny terror; I highly recommend this one to fans of folkhorror.

Many thanks to Zando for providing me with an ARC in exchange for an honest review. All opinions are my own.

You can find this book here on Goodreads.