Little Mermaids Have Teeth (and Aren’t So Little) in Mira Grant’s Into the Drowning Deep

The horror of the bleak ocean depths informs everything about Mira Grant’s Into the Drowning Deep. (Mira Grant is a nom de plume for the inestimable Seanan McGuire, who won a whole bunch of awards, including the Hugo and Nebula.) Seven years before the events the novel begins, the good ship Atargatis set sail on a reality tv mission, dispatched by a media conglomerate to film a faux-documentary that would be right at home in Syfy’s Saturday evening schlock lineup. Their mission: to hunt for the mythical mermaid lurking somewhere in the deep ocean valley of the Mariana trench. It didn’t go well. In short order, the ship found bloodstained and drifting, the crew and passengers vanished without a trace.  Because the voyage was to be televised, their disappearances don’t exactly remain a mystery: there is clear, unquestionable footage of eel-like mermaids pulling themselves onboard and murdering everyone with their, yes, 25 rows of razor sharp teeth. (For more on the fate of the Atargatis, pick up the 2015 novella Rolling in the Deep; it’s not essential you read it before the novel-length sequel, but it’s horrifically fun.)
Unfortunately for the family and friends of the lost crew, the “unquestionable” evidence was ultimately able to be questioned. Despite the clear lack of tampering with the footage, most everyone believes the Atargatis tragedy is a hoax perpetrated by the media company. (To what end is never clear; easier to believe the conspiracy than confront the awful truth.) Those lost left behind all manner of bereaved and questioning loved ones, who put together a second voyage in search of answers. Along with a compatriot of hangers on, scientific explorers, media darlings, corporate flacks, and other such unsavory types, they set out abord the Melusine, a ship purpose-built for the mission, to find the answers they seek, and discover the truth about the mermaids at the center of whole bloody affair.

The people of the Melusine end up being a mess of competing needs and expectations. There’s Dr. Jillian Toth, a “sirenologist” responsible, in many ways, for sending the Atargatis on its ill-fated journey; she could not bring herself to join the original mission and is wracked with guilt over the loss of the original crew, sent out to find creatures of the murderous deep with her ill-received research in hand. There’s her not-quite-ex-husband, who, after a near-fatal injury fighting whalers, ended up the right-hand man for the dodgy media company funding the clamatous expedition. There’s the sister of a media darling who perished on the Atargatis, and the woman who replaced her. There are deaf twins and their hearing sister; a married pair of veldt hunters; a whole passel of security people hired more for their looks than their competence. And then there’s the multimillion dollar research ship itself, which might as well be named Mermaids McMurder Face.
There’s a pall of inevitability as the Melusine shoves off, its complex social strata and interpersonal histrionics falling away once the terrifying reality of the drowning deep comes to bear on its unprepared crew. From the first, Jillian Toth expects they will all die on the water, two miles above the Mariana Trench, and it’s hard not to give this pessimism credit once the dying begins in earnest. Ultimately though, the horrible sirens of Into the Drowning Deep are mere biological creatures, not the magical, fantastical ones of myth and legend (even if they informed those myths.) They can be studied, understood, and beaten back into the  dark, if only we can put our well justified terror of the abyss aside. This book kept me reading long into the night, giggling at its gleeful push-pull embrace of B-movie horror tropes even as I gripped the pages tight.
Into the Drowning Deep is available now.