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3.36 AVERAGE
3.36 AVERAGE
dark
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Plot
Strong character development:
No
Loveable characters:
No
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
dark
tense
slow-paced
Strong character development:
No
Loveable characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
dark
mysterious
tense
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
No
Loveable characters:
No
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Complicated
adventurous
dark
emotional
mysterious
tense
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Complicated
Loveable characters:
Yes
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
I likes this one, but it kept me awake at night. Was a real nightmarish descent into madness that pushed a lot of the usual horror buttons. Abusive families, alienation, claustrophobia, eldritch abominations, body horror, insects.
dark
mysterious
sad
tense
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Complicated
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Complicated
adventurous
challenging
dark
funny
sad
tense
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Complicated
Loveable characters:
Yes
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Complicated
dark
mysterious
tense
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
No
Loveable characters:
No
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
dark
emotional
tense
medium-paced
i have never been more frustrated at a book i tore up so fast.
as someone who is really into cosmic horror, and has a fascination with the horrors that lie beneath our ocean and all-things thalassophobia, it would be very hard for anyone to write a book with the deep's premise and make me dislike it whole cloth.
that said, there are constant reminders throughout the book that nick cutter just sucks at writing a lot of the time. dialogue is serviceable at best and eye-rolling at worst, made especially clear during the deep's many flashback sequences that don't always stick the landing and oftentimes break up the otherwise really fun and enticing pacing of the rest of the novel. many of the horror elements, unfortunately, fall into pretty bog-standard cosmic horror tropes, and many of the characters are equally trope-filled and fairly predictable. there's a substantial portion of the book that mostly consist of journal entries written by a scientist gone mad, but they don't read like journal entries at all, but narrative prose in nick cutter's more-or-less unaltered writing style.
for every moment in this book that makes you think that nick cutter is going to drop the ball completely, every time you feel yourself saying "there's no way this book is going to be worth continuing," he hits you with some genuinely memorable and inspired passages and horror themes. the deep really fires on all cylinders in two circumstances: when the book focuses primarily on the depths of the ocean itself, the uncanniness of the environment and its sheer incompatibility with humankind, and when the book leans into some of it's more fever-dreamy aspects into a character's obsession with categorizing what they see in their own head. the book's first quarter, flashbacks aside, is kinda just great! i'm not the biggest fan of nick cutter's fat = evil approach to writing luke's mom, but setting up the 'gets, the initial descent into the trieste, and some of the initial action on the trieste itself was extremely compelling in its own right. it honestly could've been reworked into a short story that begins and ends there, and if that were the case it'd be an all-timer short story for me, personally.
while not every attempt at horror lands in my opinion, quite a number of them do. the setting and environment alone does so much heavy lifting. nick cutter never lets you forget that no matter what god-forsaken events are happening on the trieste, that it's happening all in a horrid, spider-like manmade contraption 8 miles underwater in an environment closer to another planet than it does planet earth. the setting compounds in its effectiveness when sanity starts to buckle for luke and al, where the unreliable narration actually has steaks and means something. the obsessions the scientists develop over ambrosia, the isolation they've dug for themselves in the trieste hold so much more weight knowing that they're well and truly trapped in such a comprehensively hostile environment.
it just supremely frustrates me that all of these elements that i've come to thoroughly enjoy about the book, the elements that made me tear up this book in such a short amount of time, are sandwiched between so much amateurish trash. the trash makes it really, really hard to recommend to anyone aside from pitching it as a popcorn read, maybe.
so that's probably where i'll leave this review. if you have a weird bend for cosmic horror, for thrillers that take place underwater, then you might gleam just about as much enjoyment from the book as i did. if you're not that kind of person, then the book might be a somewhat fun read at best, but don't feel guilty if you tap out early.
as someone who is really into cosmic horror, and has a fascination with the horrors that lie beneath our ocean and all-things thalassophobia, it would be very hard for anyone to write a book with the deep's premise and make me dislike it whole cloth.
that said, there are constant reminders throughout the book that nick cutter just sucks at writing a lot of the time. dialogue is serviceable at best and eye-rolling at worst, made especially clear during the deep's many flashback sequences that don't always stick the landing and oftentimes break up the otherwise really fun and enticing pacing of the rest of the novel. many of the horror elements, unfortunately, fall into pretty bog-standard cosmic horror tropes, and many of the characters are equally trope-filled and fairly predictable. there's a substantial portion of the book that mostly consist of journal entries written by a scientist gone mad, but they don't read like journal entries at all, but narrative prose in nick cutter's more-or-less unaltered writing style.
for every moment in this book that makes you think that nick cutter is going to drop the ball completely, every time you feel yourself saying "there's no way this book is going to be worth continuing," he hits you with some genuinely memorable and inspired passages and horror themes. the deep really fires on all cylinders in two circumstances: when the book focuses primarily on the depths of the ocean itself, the uncanniness of the environment and its sheer incompatibility with humankind, and when the book leans into some of it's more fever-dreamy aspects into a character's obsession with categorizing what they see in their own head. the book's first quarter, flashbacks aside, is kinda just great! i'm not the biggest fan of nick cutter's fat = evil approach to writing luke's mom, but setting up the 'gets, the initial descent into the trieste, and some of the initial action on the trieste itself was extremely compelling in its own right. it honestly could've been reworked into a short story that begins and ends there, and if that were the case it'd be an all-timer short story for me, personally.
while not every attempt at horror lands in my opinion, quite a number of them do. the setting and environment alone does so much heavy lifting. nick cutter never lets you forget that no matter what god-forsaken events are happening on the trieste, that it's happening all in a horrid, spider-like manmade contraption 8 miles underwater in an environment closer to another planet than it does planet earth. the setting compounds in its effectiveness when sanity starts to buckle for luke and al, where the unreliable narration actually has steaks and means something. the obsessions the scientists develop over ambrosia, the isolation they've dug for themselves in the trieste hold so much more weight knowing that they're well and truly trapped in such a comprehensively hostile environment.
it just supremely frustrates me that all of these elements that i've come to thoroughly enjoy about the book, the elements that made me tear up this book in such a short amount of time, are sandwiched between so much amateurish trash. the trash makes it really, really hard to recommend to anyone aside from pitching it as a popcorn read, maybe.
so that's probably where i'll leave this review. if you have a weird bend for cosmic horror, for thrillers that take place underwater, then you might gleam just about as much enjoyment from the book as i did. if you're not that kind of person, then the book might be a somewhat fun read at best, but don't feel guilty if you tap out early.