Nightmare Reef starts with a pod of plesiosaurs cruising the Pacific Ocean as if nothing had changed since the Cretaceous Period. Obeying instincts passed down for 215 million years; they were on the prowl for a big buffet of marine creatures to eat.  

These monsters—with bodies like turtles, necks like snakes and heads like crocodiles—were as long as camper vans and weighed up to five tons. You could say they were similar to the Loch Ness Monster, or maybe something from a Scandinavian legend.

By serendipity, the pod crosses paths with a family of five (six if you include a fluffy Pomeranian doggo) currently on a year-long sailing adventure from Melbourne to San Francisco. 

Naturally, this excites the Plesiosaurs very much. “People are particularly delicious,” explains author Deborah Sheldon. “The muscle tissue of a human is tender and much prized and considered a premium meat to a plesiosaur.” Humans were the rarest and therefore the most prized meat—ranking above critically endangered species such as Kemp’s ridley sea turtle or the elusive bigfin squid.

One specific plesiosaur sets his sights on Marique, the matriarch of the Wagner family. At night, he surfaces to watch the woman on the sailboat’s deck. The sight of her makes his mouth water. He could smell her on the breeze—a provocative and heady combination of sweat, skin oils and trace elements of hair and genitalia. The scent of her spicy, warm meatiness saturates his sinuses and tingles his salivary glands. “Anticipation made him clench and unclench his long jaws.”

Instead of tasting Marique’s juicy female parts, the plesiosaur has to settle for a nip at her husband, Christoph. It’s the creature’s first sampling of human meat and he’s not disappointed. “Oh, so gratifying, heady, tender—like nothing he’d ever consumed before. Similar to turtle; meaty, but not briny. A soft texture reminiscent of squid, but not slimy.” Note: I have a strong suspicion that Deborah Sheldon would love a gig as a newspaper restaurant critic.

BTW: The husband getting eaten by a plesiosaur isn’t a spoiler—it’s karma. He was a stuffy, inflexible, egotistical and manipulative man. He was also stupid. Taking his family with three young children on a 12-month sailing excursion on a rickety sailboat was the most irresponsible thing imaginable. To be honest, I don’t think I could’ve finished Nightmare Reef if Christoph hadn’t died by page 40.  

Sheldon doesn’t go easy on her surviving protagonist either. The initial description of Marique is quite harsh: she’s “a scrawny, flat-chested housewife wearing Target clothes and flat-heeled shoes, with a sensible bob haircut, no makeup, sexless and meek.” She also suffers from a debilitating, self-defeatist attitude. 

The novel’s final tableau finds the surviving members of the Wagner family stranded on a sandbar in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. Can Marique and her kids survive their dire situation? Or are they fated to become monster food? The answer to both questions is: yes. 

[ Nightmare Reef / By Deborah Sheldon / First Printing: September 2025 / ISBN: 9781923165830 ]