Book Review: The Last Known Position by Steve Goldsmith

The Last Known Position is a collection of compact, folkloric-horror vignettes that interrogate historical absence and landscape memory. It opens with “The Old One and The Hunger,” a piece narrated by a boundary-spirit who “moves the winds” to protect people who cannot—or will not—read the forest’s warnings; the text reimagines the Roanoke vanishing not as a violent erasure but as a complicated rescue and a transfer, where fear and misunderstanding open a pathway for a different destiny. The voice of the forest (and of The Old One) is patient, ancient, and morally complex: it watches the pale settlers make errors of cultural listening and pays attention to the way fear itself feeds older hungers. That reorientation—vanishing as movement, carving as communication—gives this story an uncanny tenderness that reframes a famous historical mystery. 

Later sections shift into maritime uncanny and ecological dread with equal skill. “The Tangle” and “The Dank” imagine different kinds of appetites—the vegetal/colonial appetite of a parasitic tangle that lures and consumes, and the rot-thinking “Dank” that haunts ships and legends (the Mary Celeste material is especially haunting because the narrator treats legend itself as a kind of feast). The prose here is economical but evocative: small details (fireflies pulsing into “letters,” a carved CROATOAN that reads as direction rather than curse, the whispering timbers of a doomed vessel) accumulate into an atmosphere of slow, inevitable consequence rather than spectacle. Where Infernal Twins wears its theatricality on its sleeve, The Last Known Position prefers insinuation: the horror is less a set piece and more the world adjusting itself around human errors. 

What we found most compelling is the book’s historical imagination combined with a steady ethical core. The author refuses cheap moralizing about colonists or sailors; instead, he gives agency to nonhuman forces (the Old One, the Hunger, the Dank) that interpret human folly on their own terms. This gives the stories a mythic scale without abandoning specificity—Governor John White’s grief, Virginia Dare’s quiet transformation into Ensenara, and the lost journal fragments about Sarah Briggs are all anchored in sensory detail that makes the uncanny feel real. If there’s a criticism, it’s that the collection’s deliberately measured pace can sometimes feel elliptical: readers expecting a full unraveling of mystery may be left wanting more explicit resolution. But that restraint is also the book’s strength: it trusts the reader to live inside uncertainty. 

Verdict: The Last Known Position is a quieter, more somber companion to the louder, satirical voice of the Twins book—intelligent, haunting, and formally assured. It will appeal to readers who like their speculative histories atmospheric and thoughtfully melancholic rather than sensational.

Rating: ★★★★½☆ (4.5/5)