The Night Boat (Page 27)
Robert McCammon Tells How He
Wrote The Night Boat
The Night Boat was the second novel I wrote, but the third one published. If you'd like to know why that was, write me a letter and I'll be glad to tell you a tale of dark and twisted passages.
I also am fascinated by machines. Particularly ships and submarines. I can imagine nothing more grim than to be two hundred feet underwater in a leaking, moldering submarine. They didn't call them Iron Coffins for nothing, and it took iron-willed men to survive in them. Most of the German submarine crews didn't.
The Night Boat is a mixture of dream and nightmare. A dream in that the location, the colors, the language are idyllic; nightmarish because the Night Boat invades the dream and destroys it. I took scuba-diving lessons in researching The Night Boat, but I wasn't able to afford a trip to the Caribbean. It amazes me still that a review I got for the book went to lengths to say how accurate the reviewer thought I'd gotten the cadences of island language. I listened to many hours of calypso music and spoken Caribbean dialect records.
Now, eight or nine years after The Night Boat was first published, I think often of Coquina Island. It is a beautiful place, surrounded by emerald water, with fresh trade winds and golden sand, green palms swaying in the breeze, the scent of cinnamon and coconut in the air. It was created by a young man whose apartment looked out over a junk car lot, the smell of burned onions wafting from somebody's kitchen, and burglar bars on the windows. Ah, the luxury of the imagination...
The Night Boat is about the merging of dream and nightmare, confinement and escape, and what I think of as the whirlpool of Fate. David Moore thought he'd escaped that whirlpool, but it was waiting for him, there below the surface of emerald waters, where the monsters doze but never sleep.
June 1988