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Book Review: Into the Drowning Deep by Mira Grant

Into The Drowning Deep by Mira Grant
Orbit Books,2017
ISBN-13: 978-0316379403
Available: Hardcover, paperback, Kindle edition, audiobook, audio CD

Mermaids? Scary? If you’re familiar with Mira Grant(aka Seanan McGuire), author of the Feed series, you know she’s capable of some horrific storytelling. In Into the Drowning Deep, the sequel to her novella Rolling in the Deep, Grant has reinvented a creature that most people don’t take seriously into a terrifying monster. The novel is scientifically based, utterly plausible, and rich in characterization– and it will make the reader cringe every time a dark corner is turned. Into the Drowning Deep is as frightening as Aliens and as mind-bending as Jurassic Park, with the lyrical prose only Grant is capable of writing.

The plot goes something like this: Imagine, an entertainment corporation that seems part reality-show machine and part “Umbrella Corp,” sent a cruise ship into the heart of the Pacific, towards the Mariana Trench, in search of a fictional beast they believe will steer millions straight through televisions into their pockets. Except, of course, something goes wrong and everyone on board goes missing. Only a secret video and splatters of blood remain.

Victoria is a marine biologist whose sister was one of the victims on that first boat. Now, Imagine wants Victoria to be a part of the second voyage, to prove that mermaids actually exist. She’s grouped with a college professor who’s devoted her life to cryptozoology, the woman’s husband and Imagine guru, a pair of deaf twin sisters who are geniuses in their given fields, and a plethora of other characters. Not one of the secondary personalities is poorly drawn; everyone has a backstory that works here without it overwhelming the story.

The ship has its own mysteries, and things obviously go wrong, but not in a typical “bad horror movie” way. The creatures find them and all hell breaks loose, but not in a manner that’s expected. Fans of Grant’s Feed series know that blood and gore will not be avoided, yet it is not exploited, either. Despite the carnage, the cast and crew of the ship remain committed to solving this sci-fi horror mystery of the hows and whys of the mermaids, and not just surviving them.

With very few parts that lag, Into the Drowning Deep rolls through the currents fast and hard, pushing the reader to keep up. While deftly pacing the story so the reader knows what’s going on and why, Grant also captures the lives of the characters in a manner that most cannot. Even the unlikable people evoke sympathy from the reader, and the suspense is genuine because of it. While not as hardcore and explicit as Michael Crichton, the science rings true. It is fascinating, teaching the reader about the mysteries of the deep sea and what we don’t know– yet.  Recommended.

 

Contains: gore, violence, sex.

 

Reviewed by Dave Simms

Posted on May 26, 2018 by , Reply

Women in Horror Month: Mother Goose On The Loose

Mother Goose telling tales, from the frontispiece of Perrault’s Histoires.

The dark mystery behind the tales and rhymes that today we attribute to Mother Goose is something most people don’t notice now, because taken for granted that they were written for children in the nursery– and who today would entertain the littlest of us with violence and nightmares? Her image first appears in Perrault’s Histories, published in 1697, as an old woman telling stories to children, but her name and role as storyteller already existed in France. In Halls of Fame, Olive Beaupre Miller writes that John Newbery, the first publisher to concentrate on children’s books, was the first to publish an edition of Mother Goose rhymes in 1786,  and that in the preface, the editor writes that the rhymes  “are of great antiquity… some as old as the time of the ancient Druids”.  Miller was writing in 1921, and she wrote to educate small children, but recent research bears this out.

Apparently Americans’ puritan tastes led to “refinement” of the rhymes, although overseas, children were purchasing chapbooks of Mother Goose rhymes and fairytales in unexpurgated form. Gillian Avery notes that originally, few of them were written for children at all, but were “wrenched” out of adult contexts by children, and were “ruthless” and “often violent” until adult writers and illustrators toned down the content to what modern audiences recognize as Mother Goose rhymes today (to the objections of those who prefer the violent, political, and sexual nature of some of the originals). Samuel Goodrich, who later became the popular American children’s author, Peter Parley, was sheltered from these rhymes and tales until the age of ten, and outraged by them when he finally encountered them. Avery quotes Goodrich as saying,

“Little Red Riding Hood, Puss In Boots, Jack the Giant Killer, and some of the other tales of horror,[are] commonly put into the hands of youth, as if for the express purpose of reconciling them to vice and crime. Some children, no doubt, have a ready appetite for these monstrosities, but to others, they are revolting; until by repetition and familiarity, the taste is sufficiently degraded to relish them.”

Goodrich made a career of writing nonfiction and realistic, moral fiction for children, in a mostly successful effort to drive works of imagination and fantasy underground (for several decades, at least), and once the rhymes emerged, there continued to be censors who criticized and edited them (Geoffery Handley Taylor’s 1952 catalogue of the dangers in nursery rhymes is notable) but as this story shows, in the end, especially in the age of the Internet, you can’t keep Mother Goose down.

Sources not available online:

Avery, Gillian. Behold the Child: American Children And Their Books, 1621-1922. London: The Bodley Head, 1994.

Miller, Olive Beaupre.  “The Interesting History of Old Mother Goose”. Halls of Fame. Chicago: The Book House For Children, 1953.

 

Posted on February 18, 2016 by , Reply