Interview: “Whispers of the Drowned” by Charles Eugene Anderson

In “Whispers of the Drowned,” Charles Eugene Anderson plunges readers into a 1941 Atlantic convoy, where a mysterious artifact recovered from the sea carries voices—and vengeance—far older than the war.

Interview Questions

Did a real place or moment inspire part of your story?

Hi Jamie. It’s always good to talk with you. [Jamie is the editor of Haunted Waters.] For this story, I was lucky enough to visit Jamaica about ten years ago. My wife and I toured a colonial mansion, and I couldn’t help thinking about how a place like that had been built by slaves. That moment stuck with me. Mix that with a little Alfred Hitchcock’s Lifeboat and a little Raiders of the Lost Ark, and the story began to take shape.

The Siren’s Reliquary isn’t just a cursed object—it’s a vessel for the rage of enslaved and colonized people, its whispers speaking of “chains and whips, stolen lives and broken promises.” That’s a significant moral and historical weight to place at the center of a WWII thriller. How did you think about the relationship between the story’s horror and that specific history? Was the colonial dimension always the artifact’s origin, or did it arrive during drafting?

I’ve always been drawn to the paintings of J. M. W. Turner, especially The Slave Ship. That painting has haunted me for years, the way it captures both beauty and unimaginable cruelty at the same time. I think that tension between horror and history inevitably shaped how I thought about the reliquary. I’d like to say I had the colonial dimension mapped out from the beginning, but the truth is I probably discovered it during drafting. Once the idea appeared, though, it felt right. The reliquary stopped being just a cursed object and became a vessel for a much older anger.

The phantom sailors working their invisible rigging on the deck—figures from ships the artifact had already claimed—are one of the story’s most haunting images. They’re not attacking; they’re replaying their own deaths. What drew you to giving the ghosts that specific quality of compulsive repetition rather than active menace?

I’ve always been someone who wonders what happened in a particular place over time. Living along Colorado’s Front Range, it’s strange to think that millions of years ago, there was an ocean here. Now it’s almost desert. That idea, that landscapes remember what once existed there, has always fascinated me.

So when I imagined the ghosts on the ship, I didn’t think of them as actively malevolent. Instead, I imagined them trapped in the final moments of their lives, repeating the last work they ever did. In that sense, the sea isn’t evil—it’s simply holding memories that refuse to fade.

The story ends in 1950, with Taylor working at a maritime museum, reading a newspaper clipping about another crew gone missing and a carved wooden box recovered and en route to the British Museum in London. The Reliquary is coming home to the heart of empire. That’s a bleak and pointed ending. How deliberately political is that final image?

It is very political. With the end of World War II, the British Empire had already begun to fade. In the decades that followed, Britain faced rationing, economic hardship, and the gradual loss of the global dominance it had built over centuries, including during the era of the slave trade.

So the idea of the Reliquary returning to London, to the heart of that former empire, felt like an appropriate image. History has a way of circling back on itself.

What are you working on now—and what’s fun or exciting about it?

Right now I’m working on a story for a future issue of Boundary Shock Quarterly called “Our Lady of the Tractor Beam,” a silly religious science-fiction story in which aliens decide that Earth is something that can simply be towed away. I’m also working on a sword-and-sorcery story that may feature a brooding barbarian somewhat reminiscent of another famous barbarian from fantasy literature. It’s been fun returning to that kind of pulpy adventure.

About the Author

Chuck Anderson is a well-seasoned art student at MSU Denver.

Find out more about Chuck at chuckanderson.rocks

Read the Story

“Whispers of the Drowned” appears in Haunted Waters, available now from Blackbird Publishing.

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