A review by chemicallykat
The Deep by Nick Cutter

1.75

I'm an absolute sucker for the deep sea. Anything set on the sea floor is automatically on my tbr regardless of genre or quality. If anyone has any recs... let me know!!

Sections of this bored me and other sections seemed like they were just there for shock value. 

This was creepy, dark, and graphic. The beginning was slow but introduced some neat concepts. The middle lost me a bit. I wanted to know what was going on and I was not getting answers! The way this book is written is confusing. Half the time I couldn't figure out what was real and what wasn't.

The writing wasn't to my preference - some scenes felt unnecessary, and the characters and dialogue drove me nuts.

The author tends to make a lot of comparisons, "it looked like a glob of partially set Jell-O" and sometimes these came back-to-back and felt redundant. If you say something is colorless, you don't also have to make a comparison to something colorless in the next line.

The way the main character kept describing his mom weirded me out. Every time she was mentioned, even in passing, he'd make a comment to remind us his mom was fat. In general, character descriptions and characterization were sorely lacking. Characters seemed like they were only there for the plot. There's no development and I could not tell you a single thing about any of them beyond factual things like "scientist" or "father."


Beyond that, the plot was THIN. Chapters are repetitive and everything was predictable. Throwing in a "magical" element felt like a lazy way to skip explaining anything properly, and quite frankly, I don't get it.

The child SA was so unnecessary and didn't add a single thing - so why was it included? There are a million other things that could have been included instead. It didn't add to the creepy/horror factor the book was developing and felt like shock-value because it's thrown in and never dealt with properly.In general, the sexual stuff seemed like it could have been cut. At multiple points there's a paragraph or two detailing how hard a man's dick is. What was the relevance? Am I missing something?

I was intrigued by the mysteries of "the Gets" and the ambrosia, but I don't feel like any of that was wrapped up or handled properly. Instead, this became an intentionally confusing gorefest that had a... weird ending that very much didn't satisfy me
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