Emmett Nahil’s novel, From the Belly, tells the story of Isaiah Chase, a sailor on a whaling vessel in a fantasy world in which there are gods above and below, seers are punished by death, and supernatural forces seek vengeance for the horrors of an industry built on violence and greed.
Isaiah has only been aboard the misnamed ship, Merciful, for six months, having fled home after his father was hanged for the crime of being able to see the future. It was too painful being home with his mother, the loss of his father “an injury that festered” for them both, so Isaiah escaped to the sea in an attempt to “cauterize [the] wound to prevent it from spreading” (p. 17). While he seems to get along with most of his crewmates, he is vigilant in hiding the family “gift,” aided by the fact that his own prophetic dreams have been dormant while he’s been out at sea.
When the novel opens, the crew has just cut open a whale to find a man barely alive in its belly. Believing it bad luck to leave a man lost at sea, they pull him aboard, much to the fury of Captain Erasmus Coffin—a name that tells you where the whole thing is going and alludes to the Nantucket whaling family of the same name. Coffin orders the man be carried to the brig, where he’ll stay until he dies or recovers, untended by the ship’s doctor. Immediately enthralled by the man and his miraculous survival, however, Isaiah tucks his jacket around the man, thinking he must be cold. The captain notices and makes Isaiah the man’s minder as punishment, ordering him to feed the new arrival from his own rations and deal with the body if the man dies, without skimping on any of his other duties.
We soon learn that the ship is already behind on their quota of whale oil; Coffin is the bloody-minded and booze-soaked son of one of the owners of the Pyle, Thacket, and Coffin Trading Company; and there are a million ways a sailor can leave the ship owing money to the company for their room, board, tools, and medical care. In the novel’s first twenty pages, Isaiah’s account with the company is placed further in the hole in exchange for a bandage and a bit of alcohol to dress a cut on his palm and a few pieces of salted pork to bring to his new charge when Isaiah forgets to set aside some of his own meal. To make matters more dire, if the ship returns with less oil than their charter dictated, the crew face jail time to pay off their debts.
By contrast, there is only one way to end a voyage with a little money in their pockets and maybe something to send home: kill as many whales as possible. It’s this unjust and avaricious system that is used to explain why the crew members continue to follow orders and push toward prime hunting grounds in the south even after it has become clear that something is deeply wrong on the ship.
First, a sudden storm takes the crew by surprise and Coffin orders that the tryworks—a furnace aboard whaling vessels that heats whale blubber to extract the oil—should stay open, and a small contingent of hands keeps them running through the storm, so as not to lose any oil while the ship is tossed about. As the crew huddled below expects, all of the mates working above deck are lost to waves, along with the oil they were trying to save.
Next, in the windy days following the storm, shipmate Jerry Calder’s arm is speared on the splintered wood of the cracked mainmast when a wave rocks the deck and sets him off balance. Three days later, the early morning watch finds hundreds of live fish lying on the deck. The crew credits the gods with finally giving them a break and sets about chopping off fish heads and tossing the bodies in unused oil barrels, to supply both their own quickly depleting stores and some extra scratch when they finally return home. The next day, Coffin—sleepless, hungover, and haggard—orders the fish tossed overboard rather than kept in barrels intended for whale oil.
A few pages later, Isaiah is put to work trying to find the source of water leaking into the ship’s hold, where their stores are kept. He finds water that seems to have been sitting for weeks, rather than the days it has been since the last stores check, at least going by the state of the soft and spongy wood rotting with seawater. Uprighting a fallen barrel, he finds the water is just the beginning of the damage.
He tilted one end of the barrel, and was greeted with tufts of emerald green seaweed, slick with moisture, growing straight from the rotted wood beneath. Where there should have been dry wood, there was briny mush, almost midcalf high. It took the better part of an hour for him to scour through the pools of water, dipping a hand in periodically and feeling along the base of the hold for cracks. He was rewarded with no leak, no source at all of the collected salt water and accompanying freshly-grown seaweed. (p. 51)
The ship is being taken over by the sea, while the captain, his first mate, and every other person with any power on the ship continues to focus on the need to find and kill more whales. The crew takes to tattooing themselves with squid ink sigils, begging mercy from the gods. More crew members die, others are wounded and develop unusual growths, and still others begin vomiting up eels—whole and writhing. Eventually we learn that Calder, the previously speared mate, is being kept alive by the ship’s surgeon, Monteiro, so she can study the infection causing shells to grow in his wound—in the hopes of bringing jars of them back to sell to the company as a potential bioweapon.
Meanwhile, Isaiah has been dipping down to feed, question, and ultimately fall in love with the man from the belly, who tells Isaiah to call him Essex. At the same time, Isaiah has been trying to hide from his crewmates that Essex’s arrival seems to have activated his dormant dreams, which increasingly portend their imminent, watery deaths. Worse still, frantic to know what is going on and whether this handsome man in the brig is behind it, Isaiah takes to scrying in the moonlight of the deck. Risky business with the crew already looking for someone to blame for their plight.
In the world of From the Belly, people of color, women, trans, and nonbinary characters live and work equally alongside their white cis male counterparts, marking it as decidedly not our own, but Nahil clearly drew inspiration from New England whaling history. As previously mentioned, the Coffins were a prominent Nantucket whaling family. In 1820, teenager Owen Coffin was sailing aboard the whaling vessel Essex when it was rammed by a whale and wrecked, leaving the handful of survivors on small boats for months. When the survivors ran out of supplies and naturally dead corpses, they drew straws and Owen was shot and eaten. The story of Essex is loosely mirrored in the story of the ship that several characters in the novel had the misfortune of being on prior to Merciful. Similarly, one of those unfortunate crew members is named Hendricks and she has a counterpart on Essex in the boatsteerer, Obed Hendricks. And the first mate on Essex was named Owen Chase, sharing his surname with Isaiah. These allusions to the historical whale trade add to the overall success of the setting, brought to life by Nahil’s vivid descriptions of various ship activities and spaces.
However, I must confess that the novel’s characters left me wanting, Isaiah Chase chief among them. Isaiah is the sole vehicle for understanding the connection between Essex and what’s been going on aboard Merciful since his arrival. From a craft standpoint, this makes sense; generally, your main character needs to have some core trait, belief, or developmental experience that makes them the perfect person to center in the story. While Isaiah’s prophetic abilities check that box, his character never gets more complex than his family’s secret power, which makes him feel one-dimensional. I frequently found myself unclear on Isaiah’s motives for saying and doing certain things, and how he interpreted himself and the events of the novel. In the end, Isaiah hid himself from me as much as he hid himself from his shipmates. Perhaps this was Nahil’s intention, a comment on what it’s like to hide yourself from others so much that you become opaque to yourself: I don’t understand Isaiah’s motives, because he doesn’t understand them himself.
Nahil could also be pointing to one of capitalism’s dehumanizing aspects: with the crew worked to the bone and terrified of what happens if they return to shore without enough oil for the Company, no one has time for reflection, only action. Similarly, the novel’s environmental justice theme rests on the revenge the sea is taking on the whalers and the whaler’s refusal to alter their actions. Through much of the novel, it seems the sea’s revenge could be avoided if the crew of Merciful just stopped hunting whales. But no one has enough time, energy, or power to consider that a possibility. How many of us are similarly worn down by our role as productive workers even as climate disaster calls in capitalism’s debts? And who bears the brunt of climate disaster? Certainly not the company. Pyle, Thacket, and Coffin will build a new ship, hire a new crew. And the cycle will begin again.
If I hadn’t found much to admire in From the Belly, I probably wouldn’t have been so hungry for deeper characterization. The setting is well rendered and the atmosphere is satisfyingly ominous. Representation in the sorts of spaces and stories in which I’ve never seen myself is a gift and a joy, and a supernatural romance plot unfolding amidst a revenge story for whalekind is catnip for those of us with the intersecting interests of gay pirates and yacht-smashing orcas. If you’re looking for a novel that is fast-paced and imaginative horror on the high seas—but make it queer and let the whales win—then this might be your new favorite salted candy. Just don’t think too hard about what gives it that inky center.