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dianacantread 's review for:
The Deep
by Alma Katsu
Before anything else, I'd like to shake my fist at the people who a) decided to market this book as "horror" and b) had the audacity to actually put it in the Horror section of Barnes & Noble. The designers of this gorgeous cover definitely deserve some blame, too. You guys owe me $30.
That being said, I probably still would have read this at some point, probably checking it out from the library instead of buying it brand new like a fool. I really enjoyed Katsu's previous novel The Hunger as I felt it tapped into an interesting subgenre of a subgenre: historical / literary horror with a helping of toxic romance. Twas a good read, if you're looking for something fresh.
This book, however, is not fresh in the slightest. I imagine many readers will revel in its romantic suspense and sprinkling of the supernatural. As someone who went in hoping for the grotesque beauty of The Hunger, I was admittedly disappointed upon realizing that this book is...not that, not in the slightest. It leans more into the toxic romance side of things than the horror, and while I don't mind romantic suspense when it's done well (i.e. Daphne DuMaurier's My Cousin Rachel), something about this book really rubbed me the wrong way.
Thinking on it a bit, my distaste is two-fold: 1) dramatizing real historical events is not easy and, when done poorly, can read as kinda gross, and 2) I wanted this to be Haunting of Hill House but on the Titanic and it was not.
Let's break these points down, shall we?
1) Historical fan fiction is not a new thing, and it's also something I've enjoyed quite a bit in the past. Like I said before, I like The Hunger quite a bit, and while Katsu certainly takes liberties in her heightening of the Donner Party's drama, I felt that it was done tastefully and with an interest of making the characters come to life as human beings rather than distant echoes. On a more personal side, my friends and I have running jokes about certain literary figures, including a joke theory about Sherlock Holmes being self-insert fanfic about Oscar Wilde (side note: this is a hill I will die on). I am okay with ruminating on / joking about long-dead people. What feels weird about this book is that it's taking the events of one of the worst peacetime disasters in history (and another wartime disaster, actually) and ghost-ifying them. Like, we know what happened to the Titanic. It was awful and could have been avoided for so many reasons, but this book decides to whittle those reasons down to "jealous woman's spirit tries to kill her kid to get back with her traitorous lover but whOoPs now we did a ship sink twice!!!" ('Nother side note: can we please fucking quit it with the "suicidal jealous woman" trope??? No one likes it, it makes me angry, stop fucking putting it in books. It's embarrassing that it keeps cropping up like this.) Looking once again to The Hunger (also, spoilers for that book), the supernatural elements are not what causes the disaster. Rather, it heightens the interpersonal drama between characters whose own personal faults and failures lead them into a bad situation that the supernatural entity can thus take advantage of. Minus the spookies, this is basically how it happened in real life. In The Deep, there is a sense that none of the tragedy would have occurred if not for small petty dramas between three people had not caused a supernatural. It's disingenuous and aggravating to read.
2) When I say I wanted this book to be Haunting of Hill House (the book, not the show), I'm not pulling the comparison from nowhere. For a lot of the book, I saw it leaning toward not confirming the supernatural elements as real. This made me really happy, because a psychological study is always much more interesting to me than just blaming everything on a ghost. But the more I read, the more I realized my hopes were in vain. This became problematic because along with losing my hopes, I also began to lose my suspension of disbelief. Rather than going along with the fact that every single goddamn character was firmly convinced of a supernatural entity being onboard and not even considering something more logical, I found myself frustrated with how superstitious every single character was right off the bat. In a story that relies heavily on the reader's buying into its supernatural elements in the final act, this is a really really bad thing. The other issue was that the characters, rather than reading as people who reluctantly bought into ghost stories after exhausting all other explanations, instead came across as people who were collectively having a psychotic episode. And yes, I recognize that one of the novel's half-baked themes is that of female hysteria and the dismissal of women's concerns. I realize that the paranoia created is a diegetic result of the ghost's presence. Just because something has an explanation both in the story and thematically doesn't mean that it's well-done or comes across as intended.
Before I wrap this up, I should say that this book wasn't all bad. I was super invested at the beginning, mainly because Katsu's writing is so damn good. Her characterization is also pretty top-notch. The issues I had with the characters cropped up because the plotting (as in, how the story is structured and told) grew shakier the less interested I became in the story.
There are people who enjoyed this book a lot. I don't blame them. I admittedly expected something from this book that it could never give me, but I also think that what's there could have been executed much better than it was.
2/5 stars
That being said, I probably still would have read this at some point, probably checking it out from the library instead of buying it brand new like a fool. I really enjoyed Katsu's previous novel The Hunger as I felt it tapped into an interesting subgenre of a subgenre: historical / literary horror with a helping of toxic romance. Twas a good read, if you're looking for something fresh.
This book, however, is not fresh in the slightest. I imagine many readers will revel in its romantic suspense and sprinkling of the supernatural. As someone who went in hoping for the grotesque beauty of The Hunger, I was admittedly disappointed upon realizing that this book is...not that, not in the slightest. It leans more into the toxic romance side of things than the horror, and while I don't mind romantic suspense when it's done well (i.e. Daphne DuMaurier's My Cousin Rachel), something about this book really rubbed me the wrong way.
Thinking on it a bit, my distaste is two-fold: 1) dramatizing real historical events is not easy and, when done poorly, can read as kinda gross, and 2) I wanted this to be Haunting of Hill House but on the Titanic and it was not.
Let's break these points down, shall we?
1) Historical fan fiction is not a new thing, and it's also something I've enjoyed quite a bit in the past. Like I said before, I like The Hunger quite a bit, and while Katsu certainly takes liberties in her heightening of the Donner Party's drama, I felt that it was done tastefully and with an interest of making the characters come to life as human beings rather than distant echoes. On a more personal side, my friends and I have running jokes about certain literary figures, including a joke theory about Sherlock Holmes being self-insert fanfic about Oscar Wilde (side note: this is a hill I will die on). I am okay with ruminating on / joking about long-dead people. What feels weird about this book is that it's taking the events of one of the worst peacetime disasters in history (and another wartime disaster, actually) and ghost-ifying them. Like, we know what happened to the Titanic. It was awful and could have been avoided for so many reasons, but this book decides to whittle those reasons down to "jealous woman's spirit tries to kill her kid to get back with her traitorous lover but whOoPs now we did a ship sink twice!!!" ('Nother side note: can we please fucking quit it with the "suicidal jealous woman" trope??? No one likes it, it makes me angry, stop fucking putting it in books. It's embarrassing that it keeps cropping up like this.) Looking once again to The Hunger (also, spoilers for that book), the supernatural elements are not what causes the disaster. Rather, it heightens the interpersonal drama between characters whose own personal faults and failures lead them into a bad situation that the supernatural entity can thus take advantage of. Minus the spookies, this is basically how it happened in real life. In The Deep, there is a sense that none of the tragedy would have occurred if not for small petty dramas between three people had not caused a supernatural. It's disingenuous and aggravating to read.
2) When I say I wanted this book to be Haunting of Hill House (the book, not the show), I'm not pulling the comparison from nowhere. For a lot of the book, I saw it leaning toward not confirming the supernatural elements as real. This made me really happy, because a psychological study is always much more interesting to me than just blaming everything on a ghost. But the more I read, the more I realized my hopes were in vain. This became problematic because along with losing my hopes, I also began to lose my suspension of disbelief. Rather than going along with the fact that every single goddamn character was firmly convinced of a supernatural entity being onboard and not even considering something more logical, I found myself frustrated with how superstitious every single character was right off the bat. In a story that relies heavily on the reader's buying into its supernatural elements in the final act, this is a really really bad thing. The other issue was that the characters, rather than reading as people who reluctantly bought into ghost stories after exhausting all other explanations, instead came across as people who were collectively having a psychotic episode. And yes, I recognize that one of the novel's half-baked themes is that of female hysteria and the dismissal of women's concerns. I realize that the paranoia created is a diegetic result of the ghost's presence. Just because something has an explanation both in the story and thematically doesn't mean that it's well-done or comes across as intended.
Before I wrap this up, I should say that this book wasn't all bad. I was super invested at the beginning, mainly because Katsu's writing is so damn good. Her characterization is also pretty top-notch. The issues I had with the characters cropped up because the plotting (as in, how the story is structured and told) grew shakier the less interested I became in the story.
There are people who enjoyed this book a lot. I don't blame them. I admittedly expected something from this book that it could never give me, but I also think that what's there could have been executed much better than it was.
2/5 stars