Deeper by Jeff Long, 2007

Read in 2008

Synopsis: A decade has passed since doomed explorers unveiled a nightmare of tunnels and rivers honeycombing the earth's depths. After millennia of suffering terror and predation, humanity's armies descended to destroy the ancient hordes. Deep beneath the Pacific Ocean, a doomed science expedition killed the subterraneans' fabled leader, and suddenly it seemed that evil was dead and all was right with the world again.

Now Deeper arrives to explode that complacency and plunge us back into the sunless abyss. Hell boils up through America's subways and basements to take its revenge and steal our children. Against the backdrop of a looming war with China, a crusade of volunteers races to find the vestiges of a lost race. But a lone explorer, the linguist Ali von Schade, learns that a far greater menace lies in the unexplored heart of the planet. The real Satan can't be killed, and he has been waiting since the beginning of time to gain his freedom. Man and his pitiless enemies are mere pawns in the greatest escape ever devised.

The near decade between books shows. The Descent was much more Crichton-esque and a lot less mystical/supernatural than this one. I guess Long completely changed his perspective in those intervening years. What was a scientific thriller has morphed into a supernatural one. The mystical voices and vast cultural underpinnings created by The Old One are prominent and the evolutionary/anthropological aspects are pushed aside. The actual physical locale is more accepted and understood. People are actively colonizing the vast underworld. Some are legit, but most are refugees, criminals or misfits. Those who could not survive above ground are trying to carve out an acceptable existence under it. This results in a breach of above ground treaties and war is threatened. I found the ‘artifact’ reports to be jarring; disrupting the flow of an otherwise spiritual treatise. They didn’t belong without much more attention being paid to them. The interludes between a person (obviously Ike from the start, but only proven to be much later) and The Old One were indicative of this new perspective on the underworld.

Another area the supernatural and the natural collide is in the rapid acclimation of human beings to their new environment. Mutations and physical changes aside, these surface dwellers whose very biological clocks are tied to the sun and seasons are able to shed these dependencies and begin to live just as efficiently without sunlight or seasons. Senses of smell and hearing sharpen in the extreme as eyesight is eliminated. Long doesn’t explain this and I found the lack distracting. I want to know why we grow horns and are able to survive without vitamin D and a pure protein diet. It also puzzles me why some are more prone to mutation than others. Ali, for example, did not grow horns like some others did. Why? We aren’t told.

Probably because it’s the spiritual side that Long wants to talk about. The mystical connection Ike has with The Old One who calls him back into the deep. He claims, and we believe, that he is older than old. Has been around since the planet was cooling and supported no life. Witnessed the first bacteria and sung with delight upon receiving their dull ‘messages’. His influence created our very ideas about humanity, morality, right and wrong and all manner of religious beliefs. He basically chose and directed our evolution by experimentation and a lot of trial and error. He set us up, mowed us down and used us for his own amusement. When the hadals as Homo erectus isolated themselves from us and we diverged, he created the codependency under which they live. But yet he is trapped. He cannot rise above the surface of the earth unless released by some magic word.

What?! I’m sorry. This all-powerful being and creator of man is suddenly trapped? Give me a break. He brags to Ike and Ali about his various roles in the guise of a human and how from these positions of greatness he either changed things for the better or the worse depending on his latest whim. How come he can’t do that now? It makes no sense.

The Rebecca character I found annoying in the extreme. Her constant bleating about the children was enough to make me want to smack her. The arrogance with which she gathered her ‘army’ and her willful blindness to their true motivation was hilarious. It made her unlikeable and unrelatable. Maybe that’s what Long was going for, but I doubt it. I think he wanted a martyr to replace Ike in our sympathies. People always try to use children in this capacity; as a lever to our nobler emotions. Ha! When Rebecca’s ‘army’ deserted her and the realities of the underworld hit her, it was kind of funny to watch her stunned reaction. Still she deceived herself into thinking she could succeed. As she realized the extent of change Sam had endured, even then she couldn’t let go of her rescue. Rehabilitation was still possible, but only in her delusions. She was amusing, but only in the idea that I wanted her to fail. I wanted her illusions to crack and for her to suffer.

Ali’s shift from the purely scientific and anthropological to the spiritual is another that Long pursues. Her fall from grace in the surface world comes at the hands of a fearful mob who mistakes a scientist with underworld mutations for an escaped hadal. She’s always been accused of defending them and is now under attack. They burn her institute to the ground and she flees and decides to head back underground, there being no place for her in the sun any longer. Originally on an anthropological trail of symbols, signs and ancient cities, she soon catches the attention of The Old One who abandons Ike for Ali as the key to his release.

I didn’t find this one as gripping as the first one which I recall devouring in a couple of days. It just didn’t gel as well and had too many unanswered questions and unsupported assertions. It ends just as cliff-hangery as the first one, but I hope we don’t have to wait another 10 years for the next installment. I think that Long will change too much of the story to fit his own mood for it to make a smooth trilogy. Right now it is not smooth and does not hang together well as an elongated story arc. If he’d kept along the scientific approach or made the first novel more mystical, it would work better.