Spoilers!
Bleak, deep despair. Seemingly bottomless. An unfathomable amount of pressure. Darkness. The bends. Grief is akin to the depths of the ocean and what it enacts as a price upon us — its aches bitingly familiar and unceasingly mysterious in equal measure. In Nick Cutter’s 2015 book, The Deep, this metaphor on grief is played out with an expected gnarly, grotesque vision and flourish.
The world appears on the verge of forgetting that it’s being forgotten. An Alzheimer’s-like disease popularly known as the ‘Gets is infecting the world; what makes it worse than Alzheimer’s is that its rapid and accompanied by pockmarks on the body until death. To save the world, the world’s governments unite to explore the depths of the ocean for a miracle cure, hunting for a nebulous substance referred to as “ambrosia,” aka the food of the gods, fittingly enough. Or ominously enough. This substance appears to cure cancers from a mouse. But they must go eight miles into the Pacific Ocean to find more of it. To put that into perspective, that’s more than a mile deeper than the Mariana Trench. Incredibly, in this unfathomably dark place, life finds a way, to quote a different creature book. There is even life that extends beyond the Mariana Trench. In reality, the ocean remains uncharted and mysterious to us, relatively speaking. There’s a good reason for that: water and its accompanying pressure makes it difficult for humans to survive at such depths, much less do any exploring and mapping. One nearly unobservable engineering flaw and well, instantaneous death will occur.
That’s what the characters in The Deep are dealing with: the perilous and mysterious. Clayton and Luke. Two brothers. Clayton is a sociopathic, misanthropic, and aloof genius. He’s the one, along with two other scientists, tasked with going down into the depths to recover more ambrosia. But Clayton is stubborn (or dumb, or misanthropic to that sociopathic degree, or all of the above) that he gets enamored and taken in, which is to say, tricked, by the substance. Luke is the opposite of Clayton, filled with love and tethers to the world of sunlight and good things. At least, he did have a wife and a child. The child mysteriously disappeared seven years prior and the wife divorced him. But still, he kept going. He kept trying. Both brothers also were abused, physically, emotionally, and sexually by their mother. Luke later learns Clayton killed her.
While down in the oceanic trenches, as it were, the surface scientists, military, and government stop hearing from Clayton and the other two scientists, who also have dogs, lizards, and bees with them. The latest recording from Clayton beckons Luke to come to him. The government, wanting to keep Clayton happy, complies, as does Luke, because why not at this point in his life? But it was all the things behind the ambrosia that brought Luke to the deep. In fact, they’ve been “gaming” Clayton and Luke’s lives from the moment they were born, up to and including kidnapping Luke’s boy. It’s two creatures, older than the sun, who were for reasons unknown banished to the depths of the ocean. So, now, they play games with our species dating back to da Vinci through to Tesla and now, Clayton and Luke. Testing us out in the hopes of being returned to the surface.
Cutter’s book in dream-like sequences throughout, memories, the absurd and grotesque, made the grief Luke’s experienced and indeed, is still experiencing, palpable, weighty, and like the waves of an ocean, unceasing. Love is why Luke’s brain takes longer to be broken by these creatures, but break it does. In fact, everyone sent to the depths — Clayton, the two other scientists, the dogs (the dogs!!), Alice, aka Al, the military bad-ass who brings everyone down to the deep, and Luke himself — is taken in by these creatures and killed. And then, Cutter, leaning even more into the bleakness of it all, reminds us that the surface life is still dealing with the ‘Gets and that what emerges from the depths of the ocean at the end of the book is “unspeakable.” Good times!
Seriously, though, Cutter’s books (I previously read 2014 book, The Troop) have a way of gnawing at your skin and burrowing its way in. He is insistent upon making you uncomfortable, and often more insidiously with a scalpel to your gray matter compared to a mallet. But I like to think he had something to say here, too, about the power and pull of grief to bottomless depths, and how sometimes, things and people, just end and that’s that. But we keep trying. Because what else is there?
Milam's Musings 