The Deep

Product Information

Laughing Mad: The still-alive Al, after she's been turned into a hive for mutated bees and begins messily giving birth to them. She keeps laughing even when her head caves in from the pressure. It looks and breathes as though it is dreamlike and delusory and deceitful. It plays with your mind.

You know, I think I’m going to take Casey and Nicole’s advice (added to yours) and pass on this one. I kept wanting to read this because the hardcover art is so pretty, but after this review and their warnings, I think it’s going to be a hard pass. I’ll be curious how you respond to Cutter’s other work, though, see if anything else catches my interest (besides cover art). Wouldn’t you know it? An alleged cure has been discovered. Thing is, it can only be harvested from the bottom of the Marianas Trench. Eight miles beneath the ocean? Not an easy commute. A station is set up thereabouts, for an elite team of scientists to explore a life-saving membrane that seems, shall we say, cryptic. I would have given my first born for an ARC of this book. Endless thanks to NetGalley for giving it to me for free in exchange for an honest review.It’s not the darkness . . . It’s not the vast silence or emptiness or the absence of any life-forms he can draw warmth or certainty from . . . It’s not the pressure. It’s not even the fear of death that constantly nibbles at the edge of his mind. Finally there is Al, a woman who pilots the submersible that takes down to the Mariana Trench where The Deep is set. Her defining characteristic? Um, well, she's a woman, I guess. We barely see her and she only shows up to move what little plot the book has along. When she meets her end, you barely notice or care. The Deep is my second Cutter novel. The first I read was The Troop, which I easily gave 5-glowing stars. Luke, our protagonist, has a genius brother, Clayton, who is currently conducting research for a possible cure eight miles beneath the surface of the Pacific, down deep in Marianas Trench. The problem is that the scientists stationed in the underwater research lab called the Trieste have been incommunicado and now one of them has surfaced in a not so pretty state. The last communication that the on surface team received came from Clayton, urging his brother Luke to come on down.

Davidson isn't done borrowing from other material, some of it beneath a writer of his talent. The setting has what could be called "Camp Crystal Lake Echo", where a character finds themselves alone in a remote setting and feels the urge to call out to a friend, thereby alerting the killer exactly where they are. I lost count how many times Luke called out, and this is a character who's seen horror movies like Alien. That annoyed me. Any issues with the book list you are seeing? Or is there an author or series we don’t have? Let me know! But hey, Clayton’s in the watery beyond, calling out for Luke. So, he heads on down, more out of curiosity than necessity. A morbid curiosity, as he’s interested in what good could possibly come of it. But as he looks at the world around him, he figures it couldn’t be much worse below sea level. Plus, he’s escorted down there by Alice Sykes, a US Navy Lieutenant Commander who isn’t hard on the eyes. And if we’ve learned anything from horror books and movies, we know that the odds for a sexy rendezvous are not beyond reason. If you have any questions or want to know more, please shoot me a question. I'm pretty good about responding. Way down there in the deep, a new substance, called ambrosia has been discovered. Early observations inspire hope amongst the researchers that this ambrosia may well hold the answer to curing The Gets. But this substance is alive and all of its properties have not yet been fully vetted. Some disquieting concerns have already materialized.

Publication Order of Short Stories/Novellas

They all of them, harbour their own fears and insecurities. Add enough paranormal elements to further exploit this emotional turmoil and the results are: Cutter throws all kinds of horror tropes at the reader - a pandemic, body horror, extradimensional gates, ancient evil/Lovecraftian creatures, The Thing-like creatures that pull themselves together after having limbs or heads cut off, self-mutilation, insane ramblings in diary entries, Stephen King-like horrible parents, scary boxes and crawling body parts, eeeeendless hallucinations that might not be hallucinations, an abducted child, wanting sex while terrified (that said, it's never actually done, which makes a change). I love horror, and can stomach pretty much everything that authors throw at me, other than the drawn-out, nightmarish treatment of animals (especially dogs). Do that to a human, and I’m fine — what that says about me, I don’t know and don’t want to know, thanks!!!!!! — but I knew that a furry character in The Deep was not long for this world (especially given what happens to a certain creature in The Troop) and simply didn’t want to deal with visualizing all of that. Nope. Nada. Non. Not happening. Holy crap was this book creepy. I’m talking nightmare fuel. Unleaded. A mounting sense of dread permeates every sentence. The setting couldn’t possibly be any more claustrophobic. It literally takes place in a laboratory 8 miles down at the bottom of the ocean, full of punishingly tight crawl spaces, segmented corridors with dead ends, extremely dim lighting, and something incredibly sinister that likes to play head games. There are some images in this book that I’m pretty sure will be permanently burned into my brain. There was not one redeeming quality about him and if I were his brother, I would never have even bothered going to the Trieste in the first place.

The Plague: "The 'Gets" (short for "forgets"). It causes people to experience short-term memory loss before they begin losing bigger chunks of memory, until their bodies literally forget how to function, resulting in death. When the story begins, thousands of people have already succumbed to it, resulting in the slow breakdown of society. Besides that, the creepy hallucinations, journal entries, and insane dreams were absolutely fantastic. My goodness, those were all incredible and truly left a mark on me. I got all sorts of “A Nightmare on Elm Street” vibes with those dream sequences since they were that high in horror madness. I felt it had those Elm Street vibes to it as well as a mix of “Aliens” and even “The Shining” with how crazy things got in that special underwater research lab where all sorts of psychological insanity take place. Luke gets the message that his weirdo genius brother Clayton needs him. Clayton is 8 flipping miles under the sea at a lab called the Trieste.

During the story, each chapter is intercut with various reports and interviews surrounding the events that transpired on the island. Over the course of the book, it is revealed that a scientist of incredible skill but little restraint (Dr. Edgerton) was working on a modified tapeworm that could rapidly but safely cause weight loss. He was also secretly accepting grants from military weaponry agencies to modify it for use in warfare. Dr. Edgerton convinced a man to be part of a study, becoming injected with this worm. Through careful manipulation and planning, the patient was released into Falstaff Island, to allegedly test the virulence and military capabilities of the worm.

Chubby Mama, Skinny Papa: Played for drama and eventual horror with Luke's parents, after his mother grows fat following her medical retirement; it's implied the father fetishizes her weight, while she likely keeps him for his slim build (she's attracted to teenage boys, including her own son Clayton). It’s the sense of unreality. This out-of-body feeling that you’ve stepped away from the path your species has always tread. Things become dreamlike, essential, Your mind, seeking solace in the familiar, retreats to those things you understand, but those things become so much harder to grasp.” Deep in the Marianas Trench, in the Pacific Ocean, an unknown substance hailed as “ambrosia” has been discovered—a universal healer, from initial reports. Just in time as the world is being ravaged by a plague called 'Gets. We find ourselves in a special research lab eight miles under the sea, after a strange transmission is sent out and has been radio dark since. Luke and a few of his crew are sent below the depths to find out what happened to the other crew and preserve research. Luke will find out the former crew has tapped into something not of this world. I really wanted to love this book. I found it dragged for me between discoveries. It would have been better if it had a faster pace and more terror. It was an okay read, but nothing special. Eight miles below the surface of the ocean, a small team of scientists are working feverishly to harness the properties of a substance that has been discovered on the ocean floor that just may save the world from a plague of staggering proportions. The Hesperus has received a transmission from Clayton asking for Luke to come home. An animal doctor who is estranged from his gifted brother, Luke's presence on the Hesperus is nevertheless seen as critical. His escort is Lt. Commander Alice Sykes, a jocular servicewoman who asks Luke to call her "Al". Before they submerge, Luke is briefed on an unsettling development. One of the three scientists in the Trieste, or what's left of him, has surfaced. Madness and a high tolerance for pain are the only explanations for what might have happened, along with a message written in the submersible in blood.A strange plague called the ‘Gets is decimating humanity on a global scale. It causes people to forget — small things at first, like where they left their keys, then the not-so-small things, like how to drive or the letters of the alphabet. Their bodies forget how to function involuntarily. There is no cure. I'm talking, he is just a terrible, horrible human being that I would rate right up there with Professor Umbridge as one of my most hated characters of all time. Just a note: the Trieste in this novel is probably a reference to the Trieste bathyscaphe, which in 1960 reached the deepest part of the ocean (the Challenger Deep in the Mariana Trench). The bathyscaphe was largely contructed in the Italian city of Trieste, which is where it got its name. So, while it’s possible that the author was refering to the Spanish word for “sorrow”, it’s more likely that he was refering to the previous deep sea exploratory vehicle. This is fairly realistic – those who commission and build exploratory vessels have a tendency to name them after other exploratory vessels (all the things named after the original HMS Challenger, such as the Glomar Challenger scientific ship and the Challenger space shuttle, attest to this). A new substance, believed to be a miraculous cure-all healer, is discovered at the bottom of the Challenger Deep, the lowest known point in the ocean. It isn't long before a state of the art research center, populated with a select few brilliant scientists, is constructed eight miles below sea level.