Into the Drowning Deep

Seven years ago, the Atargatis was found empty after a voyage to make a faux documentary about mermaids, funded by a sci-fi channel Imagine. No one was ever found. Now, in 2022, a new ship is chartered by the same company, much more prepared, with a crew of all different types of (mostly skeptical) marine scientists, a pair of big game hunters, and cutting edge technology to find out what happened. Will they find nothing or something the world has never seen?

Into the Drowning Deep takes place in the near future of 2022 where things are just a little bit different. Advances in medical technology have been made including repairing spinal injuries that would normally leave a person without use of their legs. Self driving cars are a typical sight on the road. Unfortunately, pollution and climate change have taken a small but significant toll on day to day life. Human sympathy and care for animals and the environment is outweighed by indifference at best and greed or flat out ignorance at worst. This sets the stage for what will come later for both a creature relegated to myth and intelligent beings relegated to entertainment and containment. There is a running discussion about marine mammals and how sentient they are. Legislation was passed to improve treatment of marine mammals, but they are continually used selfishly by humans no matter how well meaning.

Seanan McGuire especially excels at getting into the heads of each and every character. Each one of their unique experiences and points of view is showcased without judgment or censorship. The cast of characters is large and diverse with different ethnicities and expressions of sexuality in addition to numerous disabled people. It felt like real life where people aren’t homogenous. My favorite character is Tory, a marine biologist focused on marine sounds, who lost a sister in the Atargatis. Her life’s obsession has been finding out what happened to her, working as a whale watching guide for use of the boat on its off time. Olivia is an unexpected character as a person with autism working as a reporter for Imagine. She copes with intense social situations by exploring the place thoroughly in advance and always being accompanied by her camera man. I love Olivia because she goes against so many stereotypes of people with autism and shows that they aren’t limited to certain industries or activities.

Less sympathetic characters, such as the Australian poacher couple, are given the same treatment. Their hatred of and blatant disregard for animal preservation laws and enthusiasts is on display along with their love of the hunt, the kill, and each other. All of the characters are well rounded no matter their politics or opinions. Jillian Toth has been talking about mermaids for years and knows she’s right. She didn’t want to go on the first voyage because she rightfully had no desire to encounter them. Filled with guilt over the first voyage, she feels obligated to be on the second one, accompanied by Theo, her estranged husband who she still loves but refuses to be around. I loved the inclusion of complex, unconventional relationships. Human emotions and situations are messy and not always easily defined.

The horror elements of the novel are amazing. It’s starts off like a typical horror film with the last footage of the Atargatis. The plot reflects that of Aliens, seen in many horror sub genres, and feels familiar even with the difference in creature and location. The ocean is so unknown that the story feels plausible. The mermaids themselves are slender with fish tails, humanoid upper bodies, and full lips. Other than their basic shape and lips, they are eerily inhuman with bioluminescent fibers like hair on their heads. They masterfully mimic other sounds when hunting and have a sort of sign language to speak to each other. As amphibians, the mermaids can survive out of water for a time, trailing slime to move around more easily and moving with much swifter speed than expected. Their attacks are savage, quick, and incredibly bloody. Their bodies are host to its own ecosystem never before seen that is deadly to humans. While these creatures are deadly and frightening, human shave some culpability for forcing them to the depths of the ocean and invading the only territory they have.  A discussion for their preservation is posed with both sides being argued. One side arguing that they are dangerous and the other arguing that humans should preserve all life, not jus the cute and cuddly.

Into the Drowning Deep is a well researched, engrossing novel that speculates on where we are going as a world. It has everything: an exploitative corporation, science, gore, horror, suspense, dynamic characters, romance, and critique of society. The only small problems I had were in the pacing (but science takes a while to explain) and the fairly abrupt ending. I hope there will be a continuation to the story. In the meantime, I will be reading the short story prequel, Rolling in the Deep.

My rating: 4.5/5 fishmuffins

The Lure

Mermaid sisters Golden and Silver decide to join human society in the 1980's, using a seedy nightclub as their gateway. They start off as strippers and backup vocals until the crowd is so ravenous for their performances and transformations that they become the main event. The mermaids have a good time at first making new friends and experience all the human world has to offer, but their desires start to diverge. Golden's hunger for human flesh grows while Silver falls hopelessly in love with guitarist Mietek.

The Lure is a unique film that merges a dark retelling of The Little Mermaid with an 80's setting and a musical. These mermaids aren't like Disney creations. Their tails are impossibly long and powerful and their teeth are razor sharp. They lure humans with their beautiful voices, which seem to have a magical element that compels their prey, in order to eat their throats and hearts. The difference compared to to most lore is in their ability to appear human with legs, but with no sex organs. Too long without water makes them weak and sick, but they adapt comfortably to living on land. After so many years of boring mermaids, these ones are a refreshing change.

The mermaids are one hand beautiful, impressionable teenage girls and on the other hand inhuman monsters. Golden and Silver are exploited as sex workers by the band and the nightclub management despite the acknowledgement of their young age. They don't seem to mind as they earn their keep and receive the increasing adoration of a growing group of fans. Through their experiences, they are torn in different directions. Golden embraces her true nature by eating people and seeking creative outlets with other groups where she can write her own lyrics and sing with others of her own kind. She also has love affairs with humans, but it seems more like experimentation and fun rather than anything lasting.

Silver, on the other hand, is the more innocent and emotional one. She tries to deny her true nature because of Mietek, who makes it clear that he likes her but will always view her as an animal. Her voice seems to make him forget it for a while as they build a romantic relationship that stops short of sex because of her mermaid body. She opts to surgically trade lower bodies (from just above the navel down) with a human woman in a delightfully surreal scene. Afterwards, she's a shade of herself as her voice is completely gone and her body is weak from the surgery. Mietek deigns to have sex with her, but recoils, disgusted when she bleeds on him. Her humanity repels him just as much as her inhumanity and he quickly rebounds with a beautiful singer. Through all of this, Golden supports her sister even if she doesn't agree with her decisions, which was an especially beautiful aspect of the film.

Some aspects of the film fell flat for me. Most of the songs were good, but either the translations of the lyrics were bad or the lyrics are just bad in some of them. Other aspects of the film are scattered and don't make sense. For instance, the band was pretty clearly dead in their aparment and then suddenly come to life with some drugs in their system. The drummer punches out the mermaids and then dumps their bodies in the ocean as if they are dead. Golden and Silver return with a minimum of vengeance and still perform and live with them. A few random events like this don't add anything to the story and serve to make the plot more convoluted than it needs to be. Also, all of the human men are terrible, either being physically or mentally abusive and using women for their own ends. I wish these characters had more nuance, but I get that the focus was on the mermaids and their journey.

The Lure is definitely an experience. It's much different than any other film I've seen this year. The plot meandered a lot before it got to anything resembling The Little Mermaid and then the fairy tale ended up being the main story. It's definitely more good than bad, but the messiness takes away from the unique tale.

My rating: 2.5/5

Forgive My Fins

Seventeen year old Lily has a secret that no one knows: she's actually a mermaid princess living among humans. Her mother was half human, so she wants to learn about about that side of her. It also helps that she thinks Brody, swim team stud and super hot guy, is the love of her life. She plans to eventually kiss him, which will bind them together and allow him to take whatever form she takes. Unfortunately Quince, her super annoying next door neighbor, is constantly in the way and ruins everything by kissing her. Now Quince and Lily are bound together and she has to go to her father to separate them before the bond becomes permanent.

I've read and enjoyed most of Tera Lynn Childs' Sweet Venom series plus mermaids are awesome, so I decided to try out this series. It turned out to be a cute, very fluffy book with an unlikeable protagonist and a weak plot. I would have liked Lily if she didn't interact with anyone expect her best friend. She has an odd style, a quirky personality, and is generally an ok person. When the boys come into the picture she becomes insufferable. She considers Brody the love of her life even though she barely knows the guy. When he's around, no one else exists and she becomes completely self absorbed. When Quince is around, she is irrationally horrible to him and gets so angry at the slightest things. He's actually really nice to her and clearly has feelings for her. He is a better person than me because if someone treated me that horribly, I would have given up a long time ago. I also found it annoying that she felt no responsibility or duty towards her undersea kingdom at all and she was willing to give it up for someone she doesn't even know. I just couldn't sympathize with her at all and found her whiny and generally insufferable. Ugh.

I also didn't like that Lily had to be bound to someone before her eighteenth birthday to able to rule her kingdom. Really? It asserts that her relationship defines her as a competent ruler, which is ridiculous. All the characters aren't well written and don't have any dimensions. There's no subtly to the writing at all. If you are looking for a brain candy type book that doesn't require a lot of brain activity, this is the read for you.

My rating: 2/5 fishmuffins

Lies Beneath

Calder White was perfectly happy in a nice warm climate when his sisters called him back to the icy waters of Lake Superior. Being a merman, ignoring this call is impossible. He is bound to his sisters and reluctantly returns to them as slow as possible. When he gets there, he is offered the opportunity to be released from his bond if he helps them murder the son of the man responsible for their mother's death named Jason Hancock. Calder agrees and plans to use his good looks and hypnotic merman suggestion power to manipulate one of his daughter, but things don't go as planned. He didn't think he would fall in love. Torn between being free from his family and wanting to be with his new human love, Calder doesn't know what to do.

I had high hopes for Lies Beneath even though I wasn't crazy about the cover. Mermaids are one of my favorite mythical creatures, but these aren't really mermaids. They are basically aquatic vampires, which takes away everything that makes these creatures interesting. Vampires have overflooded the YA book market and I was looking for something different. These mermaids prey on people and feed on their positive energy and emotion because they can't produce them themselves. They can also communicate with each other telepathically, manipulate humans with their beauty and hypnotic powers, and produce electricity similar to eels. This would have been interesting if it didn't make the relationship between Calder and Lily into a carbon copy of Twilight. He wants to eat her but he's in love with her and it's going against his nature...blah blah blah. I have seen this so many times before that it's ridiculous. Plus his stalker status rivals Edward's in Twilight and he kills people regularly to survive. It got really creepy. The murder aspect seemed to be justified by the fact the he doesn't kill anyone during the course of the book, but that doesn't make his past murders disappear. The romance did not wow me because it was the typical instalove with no development at all.

The characters are fairly flat and uninteresting. Lily is a rebellious girl who wears weird clothes and doesn't mind that her boyfriend has killed people in the past. His sisters are the most interesting characters in the novel, but we don't get to see much of them. All the characters could have done with richer backgrounds and dimensions. The two things that did work for me are the writing and the poetry in the novel. Despite not being very invested in the characters or the plot, I kept reading because the writing really moved and kept me interested. I am a huge sucker for classic literature cited in books. I get to discover new things I didn't know about or nerd out over things I like. I had no idea about some of these poems and it was nice to discover them.

Lies Beneath is a mediocre teen novel that had a lot of promise with the dark mermaids, but it turned into a Twilight rip off. The ending is definitely open for a sequel and I'm frankly not interested in reading it. Hopefully some of the other mermaid books will be less disappointing.

My rating: 2/5 fishmuffins