The Deep

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The Trieste itself is alone at the bottom of the ocean, on a flat, eerie surface onto which dead life falls in sea snow; where light itself is alien; where a microfracture results in instantaneous Human Pate. When the big reveal is made at the end of the book – regarding Ambrosia’s origins and its purpose – it’s fairly predictable and underwhelming.

There is the claustrophobia, fear of drowning, and horror of going insane that you would anticipate in a book set eight miles beneath the ocean, but Cutter also impressively works fear of clowns into this story. of how the thing in the closet was completely real and you were so small and no one was on your side. This book only plays with it a bit, it quickly refocuses to people-in-a-closed-environment horror tropes. The only thing that could make this any better would be if this discovery heralded an ushering in of a whole new Golden Age for horror the likes of which not seen since the '80s.

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. I can’t really tell if it was because I knew what to expect, but I thought The Deep was much worse, in terms of how gruesome and horrifying it was. In a multimillion dollar Hail Mary play for the future of the species, the US government builds an underwater habitat, the Trieste, at the bottom of the Mariana Trench’s deepest rift (8 miles underwater) and send three different scientists to find, harvest, and experiment on this Ambrosia. The Troop has received positive reviews from outlets such as the Quill and Quire and National Post, the latter of which included a satirical review from Davidson praising the book.

That is, there’s no cure in sight until one of the world’s most brilliant scientists, Clayton Nelson, makes an impossible discovery from the ocean’s depths. It is revealed through a flashback that Kent had stolen the food during the night and eaten the majority of it in ravenous hunger. It reminds me of John Carpenter's The Thing and James Cameron's The Abyss, with some Stephen King thrown in. Nick Cutter’s collection of stories, titled Rust and Bone, has since been adapted for the big screen. Especially in the parts of it where the element at hand –that which is alleged to save mankind- seems to have acquired control beyond the physical laws of nature that we Earthlings take for granted.The book jacket acknowledges that The Deep borrows from The Abyss and The Shining, and others have noted it all uses elements of The Thing and Aliens. You have the plot written out very neatly for you in the book's description so beyond that, I will say that this book is a mind bending, psychological, claustrophobic, descent into the deep, dark (evil) abyss that lies at the bottom of the ocean. The ending was decent but I was expecting a lot more to truly make this a perfect 5/5 for me as “The Troop” was because that novel is horror perfection.