Customer Reviews

Deeper: A Novel

5 star:		(19)
4 star:		(10)
3 star:		(15)
2 star:		(7)
1 star:		(7)

 

 

Jeff Long is an interesting writer. From what I understand from his bios, cadged from the back of books, he is an adventurer who likes to write about adventure. His heroes are manly men, who scale mountains, transverse canyons, explore depths. When he writes science fiction, its pretty good.

For example, Year Zero was a great book about the release of a pathogen from a holy relic. It was a vial of blood that contained a virus that hadn't been seen for 2000 years and for which we no longer have any antigens. So, they start cloning people from those holy relics, looking for someone who successfully survived the original virus to fashion a cure. Of course, that means they're cloning saints and (maybe) Jesus. Good stuff.

There were some other books in there, The Reckoning, The Wall, The Ascent, none of which I thought were amazing like Year Zero and The Descent.

Descent posited the notion that the Earth is full of tunnels, caves, depths inhabited by 'primitives.' It is Hell and its apparently ruled over by Satan ('Older Than Old') and a war stirs between the surface and the depths. Sure enough, it sings. Strong stuff, a great thriller. Before you know it, its over and you're missing it.

Now, Deeper comes along, a direct sequel to The Descent starring many of the same characters and plunging deeper (naturally) into the depths and history of the underground.

First, this is not as good as The Descent. I won't spoil it, but the scientific basis proposed in the first book is abandonned in the second. There is a Satan and he IS 'Older Than Old' and he's just kidnapped a whole mess of children from the surface. The novel is about finding them, bringing them back up atop.

There's a lot of internal dialogue going on and, as it turns out, the depths are haunted by the dead. Ali, a nun with a talent for language and trouble in the first book, is now agnostic carrying around the ghost of a dead daughter. There's another mother who's daughter is among those below, Ike from the first book who has changed unbelievably (unforgiveably), a military sniper and a film producer. All these characters are a bit confusing and each of their stories interlock, intersect, depart from each other.

To say its not as good as the first book isn't a terrible review. There aren't a lot of books out there as good as the first one. This is a good thriller and I hope Long returns to the underground again so I can actually figure out what happened at the end.

Jeff Long is a terrific writer, and I have enjoyed several of his novels.

After reading THE DESCENT and telling everyone it was the best book I'd read in years, I was thrilled to discover this so-called sequel. After just finishing DEEPER, I am not only disappointed but almost....mad! This book was obviously whipped out as the much-anticipated sequel, but if you've read THE DESCENT, this is more like a long, drawn-out short story.........or even a lost chapter from the original story. It goes on and on and........usually inside the characters' heads. ("Hush, baby...." over and over.) Occasionally, there was some quick, gratuitous gore. (Please.....not the little kids......!) Long's "Satan?" (the really, really bad guy) was the most interesting character, though even he seemed to struggle with his purpose in the story.

If you loved THE DESCENT, don't bother with DEEPER. If you have read neither, put THE DESCENT at the top of your must-read list!

DEEPER by Jeff Long is the sequel to 1999's THE DESCENT. Notwithstanding its heartstopping conclusion, THE DESCENT did not scream for a follow-up, and given the interval between the publication of the two books, there may be a bit of confusion. 2006 marked the unfortunate release of an arguably wretched film titled The Descent, which was not based on Long's novel, even though it bore some plot similarities. The bottom line is that you may want to read THE DESCENT before getting DEEPER, if you will, into Long's netherworld model for hell on earth.

THE DESCENT concerned the discovery of a civilization beneath the earth's crust that had provided the basis for Hell, with a real Satan as well as lesser demons known as hadels. It concluded with an invasion of that underworld by surface dwellers and the apparent eradication of all who lived beneath. The world in DEEPER is somewhat different. The subplanet, as the area below the crust is called, is being colonized, mined and generally exploited for all it is worth. China and the United States are the main players in a spitting contest for subplanet territory. The hadels, apparently surviving the Holocaust, return the favor, invading the U.S. and kidnapping children. An official rescue mission might seem in order, but surface tensions between the U.S. and China mitigate against it.

Two very different unsanctioned missions commence. One is led by the mother of one of the kidnapped children, a populist crusade peopled by a disparate group of mercenaries, would-be tough guys and ringer Armed Forces veterans. The other is a party of two, consisting of linguist Ali von Schade and her student and erstwhile companion. Von Schade, whose own child is dead, has lost her lover to the subplanet, and has nothing to lose by going below and trying to persuade the hadels to release the children by peaceful means. What no one realizes is that Satan, believed to have been killed in THE DESCENT, is in fact very much alive and manipulating events in an attempt to effectuate his own release from the subplanet.

Even if DEEPER doesn't provide the same rush as its predecessor, it certainly is no slouch. Long has had nearly 10 years and the benefit of a visit to Bosnia to think up new horrors, and he does so with the horrific imagination of a contemporary Bosch. He gets bogged down occasionally when he attempts to make DEEPER a parable critical of contemporary U.S. foreign policy, but it's been overdone and overwrought in the thriller genre to the point where the kvetching is unfortunately tiresome at best and tedious at worst.

Long truly shines, however, when he slowly and steadily sets up Satan's machinations, and saves the ultimate horror for last, letting it settle quietly and with great subtlety. Let us hope that we don't have to wait another decade for the third volume of what is now described as a trilogy.

--- Reviewed by Joe Hartlaub

Like most of the reviewers "The Descent" is one of my favorite books. Jeff Long can write about human struggle and suffering better than anyone. Unfortunately he seems to think he is some kind of a guru taking a spiritual quest in print. Rather than focus on the story and conflicts he uses this book and his previous book "The Wall" to go on metaphysical rambles and moral sermonizing. This seems to take the form of a mix of Eastern and Western religious ideas and whatever he comes up with on his own. It makes for a confusing mix that detracts from what could be a potentially good story.
In this book Long takes a good 1/4 to 1/3 of the book to even set up the premise of a group of children being kidnapped and taken below by the hadals. The rest of it is a confused mess of the rescue operation intercut with the spiritual quests of Ike and Ali from "The Descent". These two characters never see each other again after the first couple of pages and that is too bad since the dynamic they had in the first book was a lot of what made it interesting.
A lot of what is done in this book undoes "The Descent" with back-tracking on story lines that are shown in this book to be false. Also the hadals are basically a footnote in this book and are treated dismissively.
Long has said this will be a trilogy. Hopefully he can undo some of the damage in the 3rd book that he did in this one, but I am not hopeful

I thoroughly enjoyed "Deeper" from the moment I picked it up until the unsettling conclusion. Unlike other reviewers, I was satisfied with the direction it took to go deeper into the supernatural. There was no "cheat" in incorporating this element and it made the first book even stronger when this notion is added in retrospect. Knowing now that the series is a trilogy I can't wait to see how it ends, especially given the events in the final pages. For anyone that enjoyed the first book and want to go even further into the metaphysical aspects of a very real Hell beneath our feet I highly recommend "Deeper".

I've been surprised at the mixed reaction to this novel. Perhaps some people expected "The Descent...Continued", and "Deeper" is not that book. I won't provide a synopsis of the novel, but I will say that there is enough of "The Descent" in it that I literally had trouble putting it down each night before going to sleep. In my view, Jeff Long's writing skills have grown since "The Descent". Some of the descriptive passages are jaw-dropping. I found myself re-reading some passages simply to re-experience the vivid images the author had painted in my mind. If you enjoyed "The Descent", I highly recommend this novel. If you set aside your preconceptions and let the book stand on its own, I think you will really enjoy the experience.

I was blown away by The Descent. I was surprised to see a sequel out; I thought The Descent had ended at an excellent place, but I was happy to reenter The Descent's creepy, dark, gory world. Talk about disappointing. It felt like an entirely different person wrote the second novel. My problems with the novel:

1.) The claustrophobic blackness that Long so successfully cultivates in The Descent is gone. I don't feel the scenery because he doesn't describe it. I don't feel creeped out just by the description of a narrowing passageway or complete and utter blackness.
2.) Satan. Satan alone is a huge issue; his little passages are cutsey and are there to take up space. There is absolutely no logic behind the character either; it doesn't mesh with the Satan we left at the end of The Descent. He's also very over-stressed and given too much significance. His "revelations" don't feel like an 'ah ha!' but far more like a 'get on with it'.
3.) Long tries way too hard to humanize the hadals. I thought he did a good balancing act in the first novel to present savagery mixed with spirituality, but he went overboard in this round.
4.) The characters are all unlikeable. I loved all the characters (protagonists or antagonists) in the first novel. All the characters I loved before are inexplicably different (i.e. no development to speak of), and all the new characters are irritating.
5.) The entire novel felt rushed, as if the details weren't just skimmed out but skipped entirely. I had a lot of issues of the sociology of the hadals in the first novel compared to the second novel. As a group, they behave far differently than they were set up to behave. There were a lot of similar problems.
6.) The government news clips. Boring. Absolutely boring. Instead of the first novel's interesting one-shots thrown in, we get to read a government report every few pages.
7.) Long did a great job *not* explaining things in The Descent. It was real; we don't know much about strange phenomenon, ancient history, etc. Why should we get full, logical explanations in a novel about things that are shrouded in mystery? Well, you get all the explanations you want in Deeper--to the point that it gets tedious.

I have to admit, many of my problems with Deeper spring from my expectations from The Descent. That means that Long did an excellent job on the first in the very least. Deeper was entertaining and would probably have been a fun read had I not compared it to The Descent. For that, I give it 2 stars.

All in all, Deeper has the feel of being here only to serve as a stepping stone for a third novel. If a third Descent book comes out, do hope it's on par with The Descent. If not, Long would have done so much better just to leave The Descent as a great stand-alone.

I am amazed by the bad reviews of this book. I found the title to this sequel of "The Descent" to be just that..."Deeper." This is a mind blowing book from one page to the next. I found it very thought provoking and deep. You really have to pay attention to what is going on in the story however I never "got lost" or "confused" reading it. Jeff Long does an outstanding job of describing the horrible and dark world below. The characters are very believable in that they stayed to the story line from Jeff's first book in the series "The Descent."
I am not going to say this book is not as good as "The Descent" because it is just that a sequel. Highly recommend!!

Jeff Long is a fantastic writer, no doubt about it, but I felt like he must have been having drug-induced hallucinations while writing "Deeper." It was seriously weird, and that's saying a lot for someone who loved "Descent." There were flashes of his brillance, but they were overshadowed by a wandering plot and ceaseless gore. Many of the interesting aspects of the first book, such as the transmigrating souls, were not even mentioned here. The character who opened his eyes at the end of "Descent" was dismissed with a single sentence - and that didn't come until almost the very end of the "Deeper." "Descent" is a favorite book of mine, and "Deeper" ruined it.

There are many writers around who can pump out entertaining thrillers that twist and turn their plotlines through our known world. However, Jeff Long is one of just a handful of today's writers who can create a believable world; and then send us hurtling down through its twists and creatively seductive spirals, with us loving the descent of the tale while, at the same time, we find our minds grappling with echoes of mythological beliefs that have haunted our subconscious minds since the beginning of time. We love the descent and we love that it takes our minds deeper. This is fiction writing at its best! Thrills, chills, human emotions, and people just like us willing to go into the ultimate darkness where even one's soul cannot find the light, and take on Satan himself. It doesn't get any better than this, and the good news is that it looks like there's more to come. I can't wait! And, no, Jeff and I are not related. I'm just a fan who happens to have the same last name. Now order The Descent and Deeper. Yes, both of them. If you don't usually order two books at once, just tell yourself the Devil made you do it.