The blood comes first, from a nose that will not stop, and Jonathan Covey lies flat on the floating dock beneath his house and lets the ocean take it from his lips. Above him his father loads the trawler and calls him kiddo, loudly, because the neighbours are in earshot and the performance is for them. Upstairs the wallpaper is flecked with something the floral pattern helps to hide. Scorpion Deep by C.G. Drews opens on that split between what an island sees and what it chooses to see, and every horror that follows grows out of the gap.
A Boy the Island Agreed Not to See
Kelcarrow is a rock of crowberry and retired fishermen thirty miles off Maine, with fewer than a hundred residents and a rule nobody needs to say aloud: family business stays behind closed doors. Drews is precise about how that rule works. A kindly neighbour remarks on how hard the boy scrubs his dock. A fisherman’s slap on a trawler deck goes unremarked by the man on the next boat. The warmest house on the island, Mrs. Ridley’s kitchen of oatmeal and sailing-boat magnets, fed a starving nine-year-old Jonathan for days and then handed him back the moment his father knocked. Scorpion Deep by C.G. Drews is less interested in villains than in the bystander effect at the scale of a whole community, and it is merciless on the point.
Into that silence comes the wish. Jonathan and his two best friends perform the old island ritual one last time before Rae and Ellis sail for college, and he alone completes it, at a cost the reader feels in the teeth. What climbs out of the dark beneath the ruined lighthouse is an ancient captive who speaks like a mouldering grimoire, wants revenge on the Covey family, and quickly decides he wants Jonathan for himself. From that bargain onward, Scorpion Deep by C.G. Drews works like an old sea ballad: a promise made in the dark, and a price that keeps rising.
How C.G. Drews Writes the Hunger to Be Kept
The friendship is the second novel inside this one, and in some ways the more painful one. Rae is blunt, impatient and fiercely loving; Ellis is bookish, wealthy and kind. Both are about to leave, both have quietly paired off, and neither has looked closely enough to see what is happening to their friend. Drews never makes them cruel. That is what makes their arguments in the dark so hard to read: everyone is a little right and the damage is real anyway.
Against that slow abandonment, the creature offers total attention. He notices the bruises. He is furious on Jonathan’s behalf. And he says, more or less, that no one may hurt the boy except him, and the novel lets that line land with all its menace. This is a love story, but it is a deliberately poisoned one, and the book knows it. The grandfather is the novel’s other great creation. He sits in his recliner among chalk runes and sage, mistaking his grandson for his son, warning him off the ruins and muttering fragments of the folklore encyclopedia he has been writing for decades and was never able to sell. His confusion is played for pathos rather than laughs, and the scenes in which Jonathan feeds him the cookies he believes his own mother baked are among the gentlest in the book. They also carry a charge: the old man clearly knows something about what lies under the island, and his memory keeps slipping just before he can say it.
Readers arriving at Scorpion Deep by C.G. Drews for a swooning monster romance will find instead a study of how a starved child mistakes possession for care. It is also, quietly, one of the more thoughtful portraits of an asexual teenager in recent YA: Jonathan wants to be held, not undressed, and the book treats that wish as legitimate rather than a stage to grow out of.
Where the Comedy Lives
None of this would be bearable without the jokes, and Drews is very good at them. The god’s grand, archaic threats bounce off Jonathan’s flat teenage deadpan, and their exchanges have the rhythm of a bickering double act. The best scene in the book may be a night-time raid on a family kitchen, where the ancient horror sips chocolate milk, tastes the pepper shaker and eyes the knife block with professional interest.
The horror, when it comes, is lavish. Jonathan begins peeling strips of skin from his ribs, painlessly and compulsively, as if something underneath wants out. A night swim far into the Atlantic brings glowing deep-sea things rising toward him, then an eye larger than his whole body. These are the images readers of Scorpion Deep by C.G. Drews will carry away, and they are beautiful in the way drowning is in old ballads.
When the Tide Turns on the Reader
The book’s restlessness is also its weakness. It can lurch from banter to disembowelment within a few pages, and the switch is sometimes so abrupt that neither register gets its full weight. A long stretch in the second half, in which weeks pass underground in a blur of sleeplessness and transformation, drifts where it should tighten, and Jonathan’s anxious loops of self-blame begin to repeat with less force each time. The prose, all salt and pomegranate and spilled ink, is often gorgeous, but at its densest it smothers the action it is describing.
The content is heavy and the novel is honest about it: abuse, self-injury, violence and despair are present throughout, rendered with care but without flinching. It is a book for older teens and adults rather than younger readers, and the opening pages are a fair test of whether Scorpion Deep by C.G. Drews is for a given reader.
C.G. Drews and the Folklore of Silence
C.G. Drews is an Australian author, using they/them pronouns, whose Don’t Let the Forest In became a New York Times bestseller and made their name in YA horror. Hazelthorn followed, then an adult debut, You Did Nothing Wrong, and their work has now been translated into more than a dozen languages.
This is the most folkloric of the four, steeped in selkies, sea witches and fishermen’s superstition, and it is the one that trusts its readers most. In the acknowledgments Drews says the unanswered questions at the end are intentional, on the grounds that not knowing what comes next can be the most frightening thing of all. The final pages bear that out.
After the Last Page
Few YA novels hold horror, comedy and grief this tightly, and fewer still are this clear about who looked away. Scorpion Deep by C.G. Drews is out now from Feiwel & Friends, published on 27 October 2026, and it deserves a place alongside the best of the current wave of queer horror. Readers who want more bodies that refuse to stay human should try Compound Fracture by Andrew Joseph White, which shares its anger at violence handed down inside a small, closed community. Those drawn to the sea and its women should follow it with The Sirens by Emilia Hart, a gentler tidal story of sisters, inheritance and escape.
It is a book about a boy who wanted a wish, and about what answers when no one else will.