Into the Drowning Deep was a nice mix of scifi and horror. I have seen many movies like this but have never read a book quite like it. The book is about a group of people, with different specialties in sciences, who go on a ship to the Mariana Trench in search of answers for a previous crew who went missing there seven year prior. There are also killer mermaids.
I liked the science aspect of this book. I think you learn a lot and there is a lot science jargon but not too much to confuse. I don’t commonly read a lot of scifi but this one makes me want to read more. It takes up a lot of the beginning of the book where there is mostly setup for the rest of the novel.
For the horror, I like that every horror scene was more intense and gorier than the last one which made for a nice buildup to the next one. I am a person who can’t stand much body horror and I don’t think there was too much.
I cannot speak to the quality of the representation, as I do not identify with any of it, but I will state what representation is present. There is a f/f romance with lesbian and bisexual rep. I was surprised to find any romance in this book and it was a nice, positive aspect of it. There is also autism, deaf twin sisters, and a character with a physical disability that effects his ability to walk.
There are so many characters to follow and I think Grant did an amazing job creating distinctions between them and making them so diverse from each other and in general.
The biggest negative for me, that dropped my review a star, was the ending. There was so much action in the book and I feel like it abruptly ended. This book was over 400 pages and could have just added 50 more for a nicer ending. Then, there was an epilogue that just made me confused. I am not 100% sure what the epilogue was trying to convey.
I still recommend this book to anyone seeking a good horror novel with representation and a lot of action and mermaids, of course.
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