Hey everyone!
This week's reviews will focus on aquatic horror! I've always loved the ocean and water and therefore wanted to read something scary connected to it. I wanted horror... I got sci-fi and stories that mostly just fizzled out. Here are three ocean-themed books in short review:
(Note: I'm not going to include blurbs. Those are easy to find on google or if you click on the titles of the books in this post.)
The Swarm by Frank Schätzing: This was arguably the best aquatic horror/sci-fi I've read in the last few weeks. There is a reason it's a bestseller even though it's about 900 pages long all in all. This book is set in the real world although with sci-fi elements (in the form of intelligent bacteria) who are making a mess of the planet. It's not creepy and horror-ish per se but has a sort of slowly building 'terrible tension' instead. A lot of characters die - and all of their deaths are justified. There isn't much needless information (or red-shirt death) in the book and everything serves a purpose. The writing is sometimes a bit too philosophical for me (I'm not into long monologues about the state of the world, ethics, and morals) but for most of the book incredibly sharp with no words wasted. However, there are a lot of explanation scenes, where one character will be ignorant, and another the 'teacher'. These are quite obviously included to clue in the reader... which would be fine if it weren't so obvious and always handled the same way.
Character A: 'Do you know about this?'
Character B: 'Uh... no...'/'Uh... it would be good if you refreshed my knowledge!'/'Uh... I only know the basics.'
Character A: 'Here we go! A three-page tirade on THIS VERY SPECIFIC SCIENTIFIC SUBJECT.'
It's not terrible and a lot of it is useful but I'd still argue it isn't strictly needed to advance the story. Of course... if you're a science buff then this is right up your alley.
All in all the book was amazing and the whole of the 900 pages only took me some three days (not even reading the whole day) to finish simply because it was well written (I should probably say translated because I read it in English and it's a German book) and without fluff. I definitely recommend reading this!
Sphere by Michael Crichton: Here is a book that started well and ended disappointing. In a lot of instances Sphere is marketed as horror - but it's really not unless you're already afraid of the ocean and the creatures living in it. It actually is almost pure thriller with some sci-fi (could have guessed that by Crichton's other work). And because it is a thriller the writing drew me in immediately and didn't let me go until the end. I even did more than thrice my usual 30 minutes of stationary bike exercise while reading it. Hello 100 minutes of hard biking!
The actual story started out great as well. There's something at the bottom of the ocean and it's presumedly alien in origin. How cool is that! I'm sure there are more books with the premise (The Kraken Wakes by John Wyndham comes to mind... but that was also a disappointment) but let's give Crichton a try! It was good until about 70% in. I'm beginning to think a lot of books are. Then it became weird in a bad way. The premise of the alien spaceship crashing into Earth's oceans (with perhaps an alien prisoner trapped in the prison 'sphere' of the book's title) and weird/creepy shit happening while people are trapped in a submarine station at the bottom of the ocean is really cool... But then it turns out that while the sphere might be alien the spaceship really isn't. Instead it's human and from the future. Huh? A first red flag. Time travel stories usually don't work. But this is time travel PLUS some weird alien junk being deposited in 'the past' (the book's present). It gets more disappointing from then on. There are no aliens. The prison sphere doesn't have a prisoner. The predator who's been hunting the trapped-undersea people and killing a lot of them is the figment of one human's imagination. The prison sphere isn't a prison but some sort of voodoo ayurevedic The Alchemist -style 'you can make anything true if you just believe in it' yogi shit. It gives people the power to make THINGS true! And some people just have creepy horror ideas in their heads that haunt the whole expedition.
Zzz...
And then comes the ending... which is neither logical nor reasonable. The main characters (including a power-hungry woman) agree to 'forget' about the power they've found which in effect makes the power cease to exist. That would be ok all in all (since the book's disappointing conclusion has already been established) but doesn't make sense. Why would forgetting you have the power to do something remove all the physical evidence of the source of that power (as the book suggests)? Well. It doesn't. And there are hints that at least one of the characters retains the power anyway. Anyway. I don't recommend this book. It simply doesn't live up to its awesome premise and all you'll feel after reading it is let down.
Into the Drowning Deep by Mira Grant (Seanan McGuire): The book started out well. The beginning was creepy and tense like a proper horror and had me all high-strung with anticipation. I was very excited for the rest of the book. The first two thirds of ItDD lived up to that promise. Things became direr and direr the more words were read. The horror premise of face-eating mermaids in the Mariana Trench was paying off! Then suddenly around the 75% mark everything... fizzled out. The plot became boring and gratuitous. The main characters were in no danger whatsoever. Of a whole of six main characters all six survived. The rest of the cast (supporting characters and red shirts) were dying in troves and getting their faces eaten off but the main characters had so much plot armour (I'm guessing because the author really really wanted to have a happy ending to the book) the whole book was ruined. The only characters who died were the assholes every reader wants to die anyway. The story lost approximately all of its credibility when ALL the good main characters survived and ALL the bad guys died. Had the author not been trying so hard to keep her darlings alive the stakes might have been higher and tension up until the end of the book. As it was it was quite evident McGuire was afraid of killing her darlings (even though at least a few out of the six should have died) and therefore this book doesn't get a recommendation from me.
Have you read any of these books? Let me know what you think! I'd love to know your opinion on these books!
WriteBot.
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