Book Details:
Author: Wade Prull
Release Date: 25 August 2026Series:
Genre: Psycchological Thriller, Suspense
Format: E-book
Pages: 145 pages
Publisher:
Blurb:
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.
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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 thriller novella about grief, moral injury, complicity, and the unbearable distance between knowing the truth and acting on it.
“If Baker’s The Mezzanine and Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day had a book baby, Black Tank would be it! Just brilliant.” — Readers’ Favorite
“Prull turns an unglamorous maintenance task into an intimate study of accountability and survival.” — Literary Titan
“Taut, haunting, and utterly unputdownable.” — The Prairies Book Review
“A book that I finished fast and pondered about slow.” — Reedsy Discovery
“Delightful summer read!”
– Iona Whishaw, best-selling author of the Lane Winslow mystery series.
Review
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.
The Reading Bud 
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