Great Storytelling, spectacular narrator

What a ride! The book reads like what I imagine an Andrea Arnold and early David Lynch collaboration might be like.
It’s slow and suspenseful, kitchensink tragedy meets Jules Verne like horror remix. I dig it.

Also: what a fantastic casting of the narrator. Great quality audio and a delightful voice.

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2 Leute fanden das hilfreich

Gripping and haunting

Deep sea stories always get me, this one was horrific and sad but poetically beautiful. Pretty vague story but I found it still gripping. The love story bits and characterisations were relatable and moving to me.

"In my head I think I'm often telling Miri stories. Locking away information or things I've seen in order to tell her about them later. Even trapped as I was down there, I was still doing this. Taking everything in with one eye on how to recount it. I think I've trained myself to look at things this way, as if for her as well as me.
Although now, writing this, I'm not sure I really want her to know about it. I can't say whether this is a story I actually want to tell."
- chapter 22

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Leider etwas langweilig

Ich hab mich super auf dieses Hörbuch gefreut, da es mir empfohlen wurde, aber leider hat es mich gar nicht überzeugt.
Die interessanten und spannenden Teile des Buches enden alle auf einem Cliffhanger. Nichts wird in Detail betrachtet oder erklärt. Der Hauptcharakter, Miri, ist sehr repetitiv und hat mich absolut gelangweilt. Das Buch hat zwar etwas Atmosphäre aber keinen Inhalt.
Hinzu kommt, dass die beiden Sprecherinnen sehr monoton sind und nicht viel zur Spannung beitragen.

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Horribly Disappointing

This story is told by Miri and Leah; Leah, who went on a deep sea exploration mission and returned far too late and strangely different, and Miri, who stayed behind and now deals with a wife she cannot recognize.

The first half, if not 60% of the book, is dedicated to setup. Their relationship. Miri's friend Carmen, whom she doesn't actually like or respect. Leah's friends that also become Miri's friends, whom Miri completely fails to include in the unfolding tragedy. Miri's relationship to her mother, which can be described as "restrained", at best. All this to say, for over half of the book, nothing happens.

It is Miri that I was growing ever more annoyed with. There are a great many things she observes, but she does absolutely nothing. The most galling aspect of her inactivity is her failure to communicate. I recognize that the "lone wolf" protagonist is a popular (and wildly overused) trope, but here its use was especially grating because we are in Miri's head a lot, and she keeps telling us, the readers, that she could have said something but didn't. Oh, all the times she just didn't. Didn't say, didn't do, didn't want to actually know, it was so incredibly tedious.

When the book picks up the pace and stuff starts happening, it is actually quite interesting, which makes the whole thing all the more frustrating, because it allows me to imagine all the things this novel could have been, but wasn't. Imagine, if Miri had been an active participant in the story! What things we could have could have found out! Some will say that this novel, in eschewing the obvious route - that of an actual horror novel - went to a much more profound place (see what I did there?). To those people, I say, that may be so, but then don't mislabel stuff.

I think that the problem here is the false promise of the genre. This was labeled as "Horror", so I expected horror, but what I got was mild trepidation at best. This is not a horror novel. This is a novel about a relationship, and the whole story about the deep sea exploration turned out to be completely irrelevant. Its effects were used as metaphors, and any number of other incidents, even mundane, terrestrial ones, could have served the same purpose. All the elements that would have made this story Horror were never actually investigated or explored.

ALL THE ELEMENTS THAT WOULD HAVE MADE THIS AN ACTUAL HORROR STORY WERE COMPLETELY IRRELEVANT, and I will die mad about it.

Leah's part of the story was interesting. But since, in the end, it doesn't go anywhere, I might as well have skipped it entirely.

I started writing this review with three stars, but now, upon reflection of how much of a disappointment this was, I am giving it a very benevolent rating of two stars, simply because it wasn't the worst thing I've ever read.

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