Look, I really love deep sea stuff. Especially creepy deep sea stuff. I *really* really loved Frank Schätzing's The Swarm, and I couldn't help but think about it every so often while listening to this audiobook.

Into the Drowning Deep didn't really give me the heebie-jeebies like I had hoped it would. Maybe because the foe of this book - killer mermaids - was too real, too physical, and too toothy and well-defined. It's not necessarily a bad thing, but it did dampen the whole horror-experience I had anticipates having. Atmospherically, the book is great nonetheless: the general uneasiness aboard the ship, mostly driven by distrust of fellow shipmates, and, in the beginning less so, the presence of blood-thirsty mermaids that prey on the scientists. The cast of characters is wonderfully diverse and presented in a sensible way: disabilities and chronic conditions aren't presented in a way where you know that they will be the cause of the character's death in a few chapters, which is very refreshing given the usual paths taken in this genre. The fact that we have a bi woman and an autistic lesbian taking in two of the major perspectives in this story? Chef's kiss. I didn't go into this book expecting diversity and representation, but this has definitely been one of the more diverse casts I have read in recent memory.

While I can rave about the characters and the setting itself for days on end, I had some issues with the book which stopped me from giving it a full five stars (though I might revise my rating in the next few weeks! Who knows.): the writing itself isn't as clean and polished as I would have liked it to be. Listening to the audiobook, it was clear that certain unusual phrases were repeated in sentences following each other, without obvious rhetorical intent. Some characters were, at their core, stereotypes, and did not always develop well into their existence as actual human characters. While Olivia, the nerdy host of the network, irked me at the beginning (it's hard to write believable nerdy characters without falling into carricature), the more we learned about her, the more she grew on me. The pair of poachers - French Canadian rambo and the Japanese-Australian daughter of whalers (urgh) - didn't quite attain the nuances they could have gotten.

Seeing as how this story takes place mainly above water, a lot of wonderful creepiness was lost out on (maybe I'm just spoiled by the cave extravaganza of The Luminous Dead!). I'd love to see Mira Grant write a sequel to this that remedies that.