The Night Birds by Christopher Golden
Publication Date: May 6, 2025 | St. Martin’s Press | 304 pages
Christopher Golden’s The Night Birds hit a few particular sweet spots for me. I’m a sucker for sea-based horror, so to have the setting be the hundred-year-old, rusting hulk of the Christabel, marooned off the coast of Galveston, TX, immediately make me perk up. To sweeten things even further, the Christabel isn’t just a marooned ship, but one that has become reclaimed by nature and turned into a floating forest as mangrove trees have taken root and grown through the ship’s decks. It’s a marvelous visual that I think the book’s cover has only partially managed to capture, as Golden’s writing makes it clear — or maybe it’s just my imagination — that the ship has become positively wooly with wild vegetation. Whatever the case, the Christabel makes for one hell of a striking locale. To top it all off, the story takes place during a seriously, wickedly violent tropical storm. Well, gang, I love me a good storm setting, too, and between the monsoon Golden conjures up here and the crashing waves breaking against the hull of the Christabel, I’m kind of surprised The Night Birds pages aren’t soaked all the way through and dripping everywhere.
The Galveston storm, however, isn’t the only thing wreaking havoc and bringing on a long night full of violence aboard the Christabel. One other aspect really drew me into The Night Birds, and that’s the subject of the horrors at play here. Witches. Witches galore. A whole nasty coven, with one single, solitary demand — the life of a newborn baby recently hidden away in the ship’s cabin.
Ruby and Mae have been on the run with this child, having only just fled a black magic-fueled assault that has led them to Charlie Book’s dock slip. Book is a researcher for Texas Parks and Wildlife Department, and the floating forest of the Christabel has become both the focus of his work and his de facto home. Ruby is his ex-lover, and when she turns up in desperate need for help, with a child that is not her own, he cannot possibly turn her away. They need shelter from the storm and a place where nobody would think to look for them, and Book knows just the right place to ride out the evening. But then the birds begin to circle overhead with predatory intent, and the witches that Ruby and Mae have been fleeing are much closer than expected.
The Night Birds is Christopher Golden at the absolute top of his game. I freaking loved this book, but even just saying that feels like I’m selling it short. The story is masterfully executed, its pacing both precise and exciting. Details are crisply delivered, and rather than ever feeling like a barrage of an infodump these moments serve the story perfectly and help to ratchet up the tension. In a way, it’s like watching an expert artisan watchmaker. Springs are deliberately, carefully coiled to deliver a high level of torque to turn the gears, while keeping everything perfectly balanced. One gears turns another, and another, to keep the hands moving. It looks simple and deliberate enough from the outside, but underneath, there’s so much machinery and moving parts, all so carefully crafted to make it all work. (I am, obviously, not a watchmaker, expert or otherwise, but hopefully this analogy works well enough to get my point across, imprecise though it may be. My apologies to watchmakers everywhere.)
Golden works hard, too, at building characters to care about. Book and Ruby’s relationship is underscored by tragedy and bitterness, and while they’re forced together into tight quarters under less than ideal circumstances, I found myself rooting for them. Even the secondary characters are nicely developed, and I found myself growing quickly attached to Otis, who runs the boatyard and wants nothing more than to be left alone to read his mystery novels and listen to the waves crashing against the docks. I get Otis. I understand Otis. But what really sold me was Golden’s exploration of witch lore and the utter monstrosities he has concocted here. Golden’s no stranger to witches, given his work with Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Mike Mignola’s Hellboy and Baltimore comics, not to mention co-editing the anthology Hex-Life: Wicked New Tales of Witchery with Rachel Autumn Deering, but his take on witchy gals in The Night Birds casts this coven in a unique candlelight. These ladies are unapologetically vicious, and I dug the hell out of them for that.
Bottom line: The Night Birds is horror craftsmanship at its best, and one of my first no doubt about it, hands-down favorite reads of 2025 thus far. Golden’s latest is tense and exciting, full of wonderful little surprises along the way, and by the time the violent climax rolls around it becomes impossible to step away from.
