REVIEW: ROLLING IN THE DEEP BY MIRA GRANT

Title: Rolling in the Deep
Author: Mira Grant
Genre: Horror, Short Stories
Pages: 123
My Rating: 4 stars

 

 

“What the fuck just happened?” demanded Sonja, stabbing finger at the empty rail. “That mermaid ate his fucking face off!”

There’s something about a story that involves scientists going on an expedition and finding horrible creatures that just works. It worked in Jeff Vandermeer’s Southern Reach series (go check it out!) and it worked in Rolling in the Deep. Then you add in the ocean, with its impenetrable darkness, undiscovered creatures, and general sense of vastness, and we’re given a setting that doesn’t take much to become fearsome. If you didn’t have thalassophobia before reading this book, you will once you finish it.

There were A LOT of different people aboard the Atargatis, and I was nervous that it would get a little confusing, but each character had a distinct personality and really stood out. I was pulled into the story from page one, and even the character introductions and bits of back story that can sometimes be mundane were written well and held my interest.

 

Pros:
-Faces being bitten off, throat ripping, beheading, etc ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
-A female, no-nonsense ship captain.
-A diverse group of characters: TV personalities, crew members, humans that cosplay as mermaids, lots of scientists.
-Real and fake mermaids. The real ones aren’t so nice.

Cons:
-80% of the book was intro and setting the story, but that makes sense with a novella, especially when we were given a full book as a follow up.
-A little predictable, but had a fun twist at the end.

 

“We said ‘pretty women in the sea,’ and that was good enough, because who doesn’t want there to be pretty women in the sea? We turned monsters into myths, and then we turned them into fairy tales. We dismissed the bad parts. We were too interested in… in… in pretty women in the sea.”

Knowing that something catastrophic was going to happen didn’t ruin the suspense- it actually added to it, because you’re reading about normal people doing normal things at sea, and you’re constantly wondering when something is going to happen and when it will all go to hell. I was a little disappointed that it took until the 80% mark for us to actually see a mermaid and for some scary stuff to start happening, but this is a novella and I guess there weren’t enough pages to really get into it. I’m definitely going to check out the next book, which is full length, to see how things play out. Overall, I really enjoyed the author’s captivating writing style, and I’m looking forward to reading Into the Drowning Deep.