Urban Fantasy/Horror: Rolling in the Deep, Mira Grant

Short and shivery.  Lovecraftian in the good way (creepy and atmospheric, not racist and sexist).

Rolling in the Deep
Mira Grant
ISBN: 9781596067080
Novella: documentary-style horror story featuring creepy mermaids.
Read April 11, 2016

This was SOOOO GOOD!  This is another that I had been sitting on all winter, waiting to feel better and for the weather to brighten up.  I'm so glad I saved it and read it now.  The only better time would have been actually on summer vacation, when you can start worrying about what might be peeking through the ocean murk at your delectable toes in the surf.

Our book is all serious and set in the future (post 2017) and recording a documentary about 'ghost ships' and the great modern mystery of ghost ships is the 2015 vanishing of the good ship Atargatis with all hands (plus a film crew, a slew of desperate/broke scientists, a team of "professional mermaid performers," and our Felicia Day stand-in internet blogging personality) in the waters above the Mariana Trench (the official name is singular - I had to go look it up).  Since we know from the start that something killed all of them, and because the book is billed as a horror on the back, I don't feel like I'm spoiling anything to say that they're all dead by the end.

However, it's the voyage that counts, and we get a lot of mileage from just a few pages as our colorful cast assert themselves and work themselves ever deeper into the mire.  What I found interesting is that save two particularly nasty pieces of work, every character is more or less sympathetic, from the worry-wart captain to the den-mother troupe-leader, even to our dynamic if not particularly bright duo of cameraman and blogger personality.  Unlike a lot of horror, you never really get the sense that this poor crew of people deserves it (again, save two specific exceptions), but at the same time, the novella is so short that the slight glimmers of personality don't do much to quench the heady satisfaction of a good blood-bath.  Grace-notes abound, from the unfortunate attempts at communication via ASL, to the sweet morbid scene between the elder-statesman scientist and the creeping death advancing on him, to the fine line between the natural curiosity and camera-ready smile of our personality.

Really quite fun, in the most creepy way.