Grief, Madness, and the Sea: A Review of The Vigil by Peter J. Dellolio

A #PromoteIndieLit Review

Some books whisper. The Vigil (Type Eighteen Books) howls.

Peter J. Dellolio’s experimental novella is a gothic salt-lick of grief and hallucination, set against the battered backdrop of Boston Light, where Ralph Unda, haunted father, failed protector, lighthouse keeper in both role and ruin, watches the sea for the ghost of his drowned daughter, Georgia.

This isn’t your neat little trauma narrative. Dellolio, a poet by blood and rhythm, floods the page with lyrical dread and metaphysical saltwater. Time folds in on itself. Dreams bleed into monologue. The sea isn’t just a setting. It’s a sentient force, part Greek chorus, part monster, part confessional.

Unda isn’t a hero. He’s a man undone. The voice of the story pulses with longing and madness, and Dellolio doesn’t let us look away. The book’s “salty blankets of crushed crabs” shows how this writer never pulls back from the decay and beauty of that image. He dreams of his daughter’s return, the haunting vividness of “wet fingers” and “the coins slipping away from his grasp” echoing across the spiral staircase of Boston Light. The coins “tumble one by one down the metal coiling steps,” their sound “mocking Unda like a robotic chuckling.” That image, loss slipping from your hands in a tower of endless descent, is the book’s core.

There’s a stunning moment when he pleads, “I see the circular beam of the tower light and it stares back at me with accusation… cold orb of its eye piercing through the saline haze of summer twilight… my little girl… my Georgia… do you hear me?… forgive me… forgive me…” It’s that kind of raw, unpolished grief that gives this novella its edge. You feel like you’re reading someone’s open wound, not a neatly plotted story.

The classical references and deeper symbolic layers didn’t resonate with me personally. I’m often too ignorant to appreciate that mode of storytelling, and I’m fine admitting that. But that doesn’t mean it won’t hit for others, especially readers attuned to literature that folds in ancestral weight and literary allusion. What hit me was the brutal honesty and emotional reckoning. The Sea Lamprey becomes a metaphor for guilt, “a vicious master of the sea… it has attached itself to Unda.” He is a man being devoured by what he couldn’t prevent.

Dellolio doesn’t just explore grief. He orchestrates it like cinema. “Unda torments himself over his failure to save his daughter. He is like a maniacal film director composing the very nightmare scenes that tear at him.” That’s one of the most powerful metaphors in the book, and it’s exactly how this reads, like someone restaging their own suffering every night in the tower, unable to break the loop.

There’s no redemption here. Just endurance. “He knows his sanity is a prisoner of the tide and ebbs away a little more each day.” And yet he stays. That’s what haunts you long after the book closes.

Through fragmented dialogues and recurring nightmares, The Vigil disorients in the best way. There’s a second-person address to Georgia that feels like a prayer, a confession, and a suicide note all at once. Meanwhile, the townsfolk’s banter, half about fishing line, half about tragedy, grounds the story in a lived-in, New England grit. It’s as if The Lighthouse film took a detour into a tackle shop full of ghosts and never found the way back out.

Dellolio asks what happens when loss becomes your ecosystem. When memory isn’t just a wound, but a habitat.

For readers sick of sanitised, Etsy-grief stories, The Vigil is a necessary plunge. It’s strange, hypnotic, and refuses to offer closure. Because some things, like the sea or a father’s guilt, can’t be tamed. They can only be witnessed.

And that’s what Unda does, night after night.