Review: Rolling in the Deep

Rolling in the Deep by Mira Grant
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

From what I understand, this novella is a prequel to a successful horror series. That’s not my genre, but this one was free with my Audible membership, and I was curious to see how it did what it did.

On balance, as horror, it works as a kind of textual Blair Witch Project. (It even references that film as part of the story.) We get a lot of detail about a film crew that boards a mid-sized cruise ship in order to film what they expect will be a schlock documentary trying to prove that mermaids actually exist. We get a series of characters from the ship’s and film’s crew, and we also get a group of “mermaids,” attractive women outfitted with artificial tails who usually perform in aquariums.

In the end, though, no one emerges as a fully formed character. They’re all types, all victims-in-waiting.

And we know they’re victims because a prologue tells us that everyone on the ship has been killed.

If that sounds like complaint, it isn’t. I don’t know Mira Grant’s work, but I respect her craft. She knows her business, and she knows what her readers are expecting: it’s going to get gory, so why pretend otherwise.

The chief trick here is an old one. For most of the early parts, we don’t see the actual, monstrous mermaids of the Marianas Trench. Instead, we glimpse them just outside the frame. There are hints of what happens – which Grant’s retrospective structure allows – but we don’t get the full-on horror until the end. We know it’s coming; the thrill is in wondering just when and just how it is.

And then we do get the horror, full-blown. [SPOILER:] The final pages here are entirely bloody with everyone we’ve seen killed in some vicious manner. It’s basically a slaughter, and not my thing.

I’m sure I’d have grown tired of this if it were a full-length novel. That’s fine, though, because I’m not a horror guy. For what this is, I’m glad to have the chance to see how Grant employs a basic strategy to make this work within the conventions of a genre that has never really worked for me.


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