Halocline is a near future tale of the workings of an everyday salvage vessel and its inevitable crew of characters. It is a twisted continuance of john g rees’ first horror novel anoxic zone.
Once again, john g rees is grossly graphic in his descriptions of the impalings and disfigurements that occur throughout this wildly thrilling novel. His way of words just makes you squinch your eyes and yet want more. He happily continues to disgust and amuse us.
Several years have passed since the destruction of St. George’s Cathedral in Ploiesti that occurred in anoxic zone. The self-imposed exile of Jake Strom along with his friend and scientist Giovanni aboard Barge#22 was but an intermezzo. Their lives forever changed by the machinations of Megacorp years before; they rid themselves of the yoke they had been forced to wear, but the result left them in a limbo of the damned. Whatever good they had done was vitiated by their very being. The wheel of life turns. Living a life without consequence was not in their nature. There were only two paths available to avoid being crushed by the wheel. One light and one dark.
Sometimes having too much interest can be a malady, but in this case, it only seems to prepare our cast for the to altercations to come, leaving much room for the battles to be disastrous. And they are.
Fate once again steps in and makes the question and choice for Jake and Johnny: to save themselves or to save a people from a fate worse than death? It seems the answer is both. The risks are great and the cost their souls. The battle will be on two fronts: Megacorp and limitless greed on one side and the malevolence of a madman on the other. As Jake says, ‘It’s like being between a rock and a rock.’ It would be nice if it were all that simple. But it’s not. Jake and Johnny will have to confront the evil within themselves when it gets tight if they are to prevail. For Jake this is no small task. The odds are overwhelming.
Old friends will reunite and new ones come into the picture as a torturous quest for survival and independence once again wash up on the shores of eastern Romania. Over a thousand years ago, a war was fought on the sands of the coast. Good did not win. But the winds of change are blowing and the peoples of Romania will have to go through hell all over again if they are to earn the right to live on their piece of earth.

A halocline is a vertical gradient of salinity in a body of water where freshwater mixes with salt water. The result is a blurry translucent miasma, which makes it difficult to see things in perspective. The Black Sea was once a fresh water lake. Now salt water from the Mediterranean pours in through the Bosporus. No longer fresh, the Black Sea is a continuous halocline ever in flux. In our novel the halocline phenomena is a metaphor. All is not as it seems and nothing ever stays the same. Past and present, good and evil, domination and independence, hatred and love, dreams and reality commingle creating a halocline of life that is nearly impossible to navigate or ever forget.