Review: Into the Drowning Deep by Mira Grant

Another book review.

Seanan McGuire does her SF/horror stuff under the name Mira Grant. A while back, she did a novella called Rolling in the Deep. You remember the Discovery Channel did a credulous and asinine show about the modern-day survival of Megalodon? The premise of Rolling in the Deep was a similar show by a reality channel preying on the credulity of viewers, sending a bunch of people to the South Pacific to look for mermaids.

Things did not go well. Horror movie bad. No final girl bad.

She's just released Into the Drowning Deep, a sequel. The reality channel wants revenge and vindication, and so do some of the people who lost people in the first story.



You don't need to read the first story, because the second story is just a longer version of the first story. Or alternately, maybe I didn't need to read the second story since I've read the first one. Structurally, the major differences are that we and the characters know what's about to happen, so a lot of it is willful this time; and there are survivors.

But:

1. Seanan's books read almost effortlessly, and this is no different.
2. We like a lot of the characters, so threatening them is scary and losing some of them hurts.
3. Seanan is aware that you have Google at your fingertips, so doesn't bother to explain some things. Like, I know a lot of mythology, but I had to look up the significance of the names of the two vessels involved (the first and second story). Do you know Atargatis and Melusine without looking them up? You're better than I am. Anyway, I like it when a book makes me want to look something up.
4. Very diverse cast, written with sensitivity and agency.
5. The ending is really abrupt and there's a lot left out. I don't know that it's not complete, exactly, but I was left with a lot of wait-a-second, I want this scene and that scene and this other scene to wrap things up.
6. Like the rest of Grant's body of work -- her major series as Grant is a zombie apocalypse series -- there's attention to biological pseudoscience. It's bullshit, but it's bullshit that she's thought about and you can appreciate that.
7. There are some odd touches to the near-future of ItDD (RitD was contemporary, ItDD is a few years from now) that suggest that US politics in this timeline diverged from ours around the time that you and I probably wish that our politics diverged.
8. The early chapters revive my desire to go whale-watching in Monterey Bay.

So on the whole, if you are afraid of the ocean, then I will recommend at least one of the two books.

That being said, the rest of Seanan's bibliography is also worth your attention -- the Velveteen v. books are top three superhero prose fiction with me, the Wayward Children books are basically anti-Rabid Puppy talismans, and Indexed is the FBI versus fairy tales. Not to ignore her bread-and-butter series: October Daye (fae PI) and InCryptid (which has a required suspension of disbelief in the upper stratosphere, but is fun once the oxygen deprivation sets in), plus the Mira Grant Newsflesh series.

Even if I'm lukewarm about the necessity of this specific book, I like Seanan's books a lot, so you should buy them so that she will continue to write them. Also she filks.