Unbeknownst to the surface world, an unfathomable subterranean domain lies beneath their feet and it is not uninhabited. Let me explain.įor the entirety of their existence, humans have not been alone. And yet, I fully understand why others didn’t. I am just going to come out and say it I loved this book. lepers without lips can't pronounce labials. While Jules Verne may have pioneered the notion of deep exploration, Long takes it five steps further, and for all the chaos it's certainly not predictable. So, why two stars instead of one for this five-car-pileup of a novel? It was at least interesting enough for me to read the entire book. The horror isn't even scary - by the end, there's so much randomness and silliness going on that the moments that SHOULD be scary just blend into the background. Long had a hundred ideas and shoved EVERY ONE OF THEM into his story without giving any of them enough time to germinate.
The dialogue is embarrassing, the science atrocious (none of it gathered, sadly, from actual scientists, just random articles and a whole lot of conjecture and handwaving). I can't remember having read a book so deliberately bad.
In the preface to Long's _The Descent_, the author expresses his regret that although his friends gave him a lot of scientific advice, the science in the book would probably not please them. Stuffed with interesting concepts and engaging suggestions, it fails to adequately develop or explore any of them, leaving behind a superficial and pocked whole. It scrabbles toward and mimics meaning, but ultimately contains none. I also very much enjoyed this bit from the third chapter in which USA army major Elias Branch contemplates the war and genocide in Bosnia: "Branch did not want to save them, for they were savage and did not want to be saved." By enjoyed, I mean I wanted to rip the book in half.ģ: The narrative structure and the pacing of this book are equivalent disasters.Ĥ: I seriously cannot break down all the ways in which I hate this book. Oh, those poor, uncivilized Africans and their violent superstitions and their helpless childish minds and cultures, but at least they have given the nice, white, USAmerican nun a greater understanding of her own life. Enough of the Italian stallions, the (ever unsympathetic, mind) gangster stereotypes, the brutish non-white others, and oh my God, that second chapter, what was that even.
I'm not sure what the etiquette is for dropping f bombs in a review, so I'm just going to phrase it as gently as I know how: fuck this book.ġ: Holy racism, Batman.
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