Review: Into the Drowning Deep

Into the Drowning Deep by Mira Grant
My rating: 4.5 of 5 stars

I received an Advance Reader Copy of this book from Net Galley in exchange for an honest review.

4.5 Stars!

My obsession with the Mariana Trench began when I was ten years old. It was that age when kids want to know about the biggest, the smallest, the oldest, the youngest, the highest and the deepest. I was thoroughly absorbed with the Mariana Trench, Challenger Deep, and... what was down there. I was briefly incensed when I saw something about how the Tonga Trench's Horizon Deep might be deeper, having invested a lot of energy on graph paper analysis of how Mt Everest would fit into the Mariana Trench. Plus, hey, I was a Northen Hemisphere girl. But no, Challenger Deep is the deepest point on this planet. How deep is the Challenger Deep crevice in the Mariana Trench? Jaw-droppingly deep, at 35,814 feet below sea level. Deeper if you believe the sonar studies. The Mariana Trench has also been the subject of wry urban legend. (Be sure to check out https://xkcd.com/1040/large/)

Beyond my Mariana Trench obsession, after growing up on stories of sweet little mermaids (á la Hans Christian Andersen or Günter Spang), then taking plenty of biology classes and having dealt with enough barracuda when fishing or diving, let's just say I was ready for a more realistic mermaid that accurately reflected that time-honored quote, 'the sea is unforgiving.' Rolling in the Deep, Mira Grant's fierce and relentless 2015 novella gave me the unforgiving and vicious mermaids of my dreams, I mean, nightmares. In that novella, an entertainment company with a broken moral compass seeks to make a splashy documentary (see what I did there?) that goes deadly wrong out over the Mariana Trench. Into the Drowning Deep is the novel that follows up on the Atargatis disaster of the novella, giving us a new journey into madness, seven years later, as scientists pursue the truth about the fateful journey of the Atargatis and her crew. The scientists aboard the Imagine Entertainment-owned and aptly-named Melusine want to know the truth about mermaids or sirens, as one scientist prefers to call them. Do they or don't they exist? Was the terrifying video footage, found and released by the US Navy, of the events on the Atargatis real or fake? And if mermaids are real, where can you get one? Of course, not fools, they provide heavy security and big game hunters of questionable morality to keep the dozens of scientists recruited for the mission safe. You know how that's going to work out...

Grant starts off slowly in this 436 page novel, building characters and relationships that, as we have already experienced in Rolling in the Deep, will serve to magnify the inevitable losses. It will be a full 165 pages in before the first of these shocking losses occurs. While some might be thinking of this as conventional horror, it's good to remember that Mira Grant does science-based horror. There will be no blood and gore without ASL, echolalia, odd symbiotic organisms, neurotoxins, and bioluminescence.

In spite of its initially slow pace, this book was an engrossing read. It hasn't escaped my notice that this is #1, as in first in a series, where #0.5 was Rolling in the Deep. I'm hoping that in #2 we get to learn more about a mermaid I'll call Savior.



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