rachelmanija | Rolling in the Deep & Into the Drowning Deep, by Mira Grant (Seanan Maguire) (Reply)

These are companion works about DEEP SEA MURDER MERMAIDS. Scientifically justified and science fictionally depicted DEEP SEA MURDER MERMAIDS. I am there for that, and for once this is a Seanan Maguire/Mira Grant book where I not only liked the premise, but liked what she did with it. By far my favorite of anything I've ever read by her.

"Rolling in the Deep" is a novella set several years before Into the Drowning Deep, concerning an expedition to the Mariana Trench to make a fake documentary "proving" the existence of mermaids, a la the garbage fake docs on the History Channel. They hire some human mermaid performers for the purpose. The novella starts out by informing us that the ship was found later with no one onboard and weird footage that looks like it was attacked by mermaids, which is largely assumed to be fake. But no one on board was ever found.

It's a fun horror novella with a killer premise - and it really is about the premise. I enjoyed it a lot.

Into the Drowning Deep is a novel about an actual scientific expedition to the Mariana Trench to try to figure out what happened to the ship and if mermaids could possibly be real. The characters are just plausible and likable enough to make us care what happens to them, but really it's all about horrifying deep sea creatures, which is what the murder mermaids are. It's a lot of fun, especially if you're freaked out by deep sea creatures, which I totally am. The mermaid descriptions are very fun in terms of how they work out a plausible way for mermaids to be deep sea horrors. I would absolutely love horrifying mermaid art, and may request this for the next fic/art exchange I do.

Though I was mostly in it for the mermaids, I also appreciated the look at human mermaid culture in the novella, and the number of disabled characters in both. Like in real life, some people have disabilities which are relevant to their lives, but aren't all they are.

My biggest quibble with both books is that they both have a big twist, which ends the novella and is heavily involved in the climax of the novel. But it's the same twist, so if you read them both, you will spend one of them waiting for the characters to figure out the thing you already know. Which can be fun, but they're both written like the readers should also be shocked. In both cases this supposedly shocking and horrifying moment is just stated rather than described, so by the time you get to it for the second time, it falls doubly flat. I'm really baffled by this choice.

The twist is that the mermaids we see are all male. The female is a giant mermaid who we never see. We're told that this is so shocking and horrifying that it's a mercy to die before seeing her. But all we hear about her is that she's really big. Grant has some very horrifying and evocative descriptions in the book, so she could easily describe the giant mermaid in a way that makes her scary. But no. We are literally just told that the mermaids we see are male, and the female mermaid must be huge. That's it, that's the shocking twist. Which we get as the climax of BOTH books. I don't get it.

I was also baffled by the fate of the friendly captured mermaid. He saves all their lives, and the humans are worried about what will happen to him... but instead of being worried that he'll be vivisected or at best kept as a lonely lab animal for the rest of his life and so release him, they worry that he'll be killed out of hand and so make sure that he stays a living prisoner. That's a fate worse than death!

That aside, I did enjoy both books quite a bit. This is very light horror - it's creepy and people die and there's violence, but it's juuust to the horror side of science fiction action - Aliens rather than Alien. I suggest reading the novel first (the opposite of what I did) if DEEP SEA MURDER MERMAIDS piques your interest.

Content notes: Mermaids kill people.