Into the Drowning Deep

It’s rare for a book to show its fangs before it even starts. But Mira Grant manages that with Into the Drowning Deep, in the Dedication Page of all places, where she simply writes, “For Mike and Marnie. Stay away from the water.” It’s a chilling warning and a statement of intent: this horror novel is basically a thalassophobic’s worst nightmare in literary form, leveraging the fear of the deep water – and all the eldritch unknowns it holds – to craft an exciting and tense narrative about… mermaids.

But make no mistake, there’s no Ariel to be found here, no sweet princess hopeless in search of love. These mermaids would scare the living shit out of Ursula herself, as the opening chapters, depicting scenes of an attack on the Mariana Trench, soon reveal. A production company, Imagine, had “filled a ship with scientists, actors, and camera crews, and sent it out into the Pacific Ocean” to shoot a documentary, MythBusters style, called Lovely Ladies of the Sea: The True Story of the Mariana Mermaids. As you can expect, well-versed in horror stories as you are, these people got more than they bargained for: after communications were lost, “the ship was found six weeks later, adrift and abandoned.” One of the victims was Victoria’s sister (she’s “Vicky to her parents, Vic to her friends, Tory to herself”), who appears on camera in a leaked video, recording the last moments of those in that damned ship.

The narrator calls the main character Tory, in a clear sign of favoring her point of view, and tells us of her connection to the sea, of how deeply (sorry…) personal it is: “According to her parents, her first smile had been directed not at her mother, but at the Pacific Ocean. She had learned to swim in safe municipal pools by the age of eighteen months, and been in the ocean— closely supervised— by the time she was three, reveling in the taste of salt water on her lips and the sting of the sea spray in her eyes.” Tory grew up to become a marine biologist specialized in sonars, dedicating her whole life to explore the ocean’s waters and uncover it many mysteries (currently, more than 80% of the ocean remains unmapped and unobserved by us puny humans, after all).

If you’re much like Bob, the cynic, you could read the aforementioned passage and find it corny, complaining that Tory’s backstory is too romantic, too on the nose for a main character in a book about the sea. But here’s the thing: that passage is immediately followed by this one, which is the thematic key to the whole narrative: “She’d been grabbed by a riptide when she was seven, yanked away from her parents and pushed twenty yards from shore in the time it took to blink. She didn’t remember the incident when she was awake, but it surfaced often in her dreams: the suddenly hostile water reaching up to grab her and drag her down.” In other words, her quixotic backstory doesn’t matter, for the sea doesn’t care if you feel a connection to it or not; it’s indifferent to your struggles, to your life, to your personality. You’re insignificant before the sea, and you’re powerless, and it will swallow you whole if you give it just the pithiest of chances. It swallowed Tory’s sister whole. She doesn’t even have a body to bury.

Tory’s backstory is not romantic; it’s a warning. And one she doesn’t heed when Imagine comes to her with a fateful invitation: to visit the Mariana Trench with them and discover firsthand what happened to her sister. You see, people didn’t believe that leaked video, discarding it as a heavily edited and elaborate hoax, a marketing ploy by Imagine. Mostly, just one kind of people believed it: “Mermaids are real. —Taken from a forum post made at CryptidChase.net by user BioNerd, originally posted March 2020.” But Tory knows better, and Imagine does as well. The first expedition was intended to prove that mermaids were a myth, the subjects of children’s fairy tales. They didn’t expect to find anything, so they didn’t leave prepared for anything. Now, however, they have a ship that can drop a shield at any time to protect itself from outside invaders, they have plenty of automatic guns, they have soldiers to fire them, and even a couple of sadistic hunters onboard, for good measure: “Jacques had actually salivated at the thought of killing something out of myth, and the sex they’d had the night they signed their contracts had been incredible. This trip was going to be good for them.” And now Imagine has Tory, too.

There’s an unmistakable “Jurassic Park with mermaids” feel to the overall plot. Greedy corporate people are trying to build entertainment around creatures that shouldn’t exist and are extremely dangerous, and things obviously don’t end well for them. Then they try it again, because the second time is the charm. So, when the handsome Theodore Blackwell visits Tory uninvited to offer his proposal, for example, we can almost see the character of John Hammond there – if he were played by Glenn Powell, that is.

Imagine sells to Tory the idea that this time they’re more than well-prepared to tackle the horrors of the deep, having hired scientists and soldiers of every kind. They’re going to tame nature and make a fortune out of it. But we can easily see the cracks in their plan. We see the ship’s safety shutters failing to come down during tests, we see that the guards were chosen more because of their looks than their skills – Imagine intends to shoot a movie after all. When the captain of their ship, the Melusine, makes his first announcement, he reveals… there’s gluten-free food for anyone intolerant, acting as if he were commanding a luxury cruise ship instead of a battleship, clearly doubting he’ll ever come across any danger in the Mariana Trench. Besides the usual kind, of course:

“Ships sank in storms. The seas of the world were a vast and interconnected graveyard, every inch riddled with bones and haunted by the ghosts of the lost. Every mile of every ocean could be marked as the site of some ‘surprising’ or ‘unexpected’ death; humanity sailed, and the sea punished it for its hubris.”

Our main point of view is that of a scientist, which means most descriptions of the ocean are quite technical instead of lyrical, but even they can feel ominous at times: “Air was too thin, compared to water, to really carry sound. There was no such thing as silence in the sea.” There’s a promise of danger here, a hint that the mermaids know these people are coming, that they’re always listening, always ready, that they were always there.

Into the Drowning Deep has a brief, whimsical section where we follow the point of view of three dolphins swimming toward their doom, toward the alluring light at the deep, and we learn that they share a history with the monsters:

“Humans could say yes and no and ask for a fish. They could not discuss philosophy, the finer points of religion, the ideas of things that could only be done in dreams. Humans were solid, gravity-bound creatures, with minds suited for solid, gravity-bound things. They could build a ship. They could not write a poem. And they could not have understood what Kearney’s parents, who had been taken wild, were talking about when they expressed, again and again, their gratitude to their captors, who had swept them away from the open sea during a time of great slaughter.”

The dolphins are on a reconnaissance mission, but while they’re fully aware of the danger – being very well acquainted with its horrors –, they believe they can still do it, they believe they can fend for themselves and get away with it. They’re dolphins; they’re smart, they’re agile, they can compose poems: they’re not food. The parallel to the Melusine couldn’t be clearer, then: its many reporters, scientists, and soldiers believe themselves to be superior, too. They have the firepower, the technology. What they all fail to realize is that while they’re in the Mariana Trench, they are just… prey. So, the narrator starts to frame them with appropriate terms, reducing these human characters to their biological class, saying, for example, that two people once “laughed and grunted and made all the other sounds that came with being mammals.”

Because when the mermaids come, with their “writhing mass of glittering, filament-thin strands that cast their bioluminescent light,” their repulsive lower body in the shape of “the muscular curl of an eel’s tail,” and their hostile “mouth brimming with needled teeth,” there’s no philosophical questions anymore, no tantalizing mysteries to solve, no science to be done. There is just nature at its most brutal: helpless prey being taken by their ancient, long-forgotten predators.

The horror arises mostly from this. We’re scared when the mermaids appear, not because they’re ugly and violent – which they most definitely are – but because they represent how uncaring and merciless nature can be. If you leave a baby bleeding in the water, a shark will not show pity. These mermaids are a symbol of this system beyond morality, outside the boundaries of civilized society. We think our technology will shield us, when in truth our house of bricks can also be blown away by the wolf:

“Daryl was inexperienced compared to Gregory, and more, he was letting his nerves get the better of him; he was seeing danger in every corner, and allowing it to blind him to the danger that was actually lurking. He would have seen the smooth sweep of the hull, the fruit of human labor and innovation, intended to protect them from the dangerous waters. He would have seen how high up he was, and how far the mermaids would need to climb, and felt this rendered him safe, somehow. Protected, sheltered, like a small fish choosing to believe the coral reef can offer genuine protection from the jaws of the eel, the arms of the octopus.”

But these mermaids also function as the embodiment of the unknown. This is why their anatomy defies science here, puzzling Melusine’s scientists, who can’t decide how to classify them (as fish, as mammals, as reptiles? Nothing really accommodates their physical traits) And this is why the people on the ship will die in unpredictable ways, not always directly attacked by the creatures: sometimes by interacting with other living organisms of the mermaids’ ecosystem, which are tiny but strange, sometimes by interacting with the mermaids’ own blood, which results in the goriest descriptions in the entire novel. These mermaids are a living, deadly reminder that we don’t know everything, that we barely understand how the universe works.

So, when hell starts to break loose, it’s fascinating to keep track of how they all react in the Melusine. Some scientists can’t hide their enthusiasm – a new species has been found, and they get to see it in action! – while their peers are being slaughtered and eaten. The hunters are sexually excited to find a worthy opponent, not realizing the tables have actually turned. Some people are in denial, however, refusing to accept that there are still monsters hidden in the world, that they’re not at the top of the food chain anymore. The captain finally wakes up and moves on to more pressing matters than gluten-free food, but unfortunately, discovers the same thing we have during Covid time; that “orders have never changed human nature, and it was inevitable that some people would think the warnings were just hyperbole.”

In the middle of all this chaos, we have poor Tory, totally out of her depth (you know what, I’m not sorry), to the point where her quest to avenge her sister quickly evolves to just trying to survive. There can be no proper vengeance here, because it would mean a triumph of man over nature: the best Tory can do is leave with her life and maybe even spend it with Olivia, the fiery, beautiful reporter she met in the Melusine.

If the novel suffers from something, is that it’s very formulaic when it comes to dispatching its characters. If you’ve ever seen a horror movie in your life, you’ll be able to easily spot who the red shirts are in the Melusine and who has plot armor. Sometimes, you’ll even know you’re about to read a death scene from its very first lines, such as when we are suddenly thrown into the point of view of a very minor character just to find out he’s a total douchebag. A bit of surprises here could have kept things more interesting.

But Into the Drowning Deep is still a great horror novel that successfully reframes mermaids as creatures out of a nightmare. After all, the reason we haven’t explored more of the ocean yet, the novel seems to argue, is that it constantly reminds us of our powerlessness. It doesn’t care for our money and status. So, we probably won’t like what we’ll find.

July 31, 2025.