It conjures a purpose and agency behind the otherworldly horrors beneath the waves and the quotidian horror of everyday life only to then tell you the reasons for our pain and suffering are indifferent to us. Like the best Cosmic horror, The Deep invokes our latent desire to know that bad things happen for a reason, then toys with it. Luke’s relationships with his brother, mother and son squeezed at my heart, and when things got surreal - reality blending with memory - I found myself crying for monsters and soon for the world. Yet, there is a deep vein of humanity at the core. Hope is nowhere to be found, just frailty, tragedy and viscera. Cutter, through the present tense of Luke’s flashbacks and the Crichton-esque set up of the Trieste, manages to connect numerous episodes that are chilling on their own, but when combined form a coherent map of utter bleakness. In a way, the whole novel feels like a puzzle box. There is a great deal of suspense throughout the book and it delivers on all its nauseating promises. For every scene of creative body horror there is another to balance it by tapping into true feelings of pain vulnerability.ĭespair oozes from the pages of The Deep. These flashbacks, which tap into the very human horrors of childhood abuse and the life-rending tragedy of child abduction, anchor the larger than life sci-fi setting in a place of relatable pain. Cutter doubles down on the theme of memory, making his main character experience intense reveries through which we learn his past. What follows Luke’s descent into the Marianas Trench is scream-worthy but also compelling. Contact is lost, portentous events occur, and the main character Luke is sent down to the station in order to make contact with his AWOL super scientist brother.

A possible cure miraculously appears in the eleventh hour of our demise, and a science team is sent to an undersea facility, the Trieste, to study it. Our planet is ravaged by a new plague called the ‘Gets which causes humans to slowly forget everything until they can’t remember basic bodily functions and die. The Deep is horror of the highest concept, piling situation on top of situation until the stakes could literally not be any higher. It is a 394 page nightmare that never lets up, and from which you cannot wake, combining true human suffering with the bleak sci-fi strangeness that made H.P. This is ironic because rather than having to do with the cosmos - the indifferent reality beyond our darkest skies - the Canadian horror novel is set in the deepest depths of the Pacific ocean. Nick Cutter’s The Deep is the modern epitome of cosmic horror.

The deep book nick cutter