The Ship of Death is a brilliantly original and twisted novel composed entirely of found documents, following an unwitting couple ensnared by a sinister tabletop role-playing game.
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In This Spotlight On The Ship of Death
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About The Ship of Death
The dice roll. Darkness answers.
Cole and Lorraine playtest board games for some extra cash as they save up to buy a home. But after a series of bizarre coincidences, and signing a strange NDA, the couple finds on their porch a mysterious indie developer’s tabletop role-playing game called The Ship of Death. The game relies heavily on the players’ imaginations, and takes up an ever-growing amount of space: in their kitchen, and in their minds. As its true sinister nature becomes clearer, and its forces capture more in its web, the boundary between the game and reality begins to dissolve. . . and the pair are instructed to possess a stranger’s soul.
Told entirely through game reports, emails, game forum posts, personal journals, and police reports, reading The Ship of Death feels like a dangerous dice roll. It’s a sleep-stealing, possession-inducing work of intense, intelligent found cosmic horror that announces Kyle Winkler as a spectacular voice in the genre.
In the vein of The House of Leaves, Strange Houses, and Episode Thirteen, The Ship of Death embraces a unique form to smart end, telling a terrifying story through found materials. Though the book is composed of personal journals, emails, game forum posts, police reports, and other found documents formatted in an original way, its fresh form translates well to ebook and digital audio!
In The Ship of Death, the dimensional characterizations of Cole and Lorraine (the unwitting couple at the center of this story), deft handling of motivations, exciting lines of tension throughout, and brilliant, surprising sequencing and reveals elevate the read—this is a truly special story with a chilling, long-lingering effect.
Winkler’s literary pedigree and deep, wild imagination have made him a favorite among horror readers who have taken note of his self-published and small press works, and word of mouth is spreading. With The Ship of Death, s great found-document book, Winkler has crafted a super smart and super scary book poised for a breakout.
Praise for The Ship of Death
“Hang on. You’re giving me cosmic horror, literary found footage, and a tabletop game, all in the same novel? [The Ship of Death is] …wickedly funny and weird? Sign me the f*ck up right now.”—Wil Wheaton
[The Ship of Death is] “Mind f*cking melting.”—Benjamin Percy
[The Ship of Death is] “Strikingly original, haunting, and cosmically creepy as hell. A nightmarish experience.”—Dan Chaon
“Holy f*cking f*ck.”—Chuck Wendig
[In The Ship of Death] “Every turn of the page is a creepy as f*ck critical success D20 roll. Winkler warmed my nerd heart while draining its blood.”—Sequoia Nagamatsu
[The Ship of Death] “Reminds me of Harry Stephen Keeler’s dossier novels, e.g. 1936’s The Marceau Case. Every chapter is a different document. Sometimes this seems like the only honest way to present a piece of fiction: it should consist of words that might conceivably be written down for nonliterary purposes.”—Ed Park in Literary Hub, The Annotated Nightstand
About Kyle Winkler, Author of The Ship of Death
Kyle Winkler is an Associate Professor of English at Kent State University at Tuscarawas. He received a Ph.D. in Composition and Rhetoric from the University of Pittsburgh and an MFA from Washington University in St. Louis. He is the author of The Ship of Death, Enter the Peerless, Like You Never Had Wings, Tone-Bone, Grasshands, Boris Says The Word, Oh Pain, and The Nothing That Is.
You can connect with Kyle Winkler on his website, and everywhere on social media @bleakhousing
Source: Publisher
Publisher: Avon | HarperCollins
ISBN Trade Paperback 9780063492356
Pub Date: Sept. 29, 2026
LitStack Spots by Kyle Winkler
Here are a few more LitStack Spots that you will definitely want to add to your TBR stack, including Enter the Peerless by Kyle Winkler, Grasshands by Kyle Winkler, and Tone-Bone by Kyle Winkler.
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As an affiliate of Bookshop.org, Malaprop’s, Books-A-Million, Audiobooks.com, Chirp, 2nd & Charles, Amazon, NameHero, Envato, and Place-It, LitStack may earn a commission—at no cost to you—when you purchase through our affiliate links. We appreciate the brands we work with, and also appreciate that using our affiliate links may help you find your next great read, a book or two or more, in whatever form, while simultaneously supporting LitStack. When you use our affiliate links, you help keep LitStack running—and for that, we thank you.
As a Bookshop, Malaprop’s, BAM, Barnes & Noble, Audiobooks.com, Amazon, and Envato affiliate, LitStack may earn a commission at no cost to you when you purchase products through our affiliate links.
