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3.36 AVERAGE
3.36 AVERAGE
11/11/24 - IDK why I decided to read this review but jesus this book was so bad. I truly hope that Nick Cutter took a freshman english course recently and learned how to avoid such fundamental errors. Maybe he was trying to go against convention or something, like, free himself from the shackles of normal genre-writing tropes? Really though, he just freed himself from the shackles of any principles of good storytelling.
_______________________________________
SPOILERS, but you shouldn’t care. This one sucks.
At first, I thought this book was promising. Then, I thought it was interesting. Then I thought it was average, then mediocre and bloated. Now, I think it's just cringe, and stupid. I will spoil the book, completely, but it doesn’t really matter. If the description of the book sounds interesting to you, as it did to me, then do NOT read this book.
“The Deep” by Nick Cutter follows a veterinarian in the midst of a pandemic, called the Gets. It’s super mysterious and incurable. His brother is like an Einstein of biology, and is working on a cure for the disease, in Challenger Deep, the lowest point of the ocean. The basis of the cure is a substance called Ambrosia, a mysterious agent that seems to make things functionally immortal. Our MC heads to see his brother, and the rest of the “plot” unfolds. Honestly, this is such an interesting premise, and I cannot believe how badly Nick Cutter dropped the ball.
One thing I have never understood about the horror genre, is the seeming aversion to likable characters. How can you feel horror and terror if you can’t empathize with anyone? Nick Cutter seems to be aware of this problem. He definitely attempts to remedy it, but goes about it in probably the worst way possible. For Nick Cutter, the way to write characters is to give them a history, conveyed through memories and flashbacks and whatnot. Character is conveyed through things that happened TO the person. So, most of our characters get lengthy sections where trauma and memories get told.
This isn’t bad in and of itself, but the execution surely is. For one, there are SO MANY FLASHBACKS and they completely take you out of the novel. It’s actually a joke in the book, that the Gets plague makes you forget everything, but all they’re doing in the research station seems to be reliving memories! Seriously, these sections are so numerous and each one is so long that it honestly makes the book probably double what it would be otherwise.
The second problem with this is that, outside of these experiences, the characters have no other writing to them! They are completely bland. They are like character sheets for a tabletop game. They have a written history and then just follow the plot. Almost all dialogue in this book is merely functional, it advances the book or conveys these past experiences. Very, very little is given to character development, or even character shading. Our main character is literally just a veterinarian with some bad past experiences. Other than that, I couldn’t tell you anything about him. His brother is just a detached guy and that’s pretty much all there is. The MC’s companion is a soldier with some bad past experiences. The most developed character ends up being a doctor who dies before the novel starts and whose journals the MC reads.
Okay, sure, the characters aren’t interesting, or well-written, or human, really, but hopefully the scares are good? No, they aren’t. In this novel, described as a mix of The Shining and The Abyss, our MC gets scared of… a box, some spooky noises, a bug, his imagination… More happens later, which I will get to, but the novel devotes so much time to making the stupidest things seem scary. And of course, the scares are all related to his childhood experiences and whatnot. Most dangerous of all horrors in this novel is the …. “Tickle-trunk” that the MC’s mom gives him. It’s a box with some clowns on it, and ooooooohhhh some weird stuff happened with it when he was a kid… and then…. A box in the research station reminds him of the OG scary box… the dreaded “tickle-trunk”. What a dumb name, I hate even typing that. Ugh.
Most of the things that are supposed to be scary here feel like literally, that, they exist just because they’re creepy and spooky. What if…. There was a creepy box with clowns? What if…. The MC saw a giant hand that crawled toward him? What if…the MC thought every shadow was hiding something in it. What if…there was a huge creepy bug? Sounds super scary. All of this could be creepy, I know it can, but it's all empty. They feel out of place.
I should probably explain that, eventually it becomes clear that the ambrosia basically just makes you hallucinate a bunch of stuff. So, not only are these things out of place and empty, they also aren’t threatening at all, and even if they were, the reader wouldn’t care because we don’t care about the characters at all!
Then, Nick Cutter realizes something. That nobody actually cares about any of this hallucination stuff. He probably played Dead Space or watched The Void or Event Horizon and thought that what was really missing in his sci-fi horror novel was gore, lots and lots of gore and torture and blood and guts. So yeah, then the novel gets super gory and filled with torture. People get mutilated, crushed, amputated, etc. They even torture a dog to death in grisly fashion. And like.. why? Again, it isn’t compelling because we don’t care about the characters. The dog was cute but most people will be checked out by the time it dies. It’s over the top, and exploitative.
Speaking of exploitative, there are lots of scenes of animal abuse, child abuse, losing a child, etc. This, once again, isn’t included for any coherent thematic purpose. It's pretty much there just to shock the reader and make way for all the crazy scary and really weird wooooooahhhh oooooooohhhh kind of stuff that happens later. I’m usually against including things like that if its inclusion isn’t thoughtful, and it certainly isn’t here.
Okay, fine, but surely the plot is interesting. That setup, man, that premise, how could he let that down? Okay, ignoring all the stuff above, do the ambrosia, the mysterious happenings, the plague, etc, have satisfying payoffs? So, it becomes slightly clear over the events of the novel that the ambrosia is either intelligent, or being directed by an intelligence, and its motives are hardly pure. One of the novel’s few good scenes deals with the aforementioned dead scientist making contact with this intelligence. In the end, the intelligence is revealed to be.. some… entities..? Who, in a cheesy little monologue, explain that they just like to mess around with people, they’re just curious little guys who like to play games.
They created the ambrosia as a kind of experiment? Oh, and they CHOSE the MC and his brother and have been manufacturing all the events of their lives! So, they’re the masterminds behind such dreaded things as the horrific, terrifying “tickle-trunk”, and the protagonist’s child’s disappearance, and probably that awful, traumatic encounter with… the bug. They just really wanted the brothers to come down there and find them, so the entities could go back to the surface world, but also, they have sent other.. entities.. to the surface world to mess with the MC and his brother already, so why can’t they just go up?
Oh, and that plague? Was it created by them too? Is it curable? Is humanity doomed? Yeah, humanity is probably doomed, with an author like Nick Cutter writing their history. But no, that crazy, mysterious plague, the Gets, is just a happy coincidence for our entities, who had nothing to do with its creation. And no, of course it doesn’t get cured. In fact, the entities even say that the characters would have wanted the ambrosia even without the plague. SO WHY INCLUDE THE PLAGUE IN THE NOVEL?? This is genuinely the most excruciating point for me. The novel opens with the plague, it is the driving force for the book, and it explicitly frames it as a mystery. There are hints about bumblebees also being the only non-human thing that can get The Gets, which afaik is never explained either. How can you create something like the Gets, use it in all advertising and make it the basic premise of the book, and then leave it COMPLETELY unexplored! That is insane!
I will give Nick Cutter credit on a couple things. One, he’s pretty good at creating imagery. He can definitely paint a vivid picture. It’s just a shame that the pictures lack the context to make them effective. Second, the novel does have a kind of interesting theme about scientific research, specifically biological research on live subjects, being actually pretty horrific in some cases. The novel does this by making humans the subjects of those creepy entities’ arbitrary endeavors. Third, the prose is.. fine? It’s good, it does the job.
Don’t read this! It sucks.
_______________________________________
SPOILERS, but you shouldn’t care. This one sucks.
At first, I thought this book was promising. Then, I thought it was interesting. Then I thought it was average, then mediocre and bloated. Now, I think it's just cringe, and stupid. I will spoil the book, completely, but it doesn’t really matter. If the description of the book sounds interesting to you, as it did to me, then do NOT read this book.
“The Deep” by Nick Cutter follows a veterinarian in the midst of a pandemic, called the Gets. It’s super mysterious and incurable. His brother is like an Einstein of biology, and is working on a cure for the disease, in Challenger Deep, the lowest point of the ocean. The basis of the cure is a substance called Ambrosia, a mysterious agent that seems to make things functionally immortal. Our MC heads to see his brother, and the rest of the “plot” unfolds. Honestly, this is such an interesting premise, and I cannot believe how badly Nick Cutter dropped the ball.
One thing I have never understood about the horror genre, is the seeming aversion to likable characters. How can you feel horror and terror if you can’t empathize with anyone? Nick Cutter seems to be aware of this problem. He definitely attempts to remedy it, but goes about it in probably the worst way possible. For Nick Cutter, the way to write characters is to give them a history, conveyed through memories and flashbacks and whatnot. Character is conveyed through things that happened TO the person. So, most of our characters get lengthy sections where trauma and memories get told.
This isn’t bad in and of itself, but the execution surely is. For one, there are SO MANY FLASHBACKS and they completely take you out of the novel. It’s actually a joke in the book, that the Gets plague makes you forget everything, but all they’re doing in the research station seems to be reliving memories! Seriously, these sections are so numerous and each one is so long that it honestly makes the book probably double what it would be otherwise.
The second problem with this is that, outside of these experiences, the characters have no other writing to them! They are completely bland. They are like character sheets for a tabletop game. They have a written history and then just follow the plot. Almost all dialogue in this book is merely functional, it advances the book or conveys these past experiences. Very, very little is given to character development, or even character shading. Our main character is literally just a veterinarian with some bad past experiences. Other than that, I couldn’t tell you anything about him. His brother is just a detached guy and that’s pretty much all there is. The MC’s companion is a soldier with some bad past experiences. The most developed character ends up being a doctor who dies before the novel starts and whose journals the MC reads.
Okay, sure, the characters aren’t interesting, or well-written, or human, really, but hopefully the scares are good? No, they aren’t. In this novel, described as a mix of The Shining and The Abyss, our MC gets scared of… a box, some spooky noises, a bug, his imagination… More happens later, which I will get to, but the novel devotes so much time to making the stupidest things seem scary. And of course, the scares are all related to his childhood experiences and whatnot. Most dangerous of all horrors in this novel is the …. “Tickle-trunk” that the MC’s mom gives him. It’s a box with some clowns on it, and ooooooohhhh some weird stuff happened with it when he was a kid… and then…. A box in the research station reminds him of the OG scary box… the dreaded “tickle-trunk”. What a dumb name, I hate even typing that. Ugh.
Most of the things that are supposed to be scary here feel like literally, that, they exist just because they’re creepy and spooky. What if…. There was a creepy box with clowns? What if…. The MC saw a giant hand that crawled toward him? What if…the MC thought every shadow was hiding something in it. What if…there was a huge creepy bug? Sounds super scary. All of this could be creepy, I know it can, but it's all empty. They feel out of place.
I should probably explain that, eventually it becomes clear that the ambrosia basically just makes you hallucinate a bunch of stuff. So, not only are these things out of place and empty, they also aren’t threatening at all, and even if they were, the reader wouldn’t care because we don’t care about the characters at all!
Then, Nick Cutter realizes something. That nobody actually cares about any of this hallucination stuff. He probably played Dead Space or watched The Void or Event Horizon and thought that what was really missing in his sci-fi horror novel was gore, lots and lots of gore and torture and blood and guts. So yeah, then the novel gets super gory and filled with torture. People get mutilated, crushed, amputated, etc. They even torture a dog to death in grisly fashion. And like.. why? Again, it isn’t compelling because we don’t care about the characters. The dog was cute but most people will be checked out by the time it dies. It’s over the top, and exploitative.
Speaking of exploitative, there are lots of scenes of animal abuse, child abuse, losing a child, etc. This, once again, isn’t included for any coherent thematic purpose. It's pretty much there just to shock the reader and make way for all the crazy scary and really weird wooooooahhhh oooooooohhhh kind of stuff that happens later. I’m usually against including things like that if its inclusion isn’t thoughtful, and it certainly isn’t here.
Okay, fine, but surely the plot is interesting. That setup, man, that premise, how could he let that down? Okay, ignoring all the stuff above, do the ambrosia, the mysterious happenings, the plague, etc, have satisfying payoffs? So, it becomes slightly clear over the events of the novel that the ambrosia is either intelligent, or being directed by an intelligence, and its motives are hardly pure. One of the novel’s few good scenes deals with the aforementioned dead scientist making contact with this intelligence. In the end, the intelligence is revealed to be.. some… entities..? Who, in a cheesy little monologue, explain that they just like to mess around with people, they’re just curious little guys who like to play games.
They created the ambrosia as a kind of experiment? Oh, and they CHOSE the MC and his brother and have been manufacturing all the events of their lives! So, they’re the masterminds behind such dreaded things as the horrific, terrifying “tickle-trunk”, and the protagonist’s child’s disappearance, and probably that awful, traumatic encounter with… the bug. They just really wanted the brothers to come down there and find them, so the entities could go back to the surface world, but also, they have sent other.. entities.. to the surface world to mess with the MC and his brother already, so why can’t they just go up?
Oh, and that plague? Was it created by them too? Is it curable? Is humanity doomed? Yeah, humanity is probably doomed, with an author like Nick Cutter writing their history. But no, that crazy, mysterious plague, the Gets, is just a happy coincidence for our entities, who had nothing to do with its creation. And no, of course it doesn’t get cured. In fact, the entities even say that the characters would have wanted the ambrosia even without the plague. SO WHY INCLUDE THE PLAGUE IN THE NOVEL?? This is genuinely the most excruciating point for me. The novel opens with the plague, it is the driving force for the book, and it explicitly frames it as a mystery. There are hints about bumblebees also being the only non-human thing that can get The Gets, which afaik is never explained either. How can you create something like the Gets, use it in all advertising and make it the basic premise of the book, and then leave it COMPLETELY unexplored! That is insane!
I will give Nick Cutter credit on a couple things. One, he’s pretty good at creating imagery. He can definitely paint a vivid picture. It’s just a shame that the pictures lack the context to make them effective. Second, the novel does have a kind of interesting theme about scientific research, specifically biological research on live subjects, being actually pretty horrific in some cases. The novel does this by making humans the subjects of those creepy entities’ arbitrary endeavors. Third, the prose is.. fine? It’s good, it does the job.
Don’t read this! It sucks.
dark
mysterious
sad
tense
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Plot
Strong character development:
Complicated
Loveable characters:
Yes
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
dark
emotional
tense
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
No
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
this book had me uncomfortable from the jump; the mere idea of the 'gets is a terrifying one. it's one i wish the book explored more, rather than being just a plot device to get our protagonist where he's needed. the horror in this one is a slow burn, getting you just comfortable enough before something happens to shift you a little bit to the left of it. once things really get going, he shows no mercy. i'll be seeing a lot of this imagery in my sleep for the next while.
Content Warnings
Graphic: Violence, Injury/Injury detail, Pandemic/Epidemic
Minor: Incest
dark
tense
medium-paced
adventurous
dark
emotional
mysterious
tense
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Strong character development:
Complicated
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
challenging
dark
emotional
tense
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Strong character development:
No
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
fucking YUCK. my nightmares come to life and stuck on pages with some extra special bonus nightmares i hadn’t previously managed to think up yet.
adventurous
mysterious
tense
Solid horror book. A lot of good / genuinely scary moments that were spaced out between backstory, build up, and flashbacks. The ending was satisfactory, though a lot of the finer details seemed to be brushed by. We didn’t get a lot of answers about the ambrosia itself and how it relates to ancient alien things besides it being bait. The whole setup of the “gets” was a good hook, but was entirely too convenient to line up with the ambrosia. The ending was good, but left a lot of stuff unanswered too. That seems like a lot of complaints but overall a good read, just a bit more open-ended than what I would have liked.
dark
tense
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Plot
Strong character development:
No
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Complicated
dark
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:
Yes
This book has an intriguing setup and interesting elements, but it quickly devolves into a mess of body horror, confusing dream sequences, and very little plot. It's one gory, horrifying scene after another, which completely burns out the suspense and tension by the middle of the book. I got so frustrated by the actual plot being constantly interrupted by never-ending flashbacks. The ending was boring, unsatisfying, and disorienting.
Content Warnings
Graphic: Animal cruelty, Animal death, Body horror, Gore, Sexual assault
Minor: Child abuse
challenging
dark
emotional
mysterious
sad
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:
Yes
Content Warnings
Graphic: Animal death, Body horror, Violence, Blood, Injury/Injury detail
Moderate: Child abuse, Incest, Pedophilia, Sexual assault, Sexual violence, Pandemic/Epidemic
Minor: Sexual content