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A review by pascalibrary
The Deep by Nick Cutter
1.0
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.
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.