Deeper
A Novel
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4.3 • 88 Ratings
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- $15.99
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- $15.99
Publisher Description
New York Times bestselling author of The Reckoning takes readers on an intense and imaginative tour de force in this follow up horror novel to The Descent that plunges in the depths of Earth to a Hell that is real, geological, and savagely inhabited right below our very feet.
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 subterranean fabled leader, and suddenly, it seemed that evil was dead, and all was right with the world.
Deeper explodes that complacency and plunges readers 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 hustles 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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Fans who hoped for a sequel to Long's 1999 bestseller The Descent may be sorry to have their wish granted, as this fumbling thriller fails to expand on the tantalizing concepts explored in its predecessor. Set 10 years after spelunkers stumbled into a literal Hell and later led a supposedly successful expedition to kill Satan, this story opens on Halloween, when underground creatures abduct dozens of children and slay any adults trying to stop them. Grieving mother and widow Rebecca Coltrane, the media-anointed public face of the disaster, makes clever political use of the publicity to launch a major military expedition underneath the Earth in search of her daughter and the other missing children. As war brews underground between the explorers and the quasi-human hadals, aboveground tensions increase between China and the U.S. The parallels to the current war on terror are too broadly drawn to be convincing, and whatever larger point Long seeks to make about the source of human evil is lost in numerous gory scenes of butchery.
Customer Reviews
Fun read
I truly enjoyed both books, a fun read.
A must read sequel, but still a sequel
The concept and gore is not as fresh as in The Descent, but you know you have to find out what happens next!
Meh
I was expecting so much more. I loved the first book, but this one is just...not good at all. The plot doesn’t mesh well with the first book, and the entire “children’s crusade” is just a drawn out predictable massacre with poor characters making poor decisions leading to a poor ending. The cherry on top was the infusion of not so subtle political views into the story which was unnecessary and begs the question, “Why even put this crap in here?!” Came to read a novel and got a smoothie of jumbled plot lines and stupidity with a god/devil creature living in a hole who can’t remember yesterday but loves eating people. Glad I spent my money on this!