Into the Drowning Deep

Read this for the second time because the dates in the book were actually happening. It's interesting to see how much my own mental focus/ interests affected which things I noticed and cared about each time I read. After I read it the first time I remembered more strongly the protagonist's ex being an a-hole, the main characters lovelife, and of course SCIENCE. The second time around I noticed secondary character more and how stupid a business can be.

I loved this book!

This is one of my favorite authors, but I was still skeptical. Killer mermaids? I decided to read it anyway and I loved it!!

The Atargatis sailed 7 years ago to film a mockumentary about mermaids. Instead, they all died. Some of the footage and info made it back before they died, but most people thought it was nonsense. Not everyone thought that. Many in the scientific community thought it was real, a chance to discover a new species.
Victoria Stewart just wanted the truth. Her sister died on that trip.
Now, 7 years later, Imagine Entertainment is prepared to send another ship. This one is prepared for anything. Loaded with every relevant scientist, and lots of security, they are ready to get underway and finally get some answers.

I listened to this one, and the audiobook is fantastic! I loved the narrator. This is one of those on the edge of your seat books and it should definitely be made into a movie. I was totally invested in these characters, and I did not want to put it down. I am ready for the next one!!

I really enjoyed this book a lot. It's paced a lot like a movie and reminds me a little of Michael Crichton.

I'll probably pick up the second book soon!

I loved this book, it was extremely charming. The writing was not great. Redundant and way too long. Vacillated between relatively normal writing and overly adventurous prose. Unwieldy and no coherent style. However, the author clearly tried really hard to incorporate lots of diverse identities and give them respect - neurotypicality, deafness, queerness, sort of race, etc. I was committed to the story from early on and did not want to stop reading. I'd recommend it for its unique story and captivation value, but not if lazy editing/inconsistent writing makes you too uncomfortable to deal.

A floating buffet
there's plenty, all you can eat
why not bring the wife?

WOW. I don't typically read horror, but this was fantasy horror, and WOW. I picked up the novella precursor to this sometime last year - I never reviewed it here, probably because it was barely over 100 pages, but it was fascinating and haunting all the same. Rolling in the Deep told the story of the Atargatis, a ship sent out to the Mariana Trench to stage a mockumentary - supposedly looking for mermaids, but equipped with actors who could swim with mermaid tails. They never planned to find anything. Except they did. And they all died. One by one at first, a few people picked off, then the entire ship swarmed and eaten. The reader sees this happen, but to anyone not on the ship, the only thing they find is some footage on an abandoned ship.

Into the Drowning Deep fast forwards a few years; the production company, Imagine Network, is not doing so well, and they want to prove that the footage wasn't a hoax. So they assemble a new mission, this one with a lot more security. (Though they still picked security with an eye for what would look good on TV, rather than what would be effective, which was a poor choice.) The reader, of course, knows that the mermaids are real, and that they are dangerous, so you spend much of the first part of the book in a state of suspense waiting for them to show up. (I actually thought it took a little too long for them to finally show up, but the time was used for character-building.)

The book is very Lovecraftian, actually - from the strong, building sense of foreboding doom to the creatures that should not exist, to the kind of gibbering insanity near the end. It's probably why I liked the book so much; Lovecraft is about the only kind of horror writing I like, and I get the same feeling from Grant's writing.

So yes, the book is about mermaids. But these aren't mermaids as you've seen them before. They're not cute, they're not seductive, they don't want to live on land, and they're definitely not friendly. These mermaids are predators. Intelligent predators, but predators. And humans, apparently, are delicious.

Most of the characters in the book are scientists trying to prove mermaids exist, so there's a lot of science happening aboard the ship, and Grant doesn't shy away from it happening on the page as well. She also includes a pair of deaf scientist twins, and their interpreter sibling, which is important because the mermaids use a form of sign language as well. Most of the main characters are women, which is also great to see in such a large concentration of fictional scientists.

If you like fantasy horror, i.e. Lovecraft, you should definitely pick this up. Rolling in the Deep is also worth reading first - I think it definitely adds another layer to the sense of foreboding doom.

You can find all my reviews at Goddess in the Stacks.

3.5 stars.

I took a while to really get into this book. Mostly because I was distracted by other things (comics) and had too many books on my plate for the new year, and because I wasn't that interested in our main character Victoria. She's fine, don't get me wrong, but other characters were more interesting. And this is a science deep sea thriller, and we know how I have a hard time getting into thrillers. But once I did, I had a grand old time, because I met other characters; there was fun science-y stuff going on; MERMAIDS/SIRENS.

I had fun right up until the end, when everything ended very abruptly, and I was left dissatisfied. Luckily, I can look forward to another book in future.

I really liked Olivia. She was one of my favorites.

One of the first things the reader will notice is how the whole book seems to be a sendup of the ???mockumentaries??? shown on Animal Planet and Discovery Channel. Though they caught flak from legitimate scientific institutions, such programs have netted both channels some of their highest viewership numbers in a long time. This novel asks the question: what if a production company set out to make a mockumentary and instead wound up finding the monsters after all? Aside from the potential horror fodder such a scenario can create (and does, in this novel), it also raises some interesting ethical questions about the entertainment industry and the idea of mockumentaries in general. Can the audience be trusted to be sufficiently critical of what they are seeing to know what is and is not real? And if they cannot, does the entertainment industry have the right to take advantage of that credulity for the sake of buzz and viewership numbers?

Full review here: https://wp.me/p21txV-F0

Pros: excellent creature building, diverse cast, some tense moments

Cons: several minor items made me lose immersion, minor inconsistencies

Seven years ago the entertainment company Imagine's ship Atargatis was lost in the Mariana Trench. Video, called a hoax by most, showed mermaid like creatures attacking the ship. Now, a new ship is being sent to find out what really happened.

There's a great diverse cast. It was interesting seeing the hearing impaired twins interact with and without their translator (though I was surprised more people didn't consider handwriting or typing notes to communicate with them). I really liked Victoria, and seeing her determination to discover what happened to her sister on the Atargatis. The book had some great friend duos between Victoria and Luis and Olivia and Ray. It's not common to see close and supportive male/female friendships so it was great seeing those. While I didn't particularly like Dr. Toth, I loved her mixture of curiosity and fatalism when it came to the mermaids.

The mermaids, or sirens as Dr. Toth preferred to call them, were incredible. They're both alien and based on deep ocean creatures, beautiful and terrifying. I was impressed that the author makes it clear how they became objects of myth while also being quite different from the stories they inspired. I loved the hypotheses regarding aspects of their biology, mannerisms, and communication. The creature building was brilliantly done.

I appreciated that the romantic elements came with a healthy dose of communication and a lack of manufactured drama. It came up quickly but felt organic to the story.

There were several conversations and minor issues that kept bumping me out of the story. This ruined my immersion and lessened the tension. For example, when scientists start boarding the ship Ray and Olivia point people out to each other. Ray sees Luis Martines and knows a surprising amount of information about his life and field of study. He's even read one of Luis' academic papers. While I'll accept that Olivia and Ray were given a crew manifest, he definitely knows more than a cursory search would bring up, even if Martines' wealth makes him an intriguing subject. But then he doesn't know who Dr. Toth is, which makes no sense if he studied the crew, considering she's more famous and important as a subject for their work.

Another scene with Olivia made me pause when she thought about her family: conservative father, liberal mother. Apparently her mother doesn't think she should ever have sex due to her ‘condition', which doesn't seem ‘liberal' to me. Had Olivia framed her thought explaining that her mother believed she was liberal but her words to Olivia proved otherwise, it would have made more sense.

I noticed several minor inconsistencies. I'm not sure if other readers will find these as distracting as I did. Thankfully the last hundred pages or so didn't include any of these so I was able to really get into the action and feel the suspense and horror of the ending.

The book wasn't perfect but it has some great creatures and the ending is excellent.

This is a spoiler-free review
Read on In The Sheets

The “Killer mermaids” concept of Into the Drowning Deep immediately caught my attention and, while I'd never read anything by Mira Grant prior to this, I'd only ever heard good things and wanted to give her writing a shot.

For starters, I honestly never thought I'd get into this sort of book, nor is it something I'd have normally sought out. Unexpectedly Into the Drowning Deep made me a fan of not only Mira Grant but also mermaids? Though, it also made me terrified of mermaids, so thanks for that.

The premise here is that the crew of a television network had been sent into the ocean to film a cryptid mockumentary about mermaids, but were instead lost at sea. Footage recovered showed the crew being eaten alive by mer-creatures and, of course, everyone chalked it up as a publicity stunt and hoax. Now, seven years later, they're sending out a new crew consisting of scientists, experts, and hunters, armed with advanced technology and equipment, to find out what happened once and for all.

A couple things here are super obvious after reading Into the Drowning Deep. The first is that Mira Grant (Seanan Mcguire) loves mermaids and she'll make you love them too. The second is that she did a hell of a lot of scientific research, because I found myself convinced during multiple points of the story that mermaids could be real. Which is ridiculous. There were at least 2 nights this week where I found myself Googling them and their feasibility at three o'clock in the morning. Nonsense.

Mira Grant didn't just create an awesome new mermaid book though, she created an awesome new mermaid. She straight up reinvents them and reimagines their entire biology, culture, intelligence, personality, ecosystem, and motivations. It's honestly brilliant. A full redesign. Mira Grant has done for mermaids, what George A. Romero did for Zombies. Sure, scary killer mermaids have always existed, but this is some next level stuff. It's super unexpected and brilliant. Did I say brilliant already? I don't care, I'm sticking with it.

There's no question in my mind that this is 5 Star read, you will not be disappointed. At no point is the story ever slow, the characters are diverse and delightful, with a wide variety of representation. It's all handled expertly and developed perfectly over the course of the story.

I'm gonna have to stop myself here because I'm swooning, but trust me, it's a treat. Pick it up.

4.5