Deeper by Jeff Long is the sequel to The Descent (unrelated to the movie called the Descent). Both books are about the journey into a literal Hell at the centre of the earth.
The Descent was one of those books that grabbed me and didn’t let go — and I would consider it in my Top 10 books. Seems that people either love or hate this book. If you can get past that thousands of miles of caverns have gone undiscovered for centuries, and that in these caverns is another race of humanoids…if you can buy into that, then it’s a great action/horror story.
The Descent returns us to Hell a few years later. Now, the interesting thing with The Descent is that it has a theme. The theme being us versus them (or more notably, Freedom versus Terrorism, or Christian vs Islam). And quite frankly, it pissed me off.
I remember at Banff, Rob Sawyer told us we had to have a theme in our books. After reading The Descent, I strongly disagree. The theme pissed me off. It took me out of his well crafted world and kept dumping me in our world. Quite frankly, it annoyed me.
Now, once they returned to Hell (about 1/2 way through) it started getting much better again. But at times I couldn’t help but think that I’ve been here, done that. And I guess that’s the problem — I had been here and done that — and it was a book called The Descent. Nothing new was really added.
Of course, now I find out, this is merely the second book in the trilogy. The first was released in 1999, this one in 2007 (and it just so happened that I read the Descent this year so I didn’t have to wait 8 years). But I hope that I don’t have to wait years between books, as while this didn’t stack up against The Descent, it was still a good read — I’m still on board the series.