Going to the Six

On Lake Superior, some wrecks never rest.

When acclaimed documentary filmmaker Owen Wheeler leads a four–person crew aboard a Michigan DNR research vessel to investigate the wreck of the Keuka—a floating speakeasy long lost beneath the cold, black waters of Lake Superior—he believes he’s chasing history. What they bring back instead is something far stranger.

Told through fragmented footage, blog journals, news clippings, and Owen’s own testimony from inside a psychiatric facility, this haunting novel unfolds across two timelines: the ill-fated expedition, and the haunted present. Just as the record fractures, so too does Owen’s grip on what truly happened aboard the vessel.

Locals whisper of an old superstition—six signs that come before a person loses their mind. Did the crew uncover a secret buried with the Keuka? Or are Owen’s memories a labyrinth of guilt, grief, and madness?

A story of truth versus memory, the collapse of time, and the thin seam between reality and delusion, Going to the Six drags the reader down into the depths—where silence presses in, light cannot reach, and dread waits patiently in the dark.

“Going to the Six is a claustrophobic, itchy story told in a compulsively readable found-footage style. The combination of shipwrecks, eco-horror, and looming insanity is addictive. Do yourself a favor: open up this book and let the story in.”
—Viggy Parr Hampton, author of The Rotting Room

"Beware: If you read A.C. Hessenauer's Going to the Six too fast, diving in headfirst like I did, you'll end up with the bends by the time you return to the surface.
Never has a novel bubbled over in the bloodstream quite like this book, a haunted document that's equal parts gelatinous eco horror and a waterlogged Blair Witch."
- Clay McLeod Chapman, author of Devil Inside

“GOING TO THE SIX is an experience so close to being inside a found footage horror movie that the pages will almost be shaking in your hands—with authenticity and with fear. A.C. Hessenauer plays by the film genre’s rules, and this twitchy, itchy story is all the better for it. Paranoia, dread, things maybe or maybe not flitting just outside the camera’s view, and that awful red algae all swirl together to make a horrifying time.”
-Michael Wehunt, Bram Stoker Award winning author of The October Film Haunt

“Going to the Six gave me nightmares.
This is squishy, splashy dread, masterfully handled.”
-Ben Farthing

“A dark, engaging, and compulsively readable epistolary tale to increase your fear of water ten-fold.”
-Laurel Hightower, author of SILENT KEY

“A. C. Hessenauer delivers a potent, horrific mix full of shipwrecks, psychological horror, eco-horror, and found footage in “Going to the Six” her Cemetery Dance Publications debut! Do not miss this dark and mysterious novel!”
-Daniel Braum author of The Night Marchers and Other Strange Tales