Customer Reviews

Deeper

5 star:		(8)
4 star:		(8)
3 star:		(5)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(5)

 

 

Deeper is one of those rare books that just grabs your attention and doesn't let go until you see The End on the last page. I loved this book! It reminds me of Creature From the Black Lagoon mixed in with H.P. Lovecraft and Moore's own thrills, all wrapped together in a neat bundle of excellent storytelling that made this title stand out on the bookshelf. I'll make this easy for you. If you want to read a great book with lots of action, great plots, and adventure, pick this one up. Deeper won't disappoint you; it'll only drag you under.

This is the first thing that I've read by Moore since his execrable young adult novel "Newbies" was published some years ago, so I was leery about reading it, but it was recommended to me by an employee of Borders (Hi Walter!), and since I am a fan of monster novels, I decided to give Moore another chance. So, I bought and read this Lovecraftian horror sea novel, and I'm glad that I did, as reading it was a most enjoyable experience.

Captain Joe Bierden owns and runs a couple of pleasure crafts in Bowden's Point, and the boating and tourist season is running down when he gets a lucrative offer from an academic (Martin Ward), his chief student (Diana), and a pair of parapsychologists/writers (Jonah and Mary Parsons) to go out on an expedition to explore some caves. It's only after he's made the deal that he finds out that his client's expedition is to Golden Cove, a seaside village that has a golden veneer to it, but also has an ill reputation among the other local villages. You know things are going to go very badly sometime in the novel when you find out that there is going to be an expedition to dive in the coves of a local village that is built on the burnt out ruins of what used to be Innsmouth after it was destroyed (in "The Shadow Over Innsmouth" by H. P. Lovecraft).

To handle the students and adults that will be on the diving trip, Bierden (re)hires Charlie Moncrief, Tom Summers, and Tom's friend, Davey Walker, friends, regular employees, and hardened seamen. Problems seem to start soon after the initial dives commence. Thick mysterious fogs start moving in during the night, a ghost ship is sighted, a ghost girl is "rescued" from the sea, only to disappear, the size of the underground caves seems to fluxuate, divers are attacked by "something", and it turns out that this is the SECOND expedition, there being only two survivors of the original, information that had been kept from Bierden. Things go from bad to worse, as during a storm Bierden's ship is swept out to sea, and one of his crew mysteriously disappears during the fury. Pay attention, Moore tells you of the lost crewman's fate by how the gulls act. Then things start to get really bad. And yes, there will be Deep Ones.

Moore does a great job in creating Bierden, a no-nonsense, down-to-earth type, and a man who doesn't believe in the supernatural, but doesn't disbelieve what he sees with his own eyes either. And he will see a lot.

Publishers surprise us sometimes, and Berkley certainly did with this non-Stephen King oriented, old-fashioned weird-adventure sea pulp tale. "Deeper" is a Lovecratian fan-fiction horror story as channeled through August Dereleth, and with its generic title, something like this would normally would have appeared from Leisure Books. While not really rare, good sea horror is still a rather uncommon thing to come across. The best ones seemed to start with Edgar Allan Poe's "The Narrative Of Arthur Gordon Pym Of Nantucket" continued with "The Boats Of The `Glen Carrig'" and "The Ghost Pirates" by William Hope Hodgson. There was a drought until Dennis Wheatley's "Uncharted Seas" and then a stretch until Tim Curran's "Dead Sea" or Matthew Sprange's "Death Hulk" amongst a couple of others. On the other hand there have been many more weird horror sea movies made than weird sea tales written. While "Deeper" may not be a classic, that will take time to determine, this is certainly up there with the rest of them in entertainment value, and the reader won't need a dictionary well versed in sea jargon to read it. And just like an old pulp serial, just when you think that the story should be ending, Moore pulls another rabbit out of his hat and ups the ante.

Moore redeems his past novel "Newbies" with this corker of a sea horror tale, as mixes in ghosts, horror, suspense, monsters, Lovecraft, and adventure. At times this novel is slow and moody, and at times, it is a fast-paced two-fisted action tale, and it is all of these things at the right time as needed. The trouble with some readers is that the Lovecraftian elements will not be fully enough explained for some of them, but Moore had to make a choice, give a lot of redundant details that would have bored anybody who has read Lovecraft or gloss over them and maybe confuse the novel's general readers. It's a thin line to tread, and Moore does well here, and if you don't treat Lovecraft as a creator of a biblical text, you will probably like this novel. As it is, "Deeper" hits all of the right buttons for me, and it starts off well, and the story builds to a fitting bang.

As the New England seafaring season is almost over, the professor Dr. Martin Ward come to Bowden's Point to hire Captain Joe Bierden to take him and his three associates to Devil's Reef near the town of Golden Cove so they can explore an underwater cave. Although he, his wife Belle and his best friend and first mate Charlie Moncrief want to refuse the offer, the money is too good to say no.

On his biggest yacht Isabella's Dream, Joe, Charlie and a couple of local teens take the customers for their month long exploration. The crew is shocked by the hostility of the townsfolk. As the professor, his athletic assistant Diana and a TV famous parapsychologist along with Jacob and Mary Parsons explore Devil's Reef seeking evidence of a city Innsmouth rumored to be destroyed by the Feds, ghost ships and Deep Ones oceanic humanoids attack the crew and clients.

This is an excellent horror thriller due to a fully developed cast (human and paranormal) who seem genuine so that when the impossible occurs, James A. Moore makes it feels possible. Filled with action and suspense, DEEPER hooks readers into a one sitting tale as fans will wonder who will be left swimming in the ever increasingly darker and sinister aptly titled Golden Cove.

Harriet Klausner

Deeper sounded like just my kind of horror story. A captain is hired at the end of the season to take a professor and his students on a thirty day trip to explore some underwater caves. Deeper is James A. Moore's sequel to H.P. Lovecraft's The Shadow Over Innsmouth. Surely that's a goldmine for a horror story.

Unfortunately, the author just doesn't do much with it. He constantly tells what is happening, but he never shows what is happening. As a result, the book never seemed to connect with me.

The book is narrated by a New England sea captain, yet he was never given a distinctive voice. There were no 'little details' or real nautical slang that would have shown me that the author did his homework and would have made the captain a believable character. An entire novel where the captain never says 'port', 'starboard', 'berth' or 'head'? He never sounded like a captain or for that matter, even a New Englander. All of the characters really were pretty flat, two dimensional and interchangeable.

The biggest sin of the book though is that it just isn't scary. If Mr. Moore is going to write a Lovecraft inspired story he should also learn to carry off some Lovecraft-style cosmic dread. Nobody in this story seemed to understand that they were in a horror story. At one point, the crew have an encounter with a fish-man. Yet nobody seemed to be particularly freaked out by it. There was none of the awe and wonder that you would expect at the discovery of another sentient humanoid race. No fear, terror or looming madness. Nothing.

At 270 pages, this was a fairly short book, but I felt no connection to the characters or any spark to the events of the story. For such a short book, it really felt like a slog. Ultimately the biggest problem with Deeper is that it just lacked depth.

A great "vacation read" and I actually began to care about a character or two. To be honest, I actually got a little sad at one point when something "bad" happened to one of these characters. The 1st person perspective was very interesting and kept the book very informal but, at times, very witty. I wish Moore didn't blend the two genres ((((SLIGHT SPOILER)))) of possible etherial elements and possible unknown entities. I tried to be vague there on purpose. The ending was pretty much a rip off of one of the Lord of the Rings endings. That was the biggest let down for me because I was truly interested on how a certain situation was going to be "realistically" resolved. The resolution was just a bit to easy.

All that being said, I enjoyed the easy read and fast paced story line. Moore has a way to go to REALLY distinguish himself (that may be a bit harsh) in this albeit saturated fiction niche but I will probably read more of his books.

Don't waste your time with this book. It reads like a bad comic book. It was poorly written. Characters were unremarkable. The story made no sense. For a group of graduate students, the divers searching the reef weren't too bright. Who would keep going back into the water after people kept getting attacked, killed and/or dissappear.

I was very disappointed in this book. Looking forward to a scary, creepy underwater fiasco, it never happened. The thing about the book that annoyed me the most was it being written in first person. It got so annoying the way the main character "talks" to the reader that I found myself trying to get through the book as fast as I could just so I could say I finished it. Paid to much money for this book and probably will not purchase any more books from this author.
This story could have gone off the charts with sheer terror if it had been written differently, no first person, more blood and gore, scarier situations!!

First of all I want to say that I really enjoyed the first 80% of this book minus that very tacked-on feeling ghost sub-plot. I knew it was going to be a Lovecraft pastiche from the get go, and I ended up feeling like it was a decent one initially. The tension builds slowly throughout the story and I really grew to like the main character.

In the last 4-5 chapters it's like a completely different author takes over. New characters that weren't even hinted at in the rest of the story appear but don't really add anything to the story. The dialog between characters becomes totally ridiculous and the climactic finale takes on about as much complexity as the average Saturday morning cartoon. What makes it worse is that toward the end of the book the writing (in addition to the story) takes a downward turn as well. The main character/narrator starts beginning what seems like every other paragraph with a hypothetical question to the reader (Have you ever. . . . What would you do if. . . .) and it gets really tiring. I pressed on to see if the book could salvage itself, but it was work at that point. It's sad because I read everything until then in one sitting because I was really enjoying myself. Maybe the author had a deadline and needed a final page-count because some of it just felt like filler.

It seems clear to me that this author wrote a story that he had no idea how to end. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if all of the tacked on ghost stuff was retroactively edited in just so it could be the cheap plot device at the end of the story that it was.

I can't recommend this book at all, which is too bad because it started out with a lot of promise.

I was really hoping to like this book but it just fell flat. I never got any connection to any characters and any attempt by the author just seemed overly forced. An example of this is the main character (written in first person) tells you in two different paragraphs how much he loves his wife but never really shows it when she is around.

Every that happens in this book is also so nonchalant. Yeah two people have been bitten and maimed on separate dives but they never think or talk about not going in the water and just continue on like it was no big deal. Hey we've seen some ghost but no biggie. And when all the weird stuff happens and the crap hits the fan the characters never react in a realistic way and they just seem to go about their regular business. There is also a weird ghost sub-plot that did not need to be in the book at all.

Another little thing that bothered me was at the beginning of the book the author thanked someone for their input on deep sea diving and said how much it helped the book but the book only takes place under water for about 5 pages if that.

For a book named Deeper this book just wasn't deep enough for me to really get into it.

I downloaded this book for Kindle for what I felt would be a quick escape read. About halfway through, I wanted to escape so I read the rest quickly.

In the beginning, I found the first-person narrative of the main character, Joe Bierden, very easy to read, and it was an effective way to bring him to life as the likable captain of a charter boat business. Captain Joe was approached by a college professor and a couple of parapsychologists and asked to hire his boat out for a month to explore underwater caves around Golden Cove and Devil's Reef, areas with a history of sunken ships, devil worship, and massacres. Although reluctant to dock in the area, Captain Joe was seduced by the money in the visitor-slack, off season of New England tourism.

When one of the professor's student divers comes to the surface with a bloody leg and says something grabbed his leg and pulled him down, one gets the idea that there's a creature in the works (not to mention the cover of the book). For the next few chapters, ghost sightings, stories of past diving experiences, thrumming sounds, heavy fogs, and the glimpse of a man-like creature with claws and flipper feet set up enough foreboding for me to avoid reading the book at night. However, when the creature finally emerged to full view as a cross between duck-billed platypus, walrus, and human, the book's suspense flopped. For the rest of the book, the creatures were described as fish men, and that was about the level of believability that was left in the book. There was even a ghost ship battle, a la Pirates of the Caribbean.

I paid $6.39 for this on Kindle. At least I don't have to recycle it. It might have been good for a beach read. Maybe I could have imagined Jaws while reading it.