Nick Cutter has given us a truly terrifying story in his latest work ‘The Deep’. It should come as no surprise with his previous work being cited by Stephen King as “Old-school horror at its best” and I would have to say that ‘The Deep’ stands up to the same level of quality that Cutter gave us in ‘The Troop.’ With this being Cutter’s second novel, I’m truly glad to see that he is coming on just as strongly as he did with the first. Before I get into the review, I will openly admit that I am eager to see more of his work down the line!
Alzheimer’s is one of the scariest mental disorders that humanity can look forward to and in this series there is a disease called the “Gets” which is quite similar to the early stages of Alzheimer’s as people are suffering from minor to massive memory loss. This ends with their subconscious finally forgetting how to continue on and organs shut down having forgotten to function.
Wonderful.
As terrifying as a disease like this could be out in the populace and spreading from there, I get to be a late night infomercial for a moment and yell out “But wait, there’s more!”
Humanity may have found a cure but with the clocking ticking down on being able to function and the last bastion of humanity being in a research facility deep in the ocean that is starting to fail just like so much of humanity – things aren’t looking good.
Part horror, part mystery, part thriller, ‘The Deep’ delivers on all sides and keeps you on the edge with each turn of the page.
We’re getting a great range of writing from Cutter here as he went a bit more on the gory side in ‘The Troop’ and in ‘The Deep,’ we see him flipping straight into psychological horror. For me, it is a style that few can truly deliver anymore and Cutter delivers in spades.
That isn’t to say we’re not getting a huge pile of gore and splatterpunk styling thrown in as well. Cutter isn’t abandoning the horrors that made his first novel so much of a draw but he truly has been able to add in an entirely new level of terror to the book.
While not a perfect narrative and a little bit of a loss due to pacing, I was still able to become completely enthralled in what was happening at Cutter’s hand. When the key points of the story are hot, you can’t help but fly through the pages though a few sections of the narrative felt disjointed and threatened to take me out of the story. It never quite got to that point, but did get extremely close on multiple occasions. Between that and a scene with a pet that just was not needed at all, I couldn’t rate this one as a perfect story though I can easily say it is still worth picking up to check out.
