Reviews with content warning for Biphobia - Into the Drowning Deep

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Into the Drowning Deep by Mira Grant

45 reviews

aimzthereader's review against another edition

dark mysterious tense medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Plot
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? No
Diverse cast of characters? Yes

5.0

Holy moly this book is sooo good! Who knew I needed a book about killer mermaids? Also I am never going in the ocean again. I will say I was not expecting as much science as this book offered but I found it very interesting. It took a bit to get used to the pacing of this book because it moves at a slower pace especially initially then you would think a scifi horror would. There were also scenes where it would be moving very quicklly and then slow down so the pacing took a bit to get used to but it mae a lot of sense. This book is literal perfection , it even made me care about the characters which I tend not to when I know there is a possibility that they can die. Overall this book was very well done, very enterttaining and is one that will stick with me for a long time

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beccaand's review

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adventurous dark tense medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.5

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helliepad's review against another edition

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adventurous challenging dark emotional inspiring mysterious sad tense medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Plot
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

5.0

Horror novels are so nice. I have decided early on in my reading journey that science fiction was not to my taste but books like this make me question otherwise. What an amazing thriller! I have been scared since the beginning, and capsule stories like this always intrigued me (although the Melusine is, admittedly, a capsule in the sense that the Eiffel tower was considered a nail).

I love that the characters on that ship were human and had conflicting views and opinions and goals. I liked that there were deaf main characters, that there were scientists and bosses with chronic pain, that there were autistic main characters, and savage killers who loved deeply and truly, and that there were shades of horrible people to contrast the shades of horrible monsters. As much as the story is a horror from the start, and you go into reading it knowing people will not survive, the story itself doesn't lose respect for its characters and their goals. They did their jobs, they were eaten, or they were killed, or they survived, for a given definition of the word. They weren't mocked or humiliated by the narrative.

I almost gave it a 4.75 since the ending was so abrupt- the story goes from a jam-packed two days of action to skipping one day, after the rescue, and with vague sense as to what happened to the rest of the characters. I personally like getting closures while reading books, but I figured I could overlook it, as the rest of the book was so delightfully written and executed. Anyway, I can't wait to read more of Seanan McGuire's writing

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devynvictoria's review against another edition

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adventurous dark emotional tense medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.25

I love all the representation in the book. The last 150-ish pages had me so enthralled I couldn’t put it down. My only critique is that is was really slow to get through at times and took a long time to pick up, I don’t think it needed to be as long as it was.

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lynxpardinus's review against another edition

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adventurous dark emotional mysterious tense

4.25

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kingcrookback's review against another edition

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adventurous mysterious tense medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? No
Loveable characters? No
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

3.25

I can't quite put my finger on exactly why, but even though the story felt pretty decidedly medium-paced, this book felt long. Maybe it's the amount of exposition and introspection that's included. It's kind of an odd feeling, especially since I feel like this story could be pretty neatly (and entertainingly) encapsulated within the time constraints of a feature-length film.

First, the positives. With all the exposition, the premise feels sufficiently grounded in modern-day science and technology, even though this is very clearly science fiction. (Warning, though: if you have any climate anxiety, this book might exacerbate that.) Grant's pretty good at building tension, especially via dramatic irony. While the story is generally told in third person limited POV, sometimes the perspective will "zoom out" at the end of a passage and you'll get a glimpse just outside of the characters' perspectives. It feels very cinematic. I also appreciated that Grant wrote ethnic, queer, and disabled diversity directly into the story--and my appreciation for this is twofold. On the one hand, as a woman of color, I liked that some of the diversity had absolutely nothing to do with the plot. People in real life aren't non-white/queer for "a reason," and for too long creators have hidden behind narrative relevance as an excuse for not being diverse in their depictions. And on the other hand, as a disabled person, I also enjoyed that some of that diversity served a narrative function.

...however. There are some things about this book that I didn't enjoy, the pacing being one of them. The semi-epistolary introductions for each of the "acts" of the novel were interesting...for maybe the first half. After that, they didn't have much of an impact. I didn't feel a connection to any of the characters--which is not to say that I didn't like them. I just didn't care enough about them to form any feelings for them either way. (Except for Jacques Abney. His self-aggrandizing internal dialogue grated on my nerves. Points to Grant for that one, I guess.)

There were also some scenes/character actions that strained my credulity to the point of annoyance. I don't mean the suspension of disbelief necessary that allowed me to buy into the story's basic premise: sirens in the Mariana Trench; that part's fine. But some of the characters' internal dialogues and interactions just struck me as kind of weird. For example, sure, conventionally attractive people are generally aware that they're conventionally attractive and that there are both privileges and expectations associated with that, especially if they're women. It signals a sense of both self-awareness and social wariness for a character to be aware of that--but it felt so weird for characters to think and say it so explicitly and in such a blasé way. It doesn't hit the ear as natural-sounding dialogue or natural-feeling social interaction. Some of the minor characters' logic is also completely opaque to me. Specifically,

when Daryl, the younger engineer, somehow came to the conclusion that the sirens had "someone on the inside" helping them with the hunt/slaughter. Try as I might, I can't fathom what path of logic would have led him to that assumption. Even hysterical panic, which he did not seem to be in, doesn't explain it, in my opinion.

This is one of the few books I'm actually giving a star rating, and that's because I didn't really enjoy it all that much. With most of my other reads, while I can detect their flaws, I can usually find some kind of value in them (ex: it speaks to the times, the social climate, etc.). The flaws in this book just got on my nerves.

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chrisljm's review against another edition

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dark mysterious tense medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

3.5

3.5 stars; What I liked about this book was that it felt like a movie. I enjoyed the storytelling as well as the format Mira Grant utilized. I also appreciated the themes she touched on within the book. However, there was just such a lack of urgency surrounding the character’s behaviors, and the groups of characters were also way too isolated from each other in my opinion. You planned to be on a ship surrounded by violent creatures and you didn’t implement better communication features? Like not even some walkie-talkies??

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midnightcomets's review against another edition

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challenging dark emotional mysterious tense fast-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

5.0

Horrifying, deep and dark and deranged. I love this book. Into the Drowning Deep is a story about the darkness of the deep, the human tendency to always explore, and always try to conquer, and the hope that can be found even in the worst occassions. It is a tale about nature's power, about the unknown, about cryptids and monsters, whether imagined or real, and about how we always want to know, no matter the cost.

It is a story that I enjoyed cover to cover, that I read while in the sea on purpose, that made me shiver and shout and feel so many million things, and it is one of the best things I read this year, an absolute delight on so many levels. For fans of horror, please read it. For fans of the Vast in the Magnus Archives, please read it squared. For fans of the sea, and its delightful, fascinating secrets, this is going to be the best time in your life. Also, a lot of love and respect for the author and the research she put into this book. I learned so many new things, and it even made me see so many different angles on various issues.

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yuna's review against another edition

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adventurous dark tense medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

3.5

Minor spoilers in the cw.

Another review called this Jurassic Park but with mermaids and the vibe is very similar. It's scary at times, fun at others, and gets very actiony.

I liked this for the most part, but was a little underwhelmed by the ending. Maybe I'm in the minority here, but seeing as this book spent so much time showing the collision of human hubris and arrogance, I didn't really like any of the characters by the end (even Dr. Toth, who I liked for the most part a lot).

I was hoping they'd all die again like in the prequel

.

There are some weird POV scenes and brief conflict points that felt like they stuck out (and were concluded abruptly), like

the dolphin POV or the 'Tory is a suspect! Wait, no she's not'

. It's also really wordy. I liked the science and range of POVs for the most part, but in some places the descriptions of the science and the politicking that goes with it started to feel redundant.

Something I missed from the prequel was having a crew member be a prominent POV character. The crew is largely absent from this (arguably, we have the two engineer guys, but they're not on the same level as the captain/first mate from the prequel) and they came across as not very serious, almost blundering.

All that said, this feels like it would make a good movie as film could cut down some of the verbosity, and the horror moments are good.

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talonsontypewriters's review against another edition

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adventurous dark medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Plot
Strong character development? No
Loveable characters? No
Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
Flaws of characters a main focus? No

2.0

Very few things in books have made me as irritated as this exchange (edited slightly for brevity):

"If they have a language -- not just one language, but two languages, one spoken and one not -- and if the complexity of their spoken language is anything like the complexity of their singing, they must be sentient."
"Cats meow and know what they're saying. Birds sing. That doesn't make them smart."
"There's a lot of difference between a song that basically says, 'Hey, come fuck me' over and over again and a distinct, signed language."

Let's unpack some of this!

1) Sentience =/= (human-like) intelligence. Most animals are recognized as sentient beings; this is the entire point of animal welfare.
2) There are some debates around applying labels of intelligence to animals, but since it seems mostly accepted in this setting that animals (like dolphins) are capable of intelligence, it is very widely studied and accepted, even beyond deeply scientific spheres (thus not even really justifying the character without a background in science expressing this view), that birds* possess some level of quantifiable intelligence.
3) If it is specifically on the basis of "distinct language"**, many bird species do in fact use this, and not just for mating calls! Even if you look beyond stereotypically smart corvids and parrots, who are famously capable of mimicking human speech, plenty of birds have complex call/song systems to indicate danger (for instance, chickadees have varying calls depending on the exact predator they've spotted) and other purposes.

* I'm ignoring cats as an example because I don't know enough to counter that, but I'm sure saying they're not smart is not true either.
** This seems weird in and of itself when most animal intelligence surveys focus on memory, reasoning, learning ability, tool use, etc, but communication can be studied as a signifier of intelligence so I won't nitpick it as hard.

The lack of cursory research in this very basic area -- not to mention frequent references to "us," implying modern primates, "leaving/coming from the sea," with continuous implications that such an exit was because of a humanoid competitor, which just shows a poor understanding of evolution all around (especially when the character saying it has multiple biology degrees), and some other nitpicks (like forgetting the existence of lungfish) -- stripped any interest I otherwise would have had in various other scientific tangents, since I was no longer confident enough in the author's knowledge to trust her descriptions. The hard sci-fi angle feels (if you'll excuse the slight pun) shallow, with the author seemingly wanting to skate by on an introductory biology course and artistic license. To be fair, with speculative fiction some suspension of disbelief is always required -- but if your setting is an explicitly realistic, grounded one filled with ostensibly intelligent, educated scientists, of course I'm going to expect super simple scientific facts to be portrayed accurately.

Though that bit and others alone certainly soured my reading experience, I had a multitude of other problems, to the point where I waffled for a while between 1 and 2 stars for my rating. Ultimately, I suppose I can see where others might enjoy the novel, so I left it at the latter, but it's certainly not a higher-leaning 2 as other books might have been for me.

First and foremost: The writing. Listen, I will cop to the fact that I'm a pretentious person whose writing is reasonably pretentious, but there is a natural level of pretentiousness and then a tryhard one. This is the latter. It, in line with its confidently spoken but dubiously accurate scientific tangents, tries so hard to be smart and unique that it wraps back around into being insufferable to read. More than a few lines seem to be written just to be quotable and poetic, since in context they're jarringly out of place -- notably, one description of a bulge in a character's pocket as, instead of just belonging to the gun he has on him, "[speaking] of gunfire and violence." The dialogue in particular is stilted and weird and very far from natural human speech, which is kind of ironic considering how crucial a theme communication is. In general, the purple prose Grant weaves is, while superficially elegant, against the purpose of the novel: A thriller fundamentally does not work when there's enough breathing room to drag out extensive descriptions and work in paragraphs of background information and introspection on the characters and their lines of work.

As for those characters, I found them painfully uninteresting and difficult to connect to. Stories like this, where anyone can, at least in theory, die, require that kind of investment -- a character death is, to me, meaningless if it provokes no particular emotion. Character backstories are fleshed out to an almost unnecessary degree, and yet I couldn't tell you who most of the characters were as people, what their interests (beyond, in many cases, science) were, what their defining personality traits were. Characterization depends more on what the story needs than what actually fits the character's personality or feels like something an actual human would do, resulting in a lot of questionable and outright idiotic decisions. Some secondary characters are only introduced after the 70% mark, and others only shortly before then, when the action requires their existence. Other characters disappear for chapters on end or full stop, their final fate a mystery. Nothing is done to distinguish different characters' narration (which is presented in third-person omniscient already, another strike against attempted suspense) or dialogue; if you struck names and some descriptions from the dolphins' brief perspective, it would blend in seamlessly with every other PoV.

It's also difficult to react to character deaths when none of the in-universe reactions are especially strong. An exploration of different expressions of grief -- and the complications that would lead to when action was necessitated -- could have fit in really neatly and not disrupted too badly from the plot, but emotional beats are given very little time to linger before pushing onto the next sequence, leading to weird moments that don't fit into the current stakes or tone at all. One could argue that few characters are given the time to process matters and react appropriately, and of course there's no one right way to respond to bereavement, but when the reactions are lackluster all across the board -- with one or two notable exceptions -- that doesn't hold up as well. Deceased characters are also rarely acknowledged after the fact, with even Tory's sister, whose pre-novel death drives her motivation, only coming up in critical moments.

The pacing, in general, was pretty poor. At least 40% of the novel could have been trimmed out to its benefit -- it takes a while for the plot to really kick in, and then it drags on for a long time only to rush into its ending. Some character/setting details don't come up until they're absolutely necessary, leading to a couple of deus ex machina moments rather than more reasonable foreshadowing. The final major reveal comes across as contrived at best, and an ass-pull contradictory to former established facts at worst, with some prior sprinklings of hints but nothing strong enough to really justify it as a proper conclusion, and things wrap up without properly resolving either the plot as a whole or any characters' lives.

Some character dynamics were interesting -- Jillian and Theo's, for instance, as well as Tory and Luis's friendship, and as unlikable as both individuals were there was a certain intrigue to Jacques and Michi's relationship -- but the forced romantic subplot was not one of them. The first two interactions between Tory and Olivia have them on hostile terms; after starting to resolve their differences, their very next interaction establishes infatuation with no lead-in or room to develop. Their relationship itself forms awkwardly and under odd circumstances, and how underdeveloped they both are as characters eroded any potential for chemistry.

As for the actual plot, it was fine -- a bit too close to a corny Syfy movie in some places, but I did like the basic ideas and some developments as well as the multimedia format used in between parts (however grating some of the actual content thereof was). Even if it was handled poorly, I liked the basic gist of the ultimate twist, and in general felt like the sirens -- the very central point of the novel -- were relegated to mere plot elements and not truly explored in as great detail as they could have been.

On the representation side of things: The three major characters of color, I felt, were depicted awkwardly at best. Whiteness is, overall, presented as the default in character descriptions, with characters of color quickly established as such but white characters pretty much never specified to be so. Furthermore, any cultural connection is stripped down to centuries-long whaling in Michi's family -- referenced as dubious motivation for her being a big game hunter who kills for the (sometimes explicitly sexual) thrill, things that go completely against traditional Japanese whaling values; historical whaling practices are not equivalent to the modern commercialized form thereof -- and Jillian's connection to the sea and appearance. Luis's Mexican heritage is only mentioned once or twice. Another major character has a Hebrew middle name, as revealed in one scene, but her religion/ethnicity are never really established outside of that. Though the setting isn't necessarily one that allows for extensive exploration of character backgrounds and habits, that doesn't seem to matter anywhere else, so some effort to acknowledge upbringing and language, if nothing else, could have at least been extended.

I found the disabled/neurodivergent representation more palatable, although I have my issues with it as well. While the basic mechanics of Theo's chronic illness and the Wilson twins' deafness are portrayed decently enough, at least the latter two and their older sister's characterizations seem to revolve around being d/Deaf, and around the hardships thereof by extension. Olivia being autistic, while adequately coded throughout (if a bit constrained to social difficulties and overlooking other traits), is also only explicitly mentioned when ableism faced from her parents is mentioned. Portraying ableism experienced, as well as difficulties of navigating an inherently inaccessible society, is obviously an important part of portraying disabled characters, but it can drag a bit to see disabled characters almost exclusively experiencing trauma and adversity. Speaking as an autistic and physically disabled person -- yes, being disabled is hard! Experiencing ableism is hard! But disabled lives are not composed entirely of strife and pain, and seeing some joy to offset the largely negative experiences would have helped a lot.
I was a bit uncomfortable with the descriptions of Holly's voice as well, which came across as varyingly infantilizing and dehumanizing, but I'm not d/Deaf/HoH so YMMV on that.

All in all, there are some strong ideas at play in Into the Drowning Deep, but unfortunately, in my eyes it fails as both science fiction and horror, with its many flaws detracting majorly from what positives it does have going for it.

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