Rolling in the Deep (Rolling in the Deep #.05): 4 Stars

Author: Mira Grant aka Seanan McGuire
Length: 128 pgs.
"They saw a great adventure. They saw a glorious and entertaining hoax. They saw profit, ratings, everything but the disaster that awaited them. The Atargatis sailed blithely on, out of the harbor, and into history."

Rolling in the Deep is a novella-length prequel to Mira Grant’s novel Into the Drowning Deep. It revolves around a network documentary crew and a group of scientists who sail via the Atargatis into the Mariana Trench to try to verify the existence of mermaids. They sail there, but they don’t ever come back, and they’re never seen alive again.

The Mariana Trench is something that truly fascinates me. If you aren’t familiar with it I’ll give you the basics. It’s the deepest part of the ocean in the world. Per Wikipedia, if Mount Everest were dropped into the deepest part of the Mariana Trench (called the Challenger Deep) its topmost peak would still be over 1 mile underwater. Its contents and depths are shrouded in mystery and darkness.

Maybe this doesn’t interest you. If that’s the case you definitely won’t be fascinated by the premise here as I was. Actually I purchased Into the Drowning Deep first, which follows another expedition seven years later. I haven’t read the novel yet as it’s been buried under several other titles on my TBR, so when I stumbled onto Rolling in the Deep on Goodreads and saw that it was a novella prequel, I purchased it so that I could get a taste of the story before attacking the novel.

Other reviewers say that the tone here differs from Into the Drowning Deep which I can’t attest to. I will say that Rolling in the Deep, once the danger becomes apparent to the unfortunate souls aboard the Atargatis, is satisfyingly creepy. I would’ve liked more detail, more graphic violence at some points, and I felt it was kind of a cop-out how the exact details of one big scene at the end were left to the reader’s imagination. But I understand that this is a prequel, and I hope that my desire for more gore is satisfied in the full-length book. This novella serves its purpose; I gobbled it up quickly and it definitely whet my appetite for what’s to come. Chill-inducing.