Into The Drowning Deep is the first in Mira Grant’s “Rolling in the Deep” series. It’s a blend of cryptozoology, slow-burn tension, and sudden, brutal, bloody violence. Because in the deep, you see, there are monsters.
The monsters make their presence known early, when a ship filming a reality-show-slash-documentary for a B-list horror channel is found floating in the middle of nowhere. Video footage shows monsters crawling up the hull, and devouring the crew.The footage is by turns ignored, dismissed as a hoax, or believed, by cranks and zealots. Whatever left the crew of the ship a bloody ruin, dubbed “mermaids”, occupies a liminal space between belief and indifference. People, as a whole, have other problems.
And decades later, people, in the specific, are ready to go hunting monsters. They’re a motley crew, hired on by the same entertainment firm that funded the first, disastrous expedition. They include a cryptozoologist, sister to one of the murdered film crew, a zealot scientist, proselytising that whatever lives in the deep is both real and hungry, her husband, a corporate stooge with a past (and an agenda), and an entertainment presenter trying to actually do some decent work. They’re surrounded by a larger crew, who range from seasoned professionals to a couple driven by the lust of the hunt, and the promise of monsters on their wall. It’s a diverse band, and though only the central few get enough time on the page to truly breathe, still, the remainder are far more than ciphers, given enough of a splash to make them memorable. And the core cast range from endearing to icy, through inscrutable and back again. They’re alive, people dealing with loss and pain and friendship and love, and..occasionally, seeing people get eaten.
The book does a great job of making you care about these people. After the initial shock, it settles into the simmering burn of tension, building them up, showing you each as a living, breathing individual. And ito shows you the small and large mistakes, the hubris, the need for closure, the humanity that leads toward something happening again. As scientists work on a cruise that feels like a holiday, laying out equipment to study climate change, with no expectation of finding legends and myth, we know that a splash of carmine on the deck is only pages away. As the protective measures that should keep them safe are left idle, as the security team are shown to be more actor than brute squad, again and again we see the best and worst of humanity. And the rising sense of dread, of the unseen creeping ever closer, of the scaled hand cresting the rail beneath unknowing eyes - it turns the screw on the reader.
And when it comes to it, the tension is worth it. There’s a sense of the fragility and truth of humanity. That people are what we are, beneath our foibles. The good and the bad is on display, between the lethal conflict, the scrambles through the dark, through the forbidding deep. What comes as it all boils over into madness is believable, and in its way, beautiful. It speaks for the people, and the monsters, even as it approaches their reality unflinching.
Now saying that, the end suggests there’s more to come, and i look forward to it;the gaps o the denouement feel ready to be plugged, though right now they seem like a slow leak.But that’s a chary complaint, for a story which caught me up like a fishhook and pulled me through its pages like a riptide. It’s a lot of fun, this story, and I think, if you’re in the mood for monsters, for darkness and hubris and horror, you’ll enjoy this.
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