Dark Company

"Of course I had to end up here..." Over ten rainy nights, Thomas, an ex-barge-man who used to be skipper of his own boat, walks the muddy fields of the land-locked German interior and remembers the events that lost him his home, his boat, and his livelihood: his apprenticeship in the cold halls of the Royal Naval College in London; the dangers of the mean streets and waterfront of New York in the 1970s and Poland under martial law; and Germany after the reunification, when for a year or so it seemed that the whole country drifted rudderless, drawn by the current of history to who knows where. In this novel from Gert Loschutz, Thomas remembers childhood, his first love, and the warning of his grandfather: Beware the dark company! This mysterious band of men and women dressed in black cast a shadow over his story, as he wrestles with secrets, the unplumbed depths of his soul, the hazards lurking below a seemingly placid surface, and throughout it all, the rain, falling night after night. "Dark Company" is a superb example of a distinctly German tradition in weird fiction that has its roots in Kafka and Herbert Rosendorfer.