A review by zmull
The Deep by Nick Cutter

3.0

One of Stephen King's criticisms of Kubrick's film of the Shining is that Jack Nicholson is clearly crazy in his first scene and the audience is just waiting for him to starting killing people. This is a fair criticism. Really effective horror is about the unknowable perverting the knowable. Things safe become things horrific. Part of the problem with Nick Cutter's second horror novel is that his characters start out twisted. Their further descent into madness is probably inevitable given the genre, but telegraphing it on the first page robs the story of much of its power. The setting, a research station at the lowest point of the ocean, Challenge Deep, could be a great location for scares, but Cutter mostly leaves those as potential, as background tension and relies on fairly mundane, hallucinatory monsters to stalk our characters. All in all, The Deep isn't a bad novel exactly, but it does manage to waste a nice premise on gross body horror stuff and dream-like creepers.