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Black Tank
For four years, Gary has lived by procedure.
He drives the RV he was supposed to share with his wife, Claire, moving from campground to campground and dump station to dump station. At every stop, he follows the same carefully controlled routine. He monitors the park. Measures the variables. Empties the black tank.
And makes certain the procedure never quite finishes.
Now Gary has arrived at Ridgeline State Park, the place Claire circled twice in their road atlas and marked with a star. As afternoon light moves across the landscape exactly as she once described it, a failing valve traps him at the station longer than his protocols allow.
Minute by minute, the systems Gary has built to contain his past begin to break down. Memories of Claire surface alongside the truth of an environmental contamination scandal, eleven years of falsified reports, and the choice that paid for the vehicle carrying him across the country.
While strangers in the campground quietly begin to recognize what Gary has been doing, he must decide whether to repeat the managed departure that has kept him moving for four years or finally complete the procedure.
Set almost entirely over forty mounting minutes, BLACK TANK is a literary psychological suspense novel about grief, moral injury, complicity, and the unbearable distance between knowing the truth and acting on it.
He drives the RV he was supposed to share with his wife, Claire, moving from campground to campground and dump station to dump station. At every stop, he follows the same carefully controlled routine. He monitors the park. Measures the variables. Empties the black tank.
And makes certain the procedure never quite finishes.
Now Gary has arrived at Ridgeline State Park, the place Claire circled twice in their road atlas and marked with a star. As afternoon light moves across the landscape exactly as she once described it, a failing valve traps him at the station longer than his protocols allow.
Minute by minute, the systems Gary has built to contain his past begin to break down. Memories of Claire surface alongside the truth of an environmental contamination scandal, eleven years of falsified reports, and the choice that paid for the vehicle carrying him across the country.
While strangers in the campground quietly begin to recognize what Gary has been doing, he must decide whether to repeat the managed departure that has kept him moving for four years or finally complete the procedure.
Set almost entirely over forty mounting minutes, BLACK TANK is a literary psychological suspense novel about grief, moral injury, complicity, and the unbearable distance between knowing the truth and acting on it.
145 pages, Kindle Edition
Published August 25, 2026
About the author
Wade Prull
2 books11 followersWade Prull writes literary fiction from the American Northeast. His work explores the American landscape, overlooked places, and the people shaped by them.
His fiction is interested in the spaces between action and consequence, where routine, memory, and place quietly reveal the lives people have built for themselves. Drawing on the landscapes of the Northeast, his work blends literary fiction with psychological suspense to examine grief, moral responsibility, and the stories people tell themselves in order to keep moving forward.
His fiction is interested in the spaces between action and consequence, where routine, memory, and place quietly reveal the lives people have built for themselves. Drawing on the landscapes of the Northeast, his work blends literary fiction with psychological suspense to examine grief, moral responsibility, and the stories people tell themselves in order to keep moving forward.
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Displaying 1 - 28 of 28 reviews
September 19, 2026
Firstly, I received a copy of this book from the author.
Unfortunately it just did not work for me. I'm not entirely sure what was going on other than Gary dealing with the consequences of his own actions. The actual plot within the park confused me, and the ending was too open ended for my liking. I did understand what the author was trying to do with the organization of Gary's inner dialog and why the writing was repetitive - it was too repetitive for me.
There are definitely sime interesting ideas within this novella. I applaud him for taking a risk with his storytelling even if it didn't work out for me.
Unfortunately it just did not work for me. I'm not entirely sure what was going on other than Gary dealing with the consequences of his own actions. The actual plot within the park confused me, and the ending was too open ended for my liking. I did understand what the author was trying to do with the organization of Gary's inner dialog and why the writing was repetitive - it was too repetitive for me.
There are definitely sime interesting ideas within this novella. I applaud him for taking a risk with his storytelling even if it didn't work out for me.
August 25, 2026
Wade really knows how to make me anxious 😭 The anticipation of everything slowly being revealed had my heart RACING. I was flying through this book trying to figure out what was going on.
The craziest part is that this entire story takes place over 40 minutes and Gary is basically in the same freaking spot the whole time. Like physically, this story is not going anywhere 😂 He is at the RV park doing the same thing he was doing on page one, but somehow SO MUCH happens.
I don’t even know how to explain it, but I was so anxious the entire time. The way Wade slowly gives you pieces of Gary’s past, the environmental scandal, Claire, and everything else had me sitting there like 👀 okayyyy what the hell is happening.
I also really liked how detail and number focused Gary is. He is SO locked in on everything around him, and I swear that made me even more anxious because I was paying attention to every little thing too.
I’ve genuinely never read anything quite like this. It’s wild that a story can feel like it’s moving so fast when the main character is literally standing in the same spot for most of it 😂
And that ending??? BRUH. WTF WAS THAT 😭😭 Is that a huge cliffhanger or did I just not put some of the pieces together?? Either way, I loved it.
Definitely one of those books where you just sit there in silence afterward like… okay, I need to process that lmao.
The craziest part is that this entire story takes place over 40 minutes and Gary is basically in the same freaking spot the whole time. Like physically, this story is not going anywhere 😂 He is at the RV park doing the same thing he was doing on page one, but somehow SO MUCH happens.
I don’t even know how to explain it, but I was so anxious the entire time. The way Wade slowly gives you pieces of Gary’s past, the environmental scandal, Claire, and everything else had me sitting there like 👀 okayyyy what the hell is happening.
I also really liked how detail and number focused Gary is. He is SO locked in on everything around him, and I swear that made me even more anxious because I was paying attention to every little thing too.
I’ve genuinely never read anything quite like this. It’s wild that a story can feel like it’s moving so fast when the main character is literally standing in the same spot for most of it 😂
And that ending??? BRUH. WTF WAS THAT 😭😭 Is that a huge cliffhanger or did I just not put some of the pieces together?? Either way, I loved it.
Definitely one of those books where you just sit there in silence afterward like… okay, I need to process that lmao.
September 14, 2026
★★★★★ | BLACK TANK by Wade Prull
I finished Black Tank and I genuinely need a minute because WHAT did I just read?
This book was incredible.
It is the kind of psychological suspense that doesn’t need to constantly scream at you to create tension. Instead, it quietly gets under your skin and makes you increasingly uncomfortable until you realize you’ve been holding your breath for the last several chapters.
My heart was RACING while reading this. I was second-guessing everything. Analyzing every detail. Reconsidering what I thought I understood. And, perhaps most impressively, I felt like the book trusted me enough to figure things out for myself.
That trust in the reader is one of my favorite things about this book.
Black Tank follows Gary, a man who has spent four years living by procedure after the loss of his wife, Claire. He moves from campground to campground in their RV, repeating the same carefully controlled routines. Monitor. Measure. Empty the black tank. Repeat.
And that procedure becomes so much more than a literal routine.
It becomes a way of surviving.
A way of containing grief.
A way of keeping the past at a manageable distance.
And eventually, a way of avoiding what he knows.
What I found so fascinating was the way Wade Prull explores moral injury and trauma through the language of procedure. Gary has essentially categorized his own trauma into systems, measurements, rules, and routines. If everything can be controlled, perhaps nothing else has to be confronted.
But eventually, the system starts to fail.
And when it does, everything Gary has been trying to contain starts leaking through.
There was something incredibly effective about the way this book portrays grief—not as a singular event that happens and then gets “processed,” but as something that changes the way a person moves through the world. Gary isn’t simply remembering Claire. He’s carrying the consequences of what happened with him everywhere he goes.
This quote absolutely destroyed me:
“Human beings assume catastrophic events register in the ambient world. They expect that the brilliance of light changes, that ordinary objects behave differently, that the world outside the body acknowledges what has happened inside it.”
YES.
That feeling of something enormous happening inside you while the rest of the world continues completely normally is such a devastatingly accurate way of describing grief and trauma.
And then there was this:
“The reading shows a husband who is past his rated capacity and has been operating in the failure range for so long that the failure range has come to feel like operating range.”
I had to stop.
Because THAT is the book.
The idea that dysfunction can become so familiar that we stop recognizing it as dysfunction. That the state we’re barely surviving in can eventually start to feel like our baseline. That sometimes you don’t realize how far past your limits you’ve gone because you’ve been living there for so long.
And this quote might be my favorite:
“I drove through towns I have never returned to and whose names I did not log because logging them made them places I had been rather than roads I had taken. Roads I had taken were less permanent than places I had been and I needed everything to be less permanent. I needed the world to be a thing that moved past me rather than a thing I was in.”
EXCUSE ME???
That is such a beautifully painful explanation of avoidance.
Gary doesn’t want to belong anywhere. He doesn’t want to establish permanence. He wants to keep moving because movement means he doesn’t have to stop long enough to actually exist inside what happened to him.
And I think that’s what made the suspense work so well for me. I wasn’t just wondering what happened?
I was wondering:
What is Gary willing to admit happened?
What is he willing to remember?
What happens when the systems you’ve built to protect yourself become the very things keeping you trapped?
This is a book that asks some really uncomfortable questions about grief, complicity, responsibility, trauma, and the distance between knowing the truth and actually acting on it.
And I LOVED that it didn’t spoon-feed me the answers.
There were so many moments where I found myself going back through what I’d just read, questioning my own interpretation, trying to decide what was being said versus what I was supposed to infer. It made me an active participant in the story rather than someone being handed information.
That is SUCH a difficult balance to pull off in psychological suspense. Give the reader too little and the story becomes confusing. Give them too much and the tension disappears.
Black Tank found that sweet spot for me.
It is atmospheric, deeply psychological, quietly devastating, and increasingly tense in a way that had me LOCKED IN.
And honestly, I think the title itself became more meaningful the further I got into the story. The literal procedure of emptying the black tank becomes this almost perfect metaphor for what Gary is doing with his own life: repeatedly trying to dispose of something unpleasant, contained, and unspoken—without ever actually dealing with why it’s there in the first place.
There is something deeply unsettling about watching a person build an entire life around not confronting the thing that destroyed their previous one.
This book made me think.
It made me uncomfortable.
It made me question what I thought I knew.
It made me reread sentences because they felt like they had more underneath them than I caught the first time.
And most importantly, it trusted me to get there myself.
Black Tank is not just a psychological suspense novel about a man traveling around in an RV.
It’s a story about grief, moral injury, trauma, complicity, avoidance, and what happens when you can only keep running from something for so long before the road eventually runs out.
Absolutely incredible.
This is exactly the kind of psychological suspense I want more of: smart, atmospheric, unsettling, and willing to let the reader do some of the work.
Wade Prull, you have my full attention. 🖤
I finished Black Tank and I genuinely need a minute because WHAT did I just read?
This book was incredible.
It is the kind of psychological suspense that doesn’t need to constantly scream at you to create tension. Instead, it quietly gets under your skin and makes you increasingly uncomfortable until you realize you’ve been holding your breath for the last several chapters.
My heart was RACING while reading this. I was second-guessing everything. Analyzing every detail. Reconsidering what I thought I understood. And, perhaps most impressively, I felt like the book trusted me enough to figure things out for myself.
That trust in the reader is one of my favorite things about this book.
Black Tank follows Gary, a man who has spent four years living by procedure after the loss of his wife, Claire. He moves from campground to campground in their RV, repeating the same carefully controlled routines. Monitor. Measure. Empty the black tank. Repeat.
And that procedure becomes so much more than a literal routine.
It becomes a way of surviving.
A way of containing grief.
A way of keeping the past at a manageable distance.
And eventually, a way of avoiding what he knows.
What I found so fascinating was the way Wade Prull explores moral injury and trauma through the language of procedure. Gary has essentially categorized his own trauma into systems, measurements, rules, and routines. If everything can be controlled, perhaps nothing else has to be confronted.
But eventually, the system starts to fail.
And when it does, everything Gary has been trying to contain starts leaking through.
There was something incredibly effective about the way this book portrays grief—not as a singular event that happens and then gets “processed,” but as something that changes the way a person moves through the world. Gary isn’t simply remembering Claire. He’s carrying the consequences of what happened with him everywhere he goes.
This quote absolutely destroyed me:
“Human beings assume catastrophic events register in the ambient world. They expect that the brilliance of light changes, that ordinary objects behave differently, that the world outside the body acknowledges what has happened inside it.”
YES.
That feeling of something enormous happening inside you while the rest of the world continues completely normally is such a devastatingly accurate way of describing grief and trauma.
And then there was this:
“The reading shows a husband who is past his rated capacity and has been operating in the failure range for so long that the failure range has come to feel like operating range.”
I had to stop.
Because THAT is the book.
The idea that dysfunction can become so familiar that we stop recognizing it as dysfunction. That the state we’re barely surviving in can eventually start to feel like our baseline. That sometimes you don’t realize how far past your limits you’ve gone because you’ve been living there for so long.
And this quote might be my favorite:
“I drove through towns I have never returned to and whose names I did not log because logging them made them places I had been rather than roads I had taken. Roads I had taken were less permanent than places I had been and I needed everything to be less permanent. I needed the world to be a thing that moved past me rather than a thing I was in.”
EXCUSE ME???
That is such a beautifully painful explanation of avoidance.
Gary doesn’t want to belong anywhere. He doesn’t want to establish permanence. He wants to keep moving because movement means he doesn’t have to stop long enough to actually exist inside what happened to him.
And I think that’s what made the suspense work so well for me. I wasn’t just wondering what happened?
I was wondering:
What is Gary willing to admit happened?
What is he willing to remember?
What happens when the systems you’ve built to protect yourself become the very things keeping you trapped?
This is a book that asks some really uncomfortable questions about grief, complicity, responsibility, trauma, and the distance between knowing the truth and actually acting on it.
And I LOVED that it didn’t spoon-feed me the answers.
There were so many moments where I found myself going back through what I’d just read, questioning my own interpretation, trying to decide what was being said versus what I was supposed to infer. It made me an active participant in the story rather than someone being handed information.
That is SUCH a difficult balance to pull off in psychological suspense. Give the reader too little and the story becomes confusing. Give them too much and the tension disappears.
Black Tank found that sweet spot for me.
It is atmospheric, deeply psychological, quietly devastating, and increasingly tense in a way that had me LOCKED IN.
And honestly, I think the title itself became more meaningful the further I got into the story. The literal procedure of emptying the black tank becomes this almost perfect metaphor for what Gary is doing with his own life: repeatedly trying to dispose of something unpleasant, contained, and unspoken—without ever actually dealing with why it’s there in the first place.
There is something deeply unsettling about watching a person build an entire life around not confronting the thing that destroyed their previous one.
This book made me think.
It made me uncomfortable.
It made me question what I thought I knew.
It made me reread sentences because they felt like they had more underneath them than I caught the first time.
And most importantly, it trusted me to get there myself.
Black Tank is not just a psychological suspense novel about a man traveling around in an RV.
It’s a story about grief, moral injury, trauma, complicity, avoidance, and what happens when you can only keep running from something for so long before the road eventually runs out.
Absolutely incredible.
This is exactly the kind of psychological suspense I want more of: smart, atmospheric, unsettling, and willing to let the reader do some of the work.
Wade Prull, you have my full attention. 🖤
September 4, 2026
Black Tank is the debut novella by author Wade Prull. It's described as "Set almost entirely over forty mounting minutes, BLACK TANK is a literary psychological thriller novella about grief, moral injury, complicity, and the unbearable distance between knowing the truth and acting on it."
While I found the framework (it's basically this guy's inner monologue/train-of-thought over a 40 minute period while he empties the black water tank on his RV) to be intriguing and well-written for what it was I really don't get how it's a thriller or why many reviewers have said it made them feel anxious. In hindsight, I can see that is probably what the author was going for but maybe I'm the wrong audience. I don't know. My husband has generalized anxiety disorder and I can see where his inner monologue might look like this guy's sometimes.
I found it to be easy enough to read and I was on board right up until the end - which I found to be incredibly unsatisfying and unresolved. There was a page at the end that said "Coming soon; Gray Water" so I don't know if this book is just Part 1 and maybe Gray Water will continue the story or what. If that's the case I think it could have been more clear. But as it is, in my opinion there were a lot of unanswered questions for me.
For the first 2/3 or so I thought this was going to just be a really sad story about this guy dealing with his grief and finding a way to move on. For most of the last third I actually thought the story was going somewhere really interesting and I stayed up late to finish, only for it to end abruptly and leave me with all of these questions. I typically read at night, right before bed. I finished this novella last night and it made me so mad I couldn't get to sleep for an hour.
Oh yeah, thanks to NetGalley, Wade Prull, and the publisher for providing me with an ARC in exchange for my honest review.
While I found the framework (it's basically this guy's inner monologue/train-of-thought over a 40 minute period while he empties the black water tank on his RV) to be intriguing and well-written for what it was I really don't get how it's a thriller or why many reviewers have said it made them feel anxious. In hindsight, I can see that is probably what the author was going for but maybe I'm the wrong audience. I don't know. My husband has generalized anxiety disorder and I can see where his inner monologue might look like this guy's sometimes.
I found it to be easy enough to read and I was on board right up until the end - which I found to be incredibly unsatisfying and unresolved. There was a page at the end that said "Coming soon; Gray Water" so I don't know if this book is just Part 1 and maybe Gray Water will continue the story or what. If that's the case I think it could have been more clear. But as it is, in my opinion there were a lot of unanswered questions for me.
For the first 2/3 or so I thought this was going to just be a really sad story about this guy dealing with his grief and finding a way to move on. For most of the last third I actually thought the story was going somewhere really interesting and I stayed up late to finish, only for it to end abruptly and leave me with all of these questions. I typically read at night, right before bed. I finished this novella last night and it made me so mad I couldn't get to sleep for an hour.
Oh yeah, thanks to NetGalley, Wade Prull, and the publisher for providing me with an ARC in exchange for my honest review.
August 31, 2026
3.25/5
In a nutshell: the story was decent, but I was not a fan of the writing style or the pacing.
Other reviewers note that they felt a great deal of tension and anxiety reading this, but I'm over here scratching my head and wondering how someone could react to the prose that way. To me it was emotionless. Gary's thoughts and actions are repetitive and robotic. This is supposed to give the impression of avoidance, dissociation, guilt, etc. - but this kind of clipped and repetitive writing style makes me feel as detached from the story as Gary feels from himself. So while I understand *why* the prose is as it is, it doesn't make it less unpleasant to read. And I don't always hate repetition in prose - books like The Blind Owl by Sadegh Hedayat and The Sofa by Sam Munson are very repetitive, but the repetition is propulsive and the impact of it builds over time, while here it remains flat.
As I went on I was hoping that bits of emotion might start leaking through, a slight break in the control, something that would make Gary sound less like a (broken) computer...
it never happens. Not really. There are moments that come close/tease this happening, but then his thought process goes back to how it was with no meaningful change. The whole book is written in this style.
On top of this, I also could not sympathize with Gary. Everything that happened was his own fault. He could have made different choices, but he didn't - nobody forced him to take the actions that put him in his current position. So I was not very invested in how he resolved this dilemma internally. The narrative seemed to imply that the reader should relate on some level - but I thought he should lie in the bed he made for himself.
Not for me, but might be for someone else. Interesting, but not so compelling that I would be moved to check out anything else by this author.
Thank you to the publisher and NetGalley for providing a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.
#BlackTank #NetGalley
In a nutshell: the story was decent, but I was not a fan of the writing style or the pacing.
Other reviewers note that they felt a great deal of tension and anxiety reading this, but I'm over here scratching my head and wondering how someone could react to the prose that way. To me it was emotionless. Gary's thoughts and actions are repetitive and robotic. This is supposed to give the impression of avoidance, dissociation, guilt, etc. - but this kind of clipped and repetitive writing style makes me feel as detached from the story as Gary feels from himself. So while I understand *why* the prose is as it is, it doesn't make it less unpleasant to read. And I don't always hate repetition in prose - books like The Blind Owl by Sadegh Hedayat and The Sofa by Sam Munson are very repetitive, but the repetition is propulsive and the impact of it builds over time, while here it remains flat.
As I went on I was hoping that bits of emotion might start leaking through, a slight break in the control, something that would make Gary sound less like a (broken) computer...
it never happens. Not really. There are moments that come close/tease this happening, but then his thought process goes back to how it was with no meaningful change. The whole book is written in this style.
On top of this, I also could not sympathize with Gary. Everything that happened was his own fault. He could have made different choices, but he didn't - nobody forced him to take the actions that put him in his current position. So I was not very invested in how he resolved this dilemma internally. The narrative seemed to imply that the reader should relate on some level - but I thought he should lie in the bed he made for himself.
Not for me, but might be for someone else. Interesting, but not so compelling that I would be moved to check out anything else by this author.
Thank you to the publisher and NetGalley for providing a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.
#BlackTank #NetGalley
September 2, 2026
Black Tank by Wade Prull is a literary psychological thriller that transforms an ordinary RV dump station into the setting for an unnervingly intimate examination of grief, guilt and moral accountability. Gary, a former infrastructure engineer travelling alone, has developed an exacting ritual for emptying his motorhome’s black-water tank. He records temperatures, calculates the movements of other campers and monitors every sound, surface and possible observer. When a valve refuses to function correctly at Ridgeline State Park, however, the routine begins to unravel, and the longer Gary remains beside the open system, the more difficult it becomes for him to keep the past contained.
Prull’s most impressive achievement is Gary’s voice. His thoughts move through measurements, categories, tolerances and failure protocols, creating a consciousness that is both highly intelligent and profoundly unreliable. Gary does not necessarily lie to the reader; instead, he converts everything he cannot emotionally endure into technical language. The “Maintenance Tips” preceding each chapter are particularly effective, functioning as practical instructions, psychological commandments and increasingly ominous reflections on containment. The black tank itself becomes a powerful metaphor for everything left untreated: grief, complicity, memory and the consequences of believing that careful management can substitute for genuine reckoning.
Beneath its disturbing premise, the novel is also an affecting portrait of a marriage understood too late. Claire emerges through small remembered details. These recollections gradually reveal the difference between observing a life and fully inhabiting it. Prull connects Gary’s private history to his professional involvement in an environmental contamination scandal, allowing the same patterns of concealment, compromised data and deferred responsibility to operate at both personal and institutional levels. The nurse-like camp host and the experienced observer in the grey RV add external pressure, yet the novel’s most consequential confrontation remains the one occurring inside Gary’s own rigorously compartmentalised mind.
The novel’s deliberate repetition successfully recreates obsessive thought, although it occasionally works against the accumulating tension. Phrases surrounding the hose, the gauge, the light, the camp chair and Gary’s refusal to begin his “managed departure” are reiterated so frequently that their emotional force begins to diminish, particularly through the middle chapters. A leaner version, trusting the reader to retain these motifs without repeatedly restating their significance, would make Gary’s psychological collapse feel even sharper. The two perceptive observers also remain largely functional figures rather than fully realised individuals; giving them slightly more texture could have made the external world feel as immediate as Gary’s internal one.
Nevertheless, Black Tank is a formally controlled, unsettling and unexpectedly moving novel about the terrible limitations of compartmentalisation. Prull understands that guilt cannot be processed through distance, grief cannot be converted into procedure, and a life cannot be repaired solely by identifying its points of failure. The final movement is satisfyingly restrained, locating its power in release, presence and the decision to stop fleeing rather than in spectacle. Readers who appreciate literary suspense, morally compromised narrators and psychologically exacting fiction will find much to admire in this unusual and haunting book.
Prull’s most impressive achievement is Gary’s voice. His thoughts move through measurements, categories, tolerances and failure protocols, creating a consciousness that is both highly intelligent and profoundly unreliable. Gary does not necessarily lie to the reader; instead, he converts everything he cannot emotionally endure into technical language. The “Maintenance Tips” preceding each chapter are particularly effective, functioning as practical instructions, psychological commandments and increasingly ominous reflections on containment. The black tank itself becomes a powerful metaphor for everything left untreated: grief, complicity, memory and the consequences of believing that careful management can substitute for genuine reckoning.
Beneath its disturbing premise, the novel is also an affecting portrait of a marriage understood too late. Claire emerges through small remembered details. These recollections gradually reveal the difference between observing a life and fully inhabiting it. Prull connects Gary’s private history to his professional involvement in an environmental contamination scandal, allowing the same patterns of concealment, compromised data and deferred responsibility to operate at both personal and institutional levels. The nurse-like camp host and the experienced observer in the grey RV add external pressure, yet the novel’s most consequential confrontation remains the one occurring inside Gary’s own rigorously compartmentalised mind.
The novel’s deliberate repetition successfully recreates obsessive thought, although it occasionally works against the accumulating tension. Phrases surrounding the hose, the gauge, the light, the camp chair and Gary’s refusal to begin his “managed departure” are reiterated so frequently that their emotional force begins to diminish, particularly through the middle chapters. A leaner version, trusting the reader to retain these motifs without repeatedly restating their significance, would make Gary’s psychological collapse feel even sharper. The two perceptive observers also remain largely functional figures rather than fully realised individuals; giving them slightly more texture could have made the external world feel as immediate as Gary’s internal one.
Nevertheless, Black Tank is a formally controlled, unsettling and unexpectedly moving novel about the terrible limitations of compartmentalisation. Prull understands that guilt cannot be processed through distance, grief cannot be converted into procedure, and a life cannot be repaired solely by identifying its points of failure. The final movement is satisfyingly restrained, locating its power in release, presence and the decision to stop fleeing rather than in spectacle. Readers who appreciate literary suspense, morally compromised narrators and psychologically exacting fiction will find much to admire in this unusual and haunting book.
Review of advance copy received from Author
Wade Prull’s Black Tank is a tightly focused literary novel about Gary, a former infrastructure specialist who has spent four years traveling alone in an RV after the death of his wife, Claire. The story unfolds during roughly forty minutes at a state park dump station, where Gary performs a maintenance routine he’s repeated more than a hundred times. He studies every person, sound, movement, and mechanical reading around him, partly out of professional habit and partly because constant observation keeps him from confronting what he’s carrying. As the procedure begins to fail, memories of Claire, his former career, and a contaminated public water system rise into the present. What starts as an oddly tense account of emptying an RV tank becomes a confession about grief, guilt, and the exhausting work of keeping painful truths contained.
The novel’s most distinctive feature is Gary’s voice. He translates nearly every emotion into the language of gauges, pressure, chemistry, capacity, and system failure. That language can be funny in its extreme precision, especially when he calculates trail times or classifies ordinary campground behavior, but it also shows how completely he’s built his life around avoidance. The maintenance tips between chapters deepen this effect. Each one seems to describe equipment while quietly explaining Gary’s emotional condition. Prull commits fully to this structure, and the repetition gives the book a steady, pressurized rhythm. Small actions, such as a camper opening a door or Gary shifting his foot, carry the suspense of major events because we experience them through a mind that treats uncertainty as danger.
Gary reminded me of Stevens in Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day. Both men hide inside professional competence, speak in controlled and specialized language, and gradually reveal that their loyalty to procedure has helped them avoid moral responsibility. Stevens uses dignity and service to organize his memories, while Gary uses engineering logic and maintenance protocols. Prull’s approach is more physically immediate, with the malfunctioning tank and hose turning Gary’s inner life into something he has to hold in his hands. Like Ishiguro, Prull trusts the reader to notice the emotional truth before the narrator can say it. Gary’s eventual use of Claire’s name feels powerful because the entire book has shown how carefully he’s kept that name outside his operating system.
Black Tank is ultimately about a man discovering that grief can’t be processed like waste and guilt can’t be managed through motion. Gary’s technical language remains central to the end, but its meaning changes as he begins to listen to his own internal gauge. The final image of him releasing the hose and preparing to retrieve the camp chair Claire packed gives the novel a moving sense of completion without pretending that one honest moment repairs years of damage. Prull turns an unglamorous maintenance task into an intimate study of accountability and survival. It’s a strange premise, handled with remarkable seriousness and control, and the result stayed with me long after Gary’s forty minutes at the station were over.
The novel’s most distinctive feature is Gary’s voice. He translates nearly every emotion into the language of gauges, pressure, chemistry, capacity, and system failure. That language can be funny in its extreme precision, especially when he calculates trail times or classifies ordinary campground behavior, but it also shows how completely he’s built his life around avoidance. The maintenance tips between chapters deepen this effect. Each one seems to describe equipment while quietly explaining Gary’s emotional condition. Prull commits fully to this structure, and the repetition gives the book a steady, pressurized rhythm. Small actions, such as a camper opening a door or Gary shifting his foot, carry the suspense of major events because we experience them through a mind that treats uncertainty as danger.
Gary reminded me of Stevens in Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day. Both men hide inside professional competence, speak in controlled and specialized language, and gradually reveal that their loyalty to procedure has helped them avoid moral responsibility. Stevens uses dignity and service to organize his memories, while Gary uses engineering logic and maintenance protocols. Prull’s approach is more physically immediate, with the malfunctioning tank and hose turning Gary’s inner life into something he has to hold in his hands. Like Ishiguro, Prull trusts the reader to notice the emotional truth before the narrator can say it. Gary’s eventual use of Claire’s name feels powerful because the entire book has shown how carefully he’s kept that name outside his operating system.
Black Tank is ultimately about a man discovering that grief can’t be processed like waste and guilt can’t be managed through motion. Gary’s technical language remains central to the end, but its meaning changes as he begins to listen to his own internal gauge. The final image of him releasing the hose and preparing to retrieve the camp chair Claire packed gives the novel a moving sense of completion without pretending that one honest moment repairs years of damage. Prull turns an unglamorous maintenance task into an intimate study of accountability and survival. It’s a strange premise, handled with remarkable seriousness and control, and the result stayed with me long after Gary’s forty minutes at the station were over.
September 10, 2026
Black Tank arrives disguised as one kind of book and turns out to be another, and the turn is the whole experience of reading it.
For its first half this reads as a study of a working life gone wrong. A former infrastructure engineer, twenty-two years in water systems, sits with the consequences of a career built from small concessions: a memo he wrote, a lunch he was taken to, an NDA he signed and the money he accepted. There is something of Willy Loman in him, an ageing American professional who cannot separate what he did for a living from who he became. Prull seems to know it. Asked directly what he used to do, the narrator says he was in sales.
The whole present-day action takes place over thirty-nine minutes, while this man empties the waste tank of his motorhome at a state park dump station. Everything else happens inside a mind that processes grief, guilt and self-deception through the vocabulary of pressure vessels and operating tolerances. The chapter epigraphs, presented as maintenance advice for holding tanks, let the book state its truths plainly while the narrator keeps filing them elsewhere. It is controlled, distinctive voice work, and there is a scene involving a technician at a fence beside a school playground that is as good as anything I have read this year.
Then the book shows you what it has actually been about, and it is horrific. I will not spoil it. I had spent a long time inhabiting this man with real sympathy, and watching it play out left me thoroughly unsettled, which I take to be the intention.
Where it lost me is what it wants from the reader afterwards. The closing movement is built as a kind of grace: the narrator stops running, allows himself to be found, and the prose lifts into something that reads as arrival. I understood that I was being invited to feel a flicker of pride in him for staying. I could not. What he did sits far outside anything the situation required, and the book never fully reckons with that gap. The act itself is kept deliberately unnamed, described only as something his hands did while he watched, so the reader is asked to accept a great deal on the word of the one person who most needs it to be survivable. There may be a truer and colder explanation sitting in the subtext, something about a man who could bear exposure but not being seen clearly by his own wife. If so, Prull leaves it there, unexamined, and lets the ending do emotional work the middle has not paid for.
I finished it feeling as though I had missed something, and I am still not certain whether the fault is mine or the book's. That uncertainty is worth four stars on its own. This is an ambitious, tightly controlled piece of writing that has stayed with me for days, and readers who like literary fiction that withholds will find a great deal here to argue with.
For its first half this reads as a study of a working life gone wrong. A former infrastructure engineer, twenty-two years in water systems, sits with the consequences of a career built from small concessions: a memo he wrote, a lunch he was taken to, an NDA he signed and the money he accepted. There is something of Willy Loman in him, an ageing American professional who cannot separate what he did for a living from who he became. Prull seems to know it. Asked directly what he used to do, the narrator says he was in sales.
The whole present-day action takes place over thirty-nine minutes, while this man empties the waste tank of his motorhome at a state park dump station. Everything else happens inside a mind that processes grief, guilt and self-deception through the vocabulary of pressure vessels and operating tolerances. The chapter epigraphs, presented as maintenance advice for holding tanks, let the book state its truths plainly while the narrator keeps filing them elsewhere. It is controlled, distinctive voice work, and there is a scene involving a technician at a fence beside a school playground that is as good as anything I have read this year.
Then the book shows you what it has actually been about, and it is horrific. I will not spoil it. I had spent a long time inhabiting this man with real sympathy, and watching it play out left me thoroughly unsettled, which I take to be the intention.
Where it lost me is what it wants from the reader afterwards. The closing movement is built as a kind of grace: the narrator stops running, allows himself to be found, and the prose lifts into something that reads as arrival. I understood that I was being invited to feel a flicker of pride in him for staying. I could not. What he did sits far outside anything the situation required, and the book never fully reckons with that gap. The act itself is kept deliberately unnamed, described only as something his hands did while he watched, so the reader is asked to accept a great deal on the word of the one person who most needs it to be survivable. There may be a truer and colder explanation sitting in the subtext, something about a man who could bear exposure but not being seen clearly by his own wife. If so, Prull leaves it there, unexamined, and lets the ending do emotional work the middle has not paid for.
I finished it feeling as though I had missed something, and I am still not certain whether the fault is mine or the book's. That uncertainty is worth four stars on its own. This is an ambitious, tightly controlled piece of writing that has stayed with me for days, and readers who like literary fiction that withholds will find a great deal here to argue with.
August 29, 2026
Following a meticulous procedure and with keen observational skills that note everything in his surroundings, a man reaches a critical decision point in his years of travel in Black Tank by Wade Prull.
To read this, and other book reviews, visit my website: http://makinggoodstories.wordpress.com/.
The RV that he’s been traveling in for the past four years was supposed to be a shared journey with his wife, Claire, who provided valuable input on its selection, but instead Gary has had the company of his memories and a procedure. At Ridgeline State Park, the location Claire had marked in their atlas, Gary begins the process of emptying the RV’s black tank; however, the strictly observed maintenance process breaks down, in part due to a failing valve, extending the time taken beyond reasonable expectations and during which his mind revisits memories of the numerous choices and actions related to his job and interactions with Claire that led him to where he is now and the new decision he ultimately has to face.
A quickly moving story that takes place within a forty-minute timeframe, expanded by memories that add background to Gary’s character and the scenario that is filled with anxious tension, the brief narrative explores large topics such as the consequences of silence and complicity, suppressing emotion or thoughts, guilt and grief, and running from problems instead of confronting them. While the presentation of information had repetition and could be a bit dry, as there’s a focus on the mechanical and routine that comes from the character’s personality, that emphasis within the writing suits the purpose well in depicting the character. There are a lot of details provided from the vigilant observations that create an inventory of facts collected into data offered to readers from one man’s very narrow, precise perspective; with such an abundance of detail it should be clear what all has occurred, but understanding is what’s shown to be in a state of being figured out, with enough being left unsaid or said in an oblique enough way to allow readers to interpret or extrapolate from their imaginations to form their own understandings just as Gary forms his.
*I received a copy of this book from the author in exchange for an honest review.
To read this, and other book reviews, visit my website: http://makinggoodstories.wordpress.com/.
The RV that he’s been traveling in for the past four years was supposed to be a shared journey with his wife, Claire, who provided valuable input on its selection, but instead Gary has had the company of his memories and a procedure. At Ridgeline State Park, the location Claire had marked in their atlas, Gary begins the process of emptying the RV’s black tank; however, the strictly observed maintenance process breaks down, in part due to a failing valve, extending the time taken beyond reasonable expectations and during which his mind revisits memories of the numerous choices and actions related to his job and interactions with Claire that led him to where he is now and the new decision he ultimately has to face.
A quickly moving story that takes place within a forty-minute timeframe, expanded by memories that add background to Gary’s character and the scenario that is filled with anxious tension, the brief narrative explores large topics such as the consequences of silence and complicity, suppressing emotion or thoughts, guilt and grief, and running from problems instead of confronting them. While the presentation of information had repetition and could be a bit dry, as there’s a focus on the mechanical and routine that comes from the character’s personality, that emphasis within the writing suits the purpose well in depicting the character. There are a lot of details provided from the vigilant observations that create an inventory of facts collected into data offered to readers from one man’s very narrow, precise perspective; with such an abundance of detail it should be clear what all has occurred, but understanding is what’s shown to be in a state of being figured out, with enough being left unsaid or said in an oblique enough way to allow readers to interpret or extrapolate from their imaginations to form their own understandings just as Gary forms his.
*I received a copy of this book from the author in exchange for an honest review.
August 21, 2026
Disclaimer #1: The author sent me a physical ARC of Black Tank, which he very kindly signed, in exchange for an honest review.
Disclaimer #2: I rate books by ⭐️ based on how they make me feel. It’s not a scorecard for writing, plot, structure, or literary merit.
————————————
“It is worth noting, clinically, that I have spent approximately sixty-seven thousand miles on the road in order to stand at a dump station for nineteen minutes.”
This is Gary.
And I became completely invested in Gary.
He records everything. The awning. The paperback. Departure times. Changes in readings. The precise way Claire holds her coffee cup. Everything is observed, catalogued and filed away.
The writing is incredibly precise, but somehow the more Gary observes, the less certain I became about what he actually understands. He can tell us exactly what someone does without necessarily understanding what it means. And somehow those incredibly detailed observations become some of the most emotional parts of the book.
The repetition works beautifully too. Gary returns to facts, measurements and phrases again and again, almost like he’s using them to keep himself regulated and on track. He knows the facts. He knows the numbers. He knows what he has observed.
People are harder.
I spent much of the book trying to figure Gary out.
Is his relentless cataloguing a coping mechanism? Compulsion? Hypervigilance? Paranoia? Is he neurodivergent? Is he traumatised? Is he simply a man who has constructed an extraordinarily rigid system for surviving a world he no longer trusts?
I never felt confident enough to pin him down, and by the end, I wasn’t sure I was supposed to.
Gary just is.
And then there’s Claire:
“She told me that I was the most efficient sad person she had ever met.”
“I said: I’m not sad.”
“She said: I know.”
Oof. Savage!
I had about 20 pages left and realised I didn’t want to finish because I didn’t want Gary to no longer be in my life.
Naturally, I then flew through the final pages.
Disclaimer #2: I rate books by ⭐️ based on how they make me feel. It’s not a scorecard for writing, plot, structure, or literary merit.
————————————
“It is worth noting, clinically, that I have spent approximately sixty-seven thousand miles on the road in order to stand at a dump station for nineteen minutes.”
This is Gary.
And I became completely invested in Gary.
He records everything. The awning. The paperback. Departure times. Changes in readings. The precise way Claire holds her coffee cup. Everything is observed, catalogued and filed away.
The writing is incredibly precise, but somehow the more Gary observes, the less certain I became about what he actually understands. He can tell us exactly what someone does without necessarily understanding what it means. And somehow those incredibly detailed observations become some of the most emotional parts of the book.
The repetition works beautifully too. Gary returns to facts, measurements and phrases again and again, almost like he’s using them to keep himself regulated and on track. He knows the facts. He knows the numbers. He knows what he has observed.
People are harder.
I spent much of the book trying to figure Gary out.
Is his relentless cataloguing a coping mechanism? Compulsion? Hypervigilance? Paranoia? Is he neurodivergent? Is he traumatised? Is he simply a man who has constructed an extraordinarily rigid system for surviving a world he no longer trusts?
I never felt confident enough to pin him down, and by the end, I wasn’t sure I was supposed to.
Gary just is.
And then there’s Claire:
“She told me that I was the most efficient sad person she had ever met.”
“I said: I’m not sad.”
“She said: I know.”
Oof. Savage!
I had about 20 pages left and realised I didn’t want to finish because I didn’t want Gary to no longer be in my life.
Naturally, I then flew through the final pages.
Review of advance copy received from NetGalley
Wow. 4.5star
Gary does not like things that resist classification. Though I have no idea how to classify this novella myself, boy did I LOVE IT.
I want to start by saying this story will not be for everyone. That’s pretty vague and said all the time, so here’s a snippet from the beginning, which also represents the whole:
“Everything that can be measured is within tolerance. The gauge in my head is not within tolerance but the gauge in my head is not a thing I measure with instruments. It is the thing the instruments are supposed to allow me to ignore. The internal reading that the external monitoring was built to manage. I have been managing it for four years. The management is producing different results at this station than at the previous one hundred and eleven. I hold the hose. I breathe through my nose. I look at the light.”
The ENTIRE story is written in this manner, from the internal monologue of our MMC. If Gary isn’t neurodivergent, then I don’t know what neurodivergence is. He prioritizes information, so he watches, he takes notes, he categorizes and compares. And then we repeat, repeat, repeat. “I have learned not to examine the gap between true things.” I’m baffled at how the author was able to say thing’s without actually saying it, like it’s the little things we take for granted and how sometimes it’s too little, too late. And when Gary is saying this without saying it, my heart broke. There’s so much guilt and regret and at the conclusion of this story that’s a total of 40min, we are seeing Gary, for the first time, interpreting the culmination of his actions and feelings up to this point; - DESPITE “memory is interpretation and interpretation is not data” 🥲
This does end on somewhat of a cliffhanger (or I missed something) so that may be upsetting to some. I will promptly be contacting the author because I have questions! Regardless, WOW. This comes out tomorrow…PLEASE give this a try.
Thank you NetGalley for the ARC copy in exchange for my honest review.
Gary does not like things that resist classification. Though I have no idea how to classify this novella myself, boy did I LOVE IT.
I want to start by saying this story will not be for everyone. That’s pretty vague and said all the time, so here’s a snippet from the beginning, which also represents the whole:
“Everything that can be measured is within tolerance. The gauge in my head is not within tolerance but the gauge in my head is not a thing I measure with instruments. It is the thing the instruments are supposed to allow me to ignore. The internal reading that the external monitoring was built to manage. I have been managing it for four years. The management is producing different results at this station than at the previous one hundred and eleven. I hold the hose. I breathe through my nose. I look at the light.”
The ENTIRE story is written in this manner, from the internal monologue of our MMC. If Gary isn’t neurodivergent, then I don’t know what neurodivergence is. He prioritizes information, so he watches, he takes notes, he categorizes and compares. And then we repeat, repeat, repeat. “I have learned not to examine the gap between true things.” I’m baffled at how the author was able to say thing’s without actually saying it, like it’s the little things we take for granted and how sometimes it’s too little, too late. And when Gary is saying this without saying it, my heart broke. There’s so much guilt and regret and at the conclusion of this story that’s a total of 40min, we are seeing Gary, for the first time, interpreting the culmination of his actions and feelings up to this point; - DESPITE “memory is interpretation and interpretation is not data” 🥲
This does end on somewhat of a cliffhanger (or I missed something) so that may be upsetting to some. I will promptly be contacting the author because I have questions! Regardless, WOW. This comes out tomorrow…PLEASE give this a try.
Thank you NetGalley for the ARC copy in exchange for my honest review.
October 19, 2026
I finished Black Tank yesterday and decided to let it sit overnight before writing my review. I did this because the ending left me with so much to reflect on, and I wanted to form my own interpretations before seeing others. In a word, Black Tank is a feat. In under 150 pages, Wade Prull built suspense, kept me engaged, and developed the main character, Gary, in such a unique way. The analogy of the black tank to grief and monitoring to self-regulation is incredibly interesting. Using such technical and cerebral language to discuss something emotional is one of a kind. I've never read anything like this. I saw another reviewer mention I Who Have Never Known Men, and I see the similarities as well. Both are books you cannot go into expecting all the answers on a silver platter. And even more importantly, do the answers matter?
In the end, I wondered what actually happened to Claire, but then I realized it doesn't actually matter. It doesn't change the story at all. It doesn't matter what specifically was in the tank. At first, I tried to decipher the technical aspects of the story, but they don't affect the narrative. What matters is what all of these "systems" represent, and what their failure represents. My favorite part is that Gary is initially resistant to anchoring himself to places, but that changes during the 40+ minutes he spends at the last station. I loved how small items around the home trigger memory and resurface brief moments of grief. I wish I had read this with a book club or done a buddy read because I don't have anyone to analyze with. I'd love to hear other perspectives. This is such a layered story, and I can't wait to read more of Wade Prull in the future. Bravo!
In the end, I wondered what actually happened to Claire, but then I realized it doesn't actually matter. It doesn't change the story at all. It doesn't matter what specifically was in the tank. At first, I tried to decipher the technical aspects of the story, but they don't affect the narrative. What matters is what all of these "systems" represent, and what their failure represents. My favorite part is that Gary is initially resistant to anchoring himself to places, but that changes during the 40+ minutes he spends at the last station. I loved how small items around the home trigger memory and resurface brief moments of grief. I wish I had read this with a book club or done a buddy read because I don't have anyone to analyze with. I'd love to hear other perspectives. This is such a layered story, and I can't wait to read more of Wade Prull in the future. Bravo!
September 25, 2026
“I notice everything.”
“Black Tank” takes readers deep into the psyche of a man named Gary who has chosen to compartmentalize his life while on the run into strict gauges and procedures to avoid facing the regrets of his past. Gary’s slow reveal of the details behind why he finds himself in the setting of the story keeps you hooked and guessing, and the underlying risk of everything falling apart keeps you anxious to find out what happens next. The ending sets up for the author’s next book “Gray Water”; I am interested to see where this story goes!
Pros
* Prull’s author voice is very unique and strong, which is impressive for a debut novel.
* The prose in this novel is a masterclass in writing characters with rigid and methodical thinking who deliberately engross themselves in their personal missions to deny feeling their own grief and sadness.
Cons
* The writing can sometimes feel repetitive as you often encounter the same phrases used multiple times. This is most likely a stylistic choice by the author.
* The big reveal of what happened to Claire and what exactly Gary is up to are not fully revealed, probably to entice readers to seek out the upcoming second installment of the series. This feels somewhat unsatisfactory, but I am willing to see it through to the next book.
I received my copy of “Black Tank” from the author in exchange for an honest review.
“Black Tank” takes readers deep into the psyche of a man named Gary who has chosen to compartmentalize his life while on the run into strict gauges and procedures to avoid facing the regrets of his past. Gary’s slow reveal of the details behind why he finds himself in the setting of the story keeps you hooked and guessing, and the underlying risk of everything falling apart keeps you anxious to find out what happens next. The ending sets up for the author’s next book “Gray Water”; I am interested to see where this story goes!
Pros
* Prull’s author voice is very unique and strong, which is impressive for a debut novel.
* The prose in this novel is a masterclass in writing characters with rigid and methodical thinking who deliberately engross themselves in their personal missions to deny feeling their own grief and sadness.
Cons
* The writing can sometimes feel repetitive as you often encounter the same phrases used multiple times. This is most likely a stylistic choice by the author.
* The big reveal of what happened to Claire and what exactly Gary is up to are not fully revealed, probably to entice readers to seek out the upcoming second installment of the series. This feels somewhat unsatisfactory, but I am willing to see it through to the next book.
I received my copy of “Black Tank” from the author in exchange for an honest review.
August 31, 2026
This is a tight, claustrophobic little novella that turns one unglamorous task—emptying an RV black tank—into a pressure cooker. Gary has spent four years living by procedure: campground to dump station, same ritual, never quite finishing. When a failing valve traps him at Ridgeline State Park (the place his late wife marked with a star), the systems he’s used to keep grief and guilt in check start to crack.
I respected what it was trying to do. The compressed timeline, the way ordinary maintenance becomes a stand-in for moral injury and the things he won’t face, the slow leak of the past (Claire, the contamination scandal, the choice that paid for the RV)—it’s all controlled and quietly unsettling. It has more in common with a literary character study than the twisty domestic thrillers I usually reach for.
That’s also why it didn’t fully land for me. I kept waiting for the story to open up or snap into a sharper hook, and it stays inside Gary’s head and that dump station for almost the entire runtime. Smart, well-written, and it lingered, but I wanted more propulsion than it was willing to give.
If you like interior, real-time psychological tension more than plot fireworks, this will probably hit harder than it did for me. I liked it. I just didn’t love it.
I respected what it was trying to do. The compressed timeline, the way ordinary maintenance becomes a stand-in for moral injury and the things he won’t face, the slow leak of the past (Claire, the contamination scandal, the choice that paid for the RV)—it’s all controlled and quietly unsettling. It has more in common with a literary character study than the twisty domestic thrillers I usually reach for.
That’s also why it didn’t fully land for me. I kept waiting for the story to open up or snap into a sharper hook, and it stays inside Gary’s head and that dump station for almost the entire runtime. Smart, well-written, and it lingered, but I wanted more propulsion than it was willing to give.
If you like interior, real-time psychological tension more than plot fireworks, this will probably hit harder than it did for me. I liked it. I just didn’t love it.
September 16, 2026
This is an incredibly complex book. Gary is a 22 year engineer that controlled the black tanks for the county until the company encountered an 11 year disaster. When the local paper brings it to light, Gary is forced to sign an NDA and chooses to use the money to buy a new RV. The new RV is meant to travel with his wife of 21 years but when the paper comes out, the discussion doesn't turn out the way Gary planned. Through all this darkness he learns about his marriage and himself.
For such an ugly named book, it is a beautiful story. It is also a short read. The only thing keeping it from being a 5 star book is the elementary, AI, robotic writing style. It would easily be a DNF book. You would miss a beautiful story! However, there are only so many times you need to hear that he worked 29 years, had a wife named Claire, had to hold her hand......just to name a few repeated phrases. That isn't counting what the story needs. That is the discombobulated ones. So I will give this a solid mixed review. 3 🌟 star.
Thank you #NetGalley for #BlackTank in exchange for an honest review.
For such an ugly named book, it is a beautiful story. It is also a short read. The only thing keeping it from being a 5 star book is the elementary, AI, robotic writing style. It would easily be a DNF book. You would miss a beautiful story! However, there are only so many times you need to hear that he worked 29 years, had a wife named Claire, had to hold her hand......just to name a few repeated phrases. That isn't counting what the story needs. That is the discombobulated ones. So I will give this a solid mixed review. 3 🌟 star.
Thank you #NetGalley for #BlackTank in exchange for an honest review.
September 4, 2026
I want to first say thank you to Wade for sending me a copy of Black Tank. I was excited to get into Gary's story.
Gary definitely has alot going on in his head. I can see why he describes everything the way he does and his steps he takes and knows how to do what he does, but he also has issues he is trying not to sort through but as things start to fail this issues he cant sort away start to surface and we get to see why he is the way he is! Gary's guilt is coming through but he mentally doesnt have a space to place it, so he is struggling as the story continues.
This was intriguing for sure, Gary is very flat toned for me, I did not connect with his character like I was hoping I would and I was hoping he would slip up at some point. It did feel repetitive at some points BUT I feel that is how this character is supposed to be read!
Gary has a way he does things and categorized all his actions, so the writing of his thoughts going on makes sense to his character.
I also liked the Maintenance Tips at the beginning of each chapter!
Gary definitely has alot going on in his head. I can see why he describes everything the way he does and his steps he takes and knows how to do what he does, but he also has issues he is trying not to sort through but as things start to fail this issues he cant sort away start to surface and we get to see why he is the way he is! Gary's guilt is coming through but he mentally doesnt have a space to place it, so he is struggling as the story continues.
This was intriguing for sure, Gary is very flat toned for me, I did not connect with his character like I was hoping I would and I was hoping he would slip up at some point. It did feel repetitive at some points BUT I feel that is how this character is supposed to be read!
Gary has a way he does things and categorized all his actions, so the writing of his thoughts going on makes sense to his character.
I also liked the Maintenance Tips at the beginning of each chapter!
September 9, 2026
Black Tank looks, at first, like a story about an RV and a man who takes his equipment very seriously. But beside all those valves and maintenance, there is something much heavier, what is it??? guilt, memory?
Our at first unnamed main character has spent 4 years on the road after the death of his wife, Claire. He travels in the RV moving from one campground to another and keeping himself busy with maintenance and observation. He notices literally everything from people to weather to environment, every lil thing.
Everything except, perhaps, his own feelings.
Now, coming to writing, Prull’s writing style is, i feel it's deliberately mechanical, reflecting the protagonist’s mind. At times, the technical details and repetition can test your patience.
This is not a fast-paced adventure. It is a slow but crisp, thoughtful story about what happens when you keep moving because stopping means facing yourself.
And sometimes, the hardest journey is simply learning to stay.
Our at first unnamed main character has spent 4 years on the road after the death of his wife, Claire. He travels in the RV moving from one campground to another and keeping himself busy with maintenance and observation. He notices literally everything from people to weather to environment, every lil thing.
Everything except, perhaps, his own feelings.
Now, coming to writing, Prull’s writing style is, i feel it's deliberately mechanical, reflecting the protagonist’s mind. At times, the technical details and repetition can test your patience.
This is not a fast-paced adventure. It is a slow but crisp, thoughtful story about what happens when you keep moving because stopping means facing yourself.
September 23, 2026
Gary lives his life by procedure. He moves from campground to campground and dump stations in the RV he was supposed to share with his wife, Claire. At every stop, he is very peculiar following procedures to a T and empties the black tank. He arrives to the place his wife Claire had circled on their map, and he is trapped longer than protocol calls for. Memories of Claire begin to surface, also truths begin to surface about an environmental scandal.
This book is literally set during the 40 minutes Gary is at the black tank. It’s a psychological suspense about grief and complicity.
The writing was extremely repetitive. But we were inside Gary’s mind so it was unique. The story telling was different than anything I am used to. Slowly everything starts to reveal but getting to that point makes you anxious. I’ve never read anything like this. Even though Gary was literally in the same spot for 40 minutes, the book took you through so many different places and memories.
I don’t know if the ending was a cliff hanger or what but I need answers 😆
This book is literally set during the 40 minutes Gary is at the black tank. It’s a psychological suspense about grief and complicity.
The writing was extremely repetitive. But we were inside Gary’s mind so it was unique. The story telling was different than anything I am used to. Slowly everything starts to reveal but getting to that point makes you anxious. I’ve never read anything like this. Even though Gary was literally in the same spot for 40 minutes, the book took you through so many different places and memories.
I don’t know if the ending was a cliff hanger or what but I need answers 😆
August 22, 2026
Tautly written and filled with technical observations this is an exploration of grief and guilt, which may feel incredibly recognizable to anyone who has ever experienced a hyper cerebral disassociative state. It is definitely more of a character study than a highly plotted novel and more a close examination of one character than an exploration of a cast. But that exploration and the way it slowly reveals the protagonist losses and regrets is written in a way that is controlled, precise and compelling.
The one minor criticism I could offer is that the incredibly tight focus means that everyone else who appears in the story either past or present is much more an observed figure than a flushed out character.
The one minor criticism I could offer is that the incredibly tight focus means that everyone else who appears in the story either past or present is much more an observed figure than a flushed out character.
Review of advance copy received from Author
rating: 3.5 to 4 stars. Black Tank was such an interesting and tense read. It’s short, but there’s a lot packed into the story.
It reminded me a bit of I Who Have Never Known Men. We’re given pieces of Gary’s story through his observations and flashbacks, while being left to fill in some of the blanks ourselves. Gary’s internal monologue sometimes comes across as robotic, which made him an interesting character to follow.
The book also touches on grief, loss, and the moral implications of being caught up in an environmental scandal.
Thank you to the author for sharing a copy of the book with me.
It reminded me a bit of I Who Have Never Known Men. We’re given pieces of Gary’s story through his observations and flashbacks, while being left to fill in some of the blanks ourselves. Gary’s internal monologue sometimes comes across as robotic, which made him an interesting character to follow.
The book also touches on grief, loss, and the moral implications of being caught up in an environmental scandal.
Thank you to the author for sharing a copy of the book with me.
September 25, 2026
I received a copy of this short story from the author.
It's been almost a week since I finished this and I still don't really know what I read.
Figuring it was a novella I thought, 2 days max of reading ... or not.
It was very slow, very detailed, very repetitive.
It felt like I was in the mind of a person with severe autism or OCD ...
I thought I would know, at the end, what it was all about, the big reveal ... but it just left me with more questions than I had when I started the first chapters.
This might be someone else's cup of tea, unfortunately not mine.
Not a thriller but one big mystery!
It's been almost a week since I finished this and I still don't really know what I read.
Figuring it was a novella I thought, 2 days max of reading ... or not.
It was very slow, very detailed, very repetitive.
It felt like I was in the mind of a person with severe autism or OCD ...
I thought I would know, at the end, what it was all about, the big reveal ... but it just left me with more questions than I had when I started the first chapters.
This might be someone else's cup of tea, unfortunately not mine.
Not a thriller but one big mystery!
August 25, 2026
Maybe I didn’t get it? Maybe the writing style wasn’t my thing. I don’t know. It wasn’t bad by any means. But it was not something I normally would seek out.
It was very descriptive and detailed in what observations Gary had. I didn’t really get all the nuanced feelings he was having.
That being said I do think that some people may enjoy this. It is written within a 40 minute timeframe and you get his stream of consciousness through that entire time. So if that’s something you may be interested in this would be for you.
It was very descriptive and detailed in what observations Gary had. I didn’t really get all the nuanced feelings he was having.
That being said I do think that some people may enjoy this. It is written within a 40 minute timeframe and you get his stream of consciousness through that entire time. So if that’s something you may be interested in this would be for you.
September 29, 2026
Way too repetitive
I won this book through Goodreads. At first, I liked the details of the monologue in his head. What I found hard to get past and get through was that exact repetitive wording. And then such a cliffhanger at the end. Was her body in the black tank? what happened that day in the kitchen? I sympathize with his grief and can understand what’s going on in his head, but not the repetitiveness. I feel like the story kind of stayed the exact same and we never got anywhere with it.
I won this book through Goodreads. At first, I liked the details of the monologue in his head. What I found hard to get past and get through was that exact repetitive wording. And then such a cliffhanger at the end. Was her body in the black tank? what happened that day in the kitchen? I sympathize with his grief and can understand what’s going on in his head, but not the repetitiveness. I feel like the story kind of stayed the exact same and we never got anywhere with it.
Review of advance copy received from NetGalley
Thank you to NetGalley for the advanced copy of Black Tank by Wade Prull. Interesting read, but not everyone will get it. Read the description, this is literally the book from beginning to end. Cliff hanger!
August 31, 2026
The most compelling description of a man standing still, looking nonchalant, for 39 minutes I have ever read. If you are up for a bit of a literary fiction that is simultaneously repetitive and elegant in its economy, go for it!
September 4, 2026
2.5 stars
September 28, 2026
Unfortunately, this book is not for me. The writing style is too repetitive and I was confused most of the time. I enjoyed some of the parts about his wife, although I wasn't sure what really happened to her. The ending left a lot to be desired. I wish it wrapped things up but I fear it only left me more questions.
September 25, 2026
[ 2.5/5 ★ - Advanced readers copy ]
I think this may have been more successful as a short story rather than a novella. Even in the shortened format, there simply isn’t enough depth within the main character or any of his experiences to cart the novel through. The narrative concept is interesting but only peripherally explored, instead following Gary’s inner monologue as he circles the drain of grief and regret. The problem is his grief is a circle we loop through again and again, which is certainly a part of his characterization but it still isn’t enough to be compelling for a short novel.
I think this may have been more successful as a short story rather than a novella. Even in the shortened format, there simply isn’t enough depth within the main character or any of his experiences to cart the novel through. The narrative concept is interesting but only peripherally explored, instead following Gary’s inner monologue as he circles the drain of grief and regret. The problem is his grief is a circle we loop through again and again, which is certainly a part of his characterization but it still isn’t enough to be compelling for a short novel.
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