I read The Troop a couple of years back and it pretty much set the bar for body horror in literature for me. This is my second outing into his world of horror.
A pandemic is sweeping the world. Called the 'gets, it's like dementia on steroids. in it's end stages, people forget everything including how to eat and breathe and just die.
In an attempt to find a cure a team of scientists are working 8 miles below the surface of the Pacific, trying to harness a miraculous new substance they call Ambrosia.
Dr Luke Nelson is a vet. His brother is one of the scientists in the deep sea lab. When all contact s lost with the lab shortly after his brother sends a message asking to see him, Luke takes the perilous trip to the bottom of the ocean. He will soon come to regret that decision.
Things have gone very wrong indeed in the Trieste lab. In the darkest and deepest part of the ocean, something is emerging that is more terrifying than any disease.
Cutter manages to create the most cloying atmosphere of claustrophobia I think I've seen in a book. The sense of dread is palpable.
It's nowhere near as gruesome as The Troop but it is a lot more atmospheric. You can almost feel the walls pressing in and smell the stale air.
The Troop was a great ensemble piece, where this one sticks to Luke's POV almost continuously throughout. Luke is a good character and well drawn but I did find myself wanting the POV from some of the other characters. This only happened briefly in a section where he reads the diaries of one of the scientists.
This is an impressively bleak novel. Hope is a hard thing to come by eight miles under the sea facing a Lovecraftian entity. The body horror, when it comes, is effectively gruesome and mainly concerning the lab specimens so if that's a trigger, maybe avoid this.
One of the blurbs on my copy says how this book gives you a reason to be scared of the dark, and I have to say I agree with that statement.
Overall this was a good end/start to the year's reading.
No comments:
Post a Comment