“To them, we’re the myths. We’re the monsters.”
Nothing quite embodies summer like the beach: sun, sand, the beautiful ocean hiding unknown horrors. Summer is the season for maritime horror, and we’ve been leaning hard into it this year. While I wait for The Meg: 2 and The Last Voyage of the Demeter to hit theatres, I decided to finally dive into 2018’s Into the Drowning Deep by Mira Grant.
It’s been on my list for a while, and I’ll admit that it shot to the top after the Titan submersible implosion in June. Because I needed more nightmare fuel, apparently. I was not disappointed. The deep, primitive part of my brain is fully willing to contemplate that there are unimaginable terrors in the darkest depths of the ocean. Whether those are megalodons, or mermaids, or things we’ve never even conceived of. As an avid adventurer, I also get the insane impulse to explore the uncharted and answer the unanswerable. The near-future setting also brought its own kind of disquiet, raising the specter of environmental collapse and multi-species apocalypse. Spoilers ahead.
So I went into this book knowing I was firmly in the target audience, and already fueled by an overexposure by current events to the horrors of the deep. The setup is familiar but well done: a tragic expedition arranged by an entertainment company to capture “mermaids” as part of a series of mockumentaries on cryptids (Big Food, Nessie, etc) finds more than they bargained for, and loses the entire crew, leaving only disturbing footage of unknown aquatic creatures that gets leaked to the public and immediately dismissed as a hoax. (That misadventure is chronicled in Grant’s 2015 novella Rolling in the Deep, which I haven’t checked out yet.)
Years later, as the book kicks off, the younger sister of one of the lost crew members is recruited to join a second expedition, this one better prepared to face the threat of mermaids, which are real and which the entertainment company plans to prove the existence of, and presumably make a lot of money from. Tory, our grieving sister, is our protagonist, though it’s a real ensemble story, told through multiple perspectives from a variety of scientists (including an honest-to-god sirenologist and a cryptozoologist), crew members, corporate mouthpieces, bounty hunters, and the occasional monster. The liquid perspectives were one of the book’s strongest elements. We would flow seamlessly from one character’s limited POV to another, as smooth as water rolling from one container to another. I was never jarred, even when I found myself listening to the inner thoughts of a siren. It was a delight.
“The trouble with discovery is that it goes two ways. For you to find something, that thing must also find you.”
There’s a whole debate in the book about what these creatures are (scientists can be so particular), and I was ultimately convinced that “siren” was a better term for the harrowing creatures than “mermaid.” The sirens are the book’s other major asset, a terrifying blend of Human and Other, able to mimic our speech and just familiar enough to make it really uncomfortable to think of them eating your face. There’s no Ariel here. And while there were some missed opportunities to explore their history, to exploit their vulnerabilities in the open air, and to more effectively use them to explore the theme of the opportunities and limitations of language, which was never fully paid off. Overall, though, I was pretty pleased with their monstrousness.
But the humans. Oh, the humans. The queerness of this book is a budding attraction between Tory and an entertainment reporter assigned to document the journey, and while we don’t spend a ton of time on it, it adds some juicy emotional stakes to the second half of the book. There are also friendships, sibling relationships, and a couple of fascinating marriages that get readers invested in the characters. The interpersonal relationships are largely all working in this book. And as an advocate for more diversity of all kinds, there’s some really solid casual representation of disability and neurodivergence in the main cast. Gold star.
Then there are some overly convenient moments where characters abandon logic in order to advance the plot. The sticking point that knocked this book from a 5* to a 4* for me is a critical subplot about the ship’s defensive shutters, which don’t reliably work during dry dock testing and – predictably – don’t reliably work in the middle of the ocean when mermaids are swarming the boat. Do I believe corporate greed exists and that corners are cut in the name of faster progress? Of course. Do I believe there was a ticking clock at the start of this book that appropriately justified the rush to launch this ship on this particular exploration mission with a virtual guarantee of encountering hostile aquatic life that had already killed an entire ship full of people? No. And believing it is central to the plot hanging together and building tension.
“Are you telling me we have killer mermaids murdering people, and that’s not a good-enough reason to hurry up and finish their repairs? What do we even have the shutters for?” “It probably keeps insurance rates low.”
Amen.
Relatedly, once they actually do get the shutters closed, they’re unexpectedly effective and the whole story wraps up too abruptly. I ended up feeling slightly cheated of a proper climax, with the sinking suspicion that some threads were left intentionally dangling for a sequel, though there’s no news of one on the horizon that I’ve been able to find.
But if I could go back in time a week, would I pick up this book again? Yes, I would. It’s summer. Live a little…while you can.
Rating:
By Tiffany Albright
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