It’s been a while since I’ve read something so disturbing and I read a lot of disturbing stuff. Like: HAUNTED – CHUCK PALAHNIUK or Clive Barker’s Books of Blood or even some Stephen King stories. And the only reason I’ve avoided it so far it’s because I thought it would be another story about a Leviathan. The Abyss but in Book Format.

The story is pretty straightforward. Scientists discover a substance underwater which has the markings of a super healer.

“It’s resistant to categorization,” said Felz. “Every standard test—DNA cataloguing, cellular identity, chemical pattern bonding . . . all inconclusive. No matches to any known flora, fauna, DNA structures, or chemical compounds. It’s . . . well, like I said, uncategorizable.”

And since the world is now plagued with a new disease called The ‘Gets which is like Alzheimer’s on steroids – they need a cure and fast. So all the big nations get together and create a research lab 6 miles under the surface – right where they found the first few samples of “ambrosia” as they call it. In the Mariana Trench.

THERE IS A SPECIFIC DEPTH you’ll hit where the soul finds it impossible to harmonize with its surroundings.
It’s not the darkness. A man is acquainted with it by then—as acquainted as he can ever be. It’s not the vast silence or the emptiness or the absence of any life-forms he can draw warmth or certainty from.
It’s not the pressure. It’s not even the fear of death that constantly nibbles at the edge of his mind.
It’s the sense of unreality. This out-of-body feeling that you’ve stepped away from the path your species has always tread. Things become dreamlike, inessential. Your mind, seeking solace in the familiar, retreats to those things you understand, but those things become so much harder to grasp.

The intrigue is triggered by a beckoning message of one of the scientists on board asking for their brother to come and then comms going dark. So we get the brother – Lucas – who is a shell of a man, descending to the deep with Alice – a military lt who is both pretty and strong. She’s been to the lab before so she knows what to expect – but Lucas is new. He’s still grieving – years on – he’s lost his son in the woods never to be found again, he divorced and he spent his days working in a vet clinic helping animals. He is a good guy. It’s mostly his musings and his thoughts that we get – and also the nightmares and the hopes and dreams. While it’s not written in first person, he’s our link to the story.

Where is the horror coming from?

I don’t know where to start. The claustrophobic surroundings, the isolation, so far away from mankind you could be on the moon. The strange landscape outside of the hub windows, the blackness, the pressure ever mounting which could crush the glass fibre. The corridors, ever winding which some seem to lead to dead ends or get strangled before they get wide again into rooms where horrors lie.

The nightmares. Oh, the thing down there wages psychological warfare on the humans, giving them nightmares – sometimes waking ones – of horrid composition. Like take for example this nightmare where Luke sees his son again but he’s turning into a sort of a monster that he has to kill.

Zach’s screams only intensified. The eyes inside his mouth rotated madly in their cups of flesh. The skin of Zach’s chin and cheeks and forehead was developing red throbbing cysts and Luke knew eyes would soon be sprouting there, too.
Luke felt around in Zach’s eyes just a little. Gray fluid the consistency of model glue squished between the eyelids. […] Luke’s fingers sunk into Zach’s eye sockets to the second knuckle. They punched into a pocket of curdled sludge that reminded him of the congealed porridge his mother used to eat. There came a hissing sound, but from where, Luke couldn’t tell. Stinking fluid the color of molten lead bubbled up from Zachary’s sockets. [..] Luke’s fingertips passed through the grooved tangerine of Zach’s brain to touch the inner swell of his skull. Luke stared, trapped in the calm eye of his dread, as his son’s scalp split in a bloodless trench. Something pushed through the squandered flesh, horrid and spiky and flecked with white curds . . .
. . . and turned in Luke’s direction, staring not with eyes but with a sense of merciless curiosity mingled with furious intent.

This was scary as hell to read. And it’s one of many.

Eight miles above, all over the world, people were forgetting their pasts. Trapped down here in the charmless dark, Luke couldn’t escape his own.

Luke’s entire past comes unraveling at the same pace as the scientist’s diaries. Some died, some got engulfed in their research and forgot precautions. Luke is reading their diaries and keeps thinking of his own childhood, filled with an abusive mother and a weak father and a brother who was always in his own world dissecting animals and researching new things. He meets his brother alive but slowly reduced- with stooping shoulders and bandaged hands. He offers no help and no explanations other that the other scientists were weak but he knows what he’s doing. The journals are pretty clear – there is another force at play in the darkness.

There is no cure down here. There is only madness and malignant evil and death. I should say, if we’re lucky, death. We’ve been tricked. Played. Our love and hope and desire to do good for mankind—our need to understand, to CONQUER—brought us here against our every instinct.

They find holes in each lab pulling at the minds of the people within. The holes still keep the room waterproof but act like a portal to the outside and are dripping this wonder-cure which can cure anything but can also keep you from dying. Mice were decapitated and the head separated as the substance would look to regenerate and reunite the body and head.

What’s on the uh-uh-other side of the hole is chaos. But not like any I’ve ever known. Unorderable, unnameable, untheorizable. And that’s what pure evil looks like. A chaos whose v-vuh-variables are endless—so huge even the universe can’t contain them. Chaos incarnate.

Madness had been there since he’d set foot on the station; it had been dogging him persistently, waiting for the cracks to develop so that it could slip painlessly inside. That’s exactly how it would happen, too: a quick little jab like a needle administered by an expert nurse. He’d barely feel the insanity take hold

Things start moving faster towards the end – the labs open up their secrets of hives and undead dogs and pestilence. Luke and Alice struggle to stay awake – they have to make it back to the surface in one piece. Clayton, his brother, does not want to leave. It’s a struggle for survival and if they sleep, they are sleepwalking and doing the creature’s will.

There is one super disturbing scene involving the death of a dog – so if you have any – don’t read – just skip. I was crying and just wanted it to end. He could have given the dog a mercy death instead of letting her suffer like that.

The book ends with just Luke meeting the creatures behind it all, who’d been locked in darkness for too long, who wanted him and not his brother to save them, because he’d loved and was full of love and he’d get his son back (that they kidnapped).

THE CHALLENGER ASCENDED.
And within it, nothing human.

Let’s just say I can’t wait for the adaptation.

https://www.yahoo.com/entertainment/underwater-thriller-deep-series-adaptation-193728477.html