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riquesoares 's review for:
The Deep
by Nick Cutter
2/5
The short, non spoilery section: The book feels poorly put together, which is a shame, because both the prose and the setting are really well done. But the plot, while not exactly falling apart, just lacks the proper... setup to make the scenes work well one after the other. Can't say much more without spoilers. But I am pretty disappointed with this one.
The main one, the story sets you up to be bored. What do I mean by that? There are many, many, many dream and flashback sequences in this book. Some of these feel relevant at first, since they are about the abuse the protagonist, Luke, suffered at the hands of his mother and brother as a kid. And those are fine, it's good character building and all. But the ones with superonatural elements feel... well, useless, even wasteful, BECAUSE WE ONLY LEARN THOSE ARE TRUE AT THE END OF THE BOOK.
Compare it, for example, to Stephen King's IT. In that book, we know Pennywise is real, we know it's hunting the kids and we know they were in actual danger. Here, we only find that the things are real at the very last chapter. So every scary visual or flashback feels wasted and shoehorned in to add spooky imagery and maybe symbolize the characters are going insane.
And then a lot of the characters just feel wasted. Take Clayton, Luke's brother, for example. At the end of the day, he was raped by his own mother and eventually slowly poisoned her, but that's described as sort of an isolated event. The other things about him: his apparent sociopathy, his willingness to torture animals, are never correlated to that at all.
And the atmosphere is far too dark. There's no goodness to be held onto in this world, which is something this lacks in comparison to King's worlds imo. When all is bad, the badness just... doesn't feel quite as relevant.
So, for this whole book, I kept feeling like it could've been much much better with some subtle changes. Point out the magic/demon stuff at the start, even if just pointing it out, so we actually wonder if THERE ARE demons or ghosts. Make Clayton a more complicated figure, maybe make him care on some level about Luke and make Luke only find it out at the end of the story, something like that.
At the level it is right know, this book is just... mediocre. Close to being good, but at the same time very very far away.
The short, non spoilery section: The book feels poorly put together, which is a shame, because both the prose and the setting are really well done. But the plot, while not exactly falling apart, just lacks the proper... setup to make the scenes work well one after the other. Can't say much more without spoilers. But I am pretty disappointed with this one.
Spoiler
So, let's start with the basics. This book feels very much inspired by Stephen King's work and the movie Event Horizon. But it... just can't really make it work, for the following reasons:The main one, the story sets you up to be bored. What do I mean by that? There are many, many, many dream and flashback sequences in this book. Some of these feel relevant at first, since they are about the abuse the protagonist, Luke, suffered at the hands of his mother and brother as a kid. And those are fine, it's good character building and all. But the ones with superonatural elements feel... well, useless, even wasteful, BECAUSE WE ONLY LEARN THOSE ARE TRUE AT THE END OF THE BOOK.
Compare it, for example, to Stephen King's IT. In that book, we know Pennywise is real, we know it's hunting the kids and we know they were in actual danger. Here, we only find that the things are real at the very last chapter. So every scary visual or flashback feels wasted and shoehorned in to add spooky imagery and maybe symbolize the characters are going insane.
And then a lot of the characters just feel wasted. Take Clayton, Luke's brother, for example. At the end of the day, he was raped by his own mother and eventually slowly poisoned her, but that's described as sort of an isolated event. The other things about him: his apparent sociopathy, his willingness to torture animals, are never correlated to that at all.
And the atmosphere is far too dark. There's no goodness to be held onto in this world, which is something this lacks in comparison to King's worlds imo. When all is bad, the badness just... doesn't feel quite as relevant.
So, for this whole book, I kept feeling like it could've been much much better with some subtle changes. Point out the magic/demon stuff at the start, even if just pointing it out, so we actually wonder if THERE ARE demons or ghosts. Make Clayton a more complicated figure, maybe make him care on some level about Luke and make Luke only find it out at the end of the story, something like that.
At the level it is right know, this book is just... mediocre. Close to being good, but at the same time very very far away.