Jeff Long’s The Descent is a hefty novel overfull of plot and characters, many elements that are simply too underdeveloped to stand up to their own weight. Still, throughout its labyrinthine plotlines and setting, there are many elements that make it an interesting read.

Summary

(excerpted from Amazon): We are not alone. Some call them devils or demons. But they are real. They are down there. And they are waiting for us to find them. With all of Hell’s precious resources and territories to be won, a global race ensues. Nations, armies, religions, and industries rush to colonize and exploit the subterranean frontier. A scientific expedition is launched westward to explore beneath the Pacific Ocean floor, both to catalog the riches there and to learn how life could develop in the sunless abyss. But in the dark underground, as humanity falls away from them, the scientists and mercenaries find themselves prey not only to the savage creatures, but also to their own treachery, mutiny, and greed. One thing is certain: Miles inside the earth, evil is very much alive.

Content Warnings

Violence (including against animals and children). Torture and pain. Cannibalism. Rape (off page). Religious elements are heavily reframed into an anthropological sense (in one of the book’s best bits, mind). Also for folks sensitive to such, there are elements of claustrophobia, being lost, starvation, and so forth.

Review (Spoilers = Mid)

I first became aware of this book due to its confusion with the movie, The Descent. The latter also involving people in caves being attacked by strange beings. Some folks wondered if the two were related [Doug’s Note: No, they are not] and it sat on my backburner for years as a curiosity.

Shortly after Halloween, I dived into the book thinking, initially, it would be a quick fairly obviously horror read. I was wrong. On both counts. It is not quick, per se, unless you read fairly. It is also not precisely horror. It has lots of torture, violence, death, cannibalism, and other elements that align it towards the kind of “strange creatures in caves” subgenre [kind of a pun, I guess] of horror but it is also something else.

If I had to classify it, I would say it is a deeply [another kind of of pun] horror infused take on the expert-expedition style of adventure fiction. Blended with increasing elements of hollow-earth romance fantasy.

How scientifically accurate is it? No.

How accurate is it to the way humans would react to such a series of events? Probably not.

How fun? That varies.

The most fun the novel has is in its central conceit. Something not altogether obvious from the description so I am going to treat it like a spoiler and obfuscate the deeper cuts. The less-spoilery but still-a-bit-spoilery version of it is that there has been a shared existence on the earth of creatures living in a vast network of caverns and tunnels for all of modern human’s existence. These creatures are tied up into a lot of our shared mythology of hell, demons, fairies, and other visitors.

The more spoilery bit is KBZ WVDK KBVK KBZFZ DeZVKAeZF FBVeZ V Dx88xv VvDZFKe6 X2KB AF VvO 8xFK xW KBZ2e XZ2eO V99ZVeVvDZ 2F OAZ Kx Fx8Z 2vWEAZvDZ, 9ZeBV9F FZ82-86FK2DVE, 9ZeBV9F OAZ Kx DBZ82FKe6/9B6F2DF. SBZ DeZVKAeZF xvDZ BVO V EVeoZe, FKexvoZe Z892eZ tAK BV0Z Exvo FZvFZ DxEEV9FZO tVDr 2vKx tVetVe2F8.

What does not fully follow is the bit behind the spoiler leading to the final result. How those creatures came, precisely, to be quite so torture-monkey flesh-carvers. The insistence of scarring and harming their victims and the odd but in-story reasonable social hierarchy ends up feeling adrift from a lot of the novel’s reality. It simply does not make sense with the whole. Unless we take the description blurb at face value: “evil is very much alive.”

In bringing about the conceit, Long dances around a lot of fence poles. There is the expedition under the Pacific. There is a group of scholars researching how the under-Earth [aka, Hell] ties into the stories of Satan, himself. There are military aspects. Corporate aspects. Bits of folklore. Lots of asides where various encounters with the creatures are given from different viewpoints.

Sometimes these viewpoints make sense. Others feel disconnected.

In each of these elements, there tends to be sub-elements. The expedition is part corporate and partially driven by a desire to learn. One of our main POV characters is a linguist [and nun, and humanitarian, etc] interested in how the creatures might lead us back in time to the origins of human language. There is a fairly stereotypical sub-plot of soldiers gone bad in extreme circumstances angle. Espionage. Plots within plots.

Arguably the only two plots that truly matter are the characters of Ali [the nun] and Ike [a survivor who has been deeply scarred from an encounter with the creatures] on one hand and the experts studying Satan on the other. Yet, both are subjected to the book’s length and tendency to go off on tangents. It rarely feels like these are plots from the same book. Towards the end, this is softened but by that time we have left the realms of horror and expedition and dived off into the depths of hollow-earth fantasy.

And then the ending shows up and it works, but sort of mostly works as the set-up for a sequel [one, Deeper, did show up nearly ten-years later]. Leaving a sense of having gone through a set-pieces that were all a bit interesting on their own but often in competition with each other to find any true place to thrive.

For instance, one character, e3MKRv, is introduced and given quite a bit of focus in the plot but ocGs wmJPGwj eNWmggGmJW G23Ggo 4BJ m 4Gh WNeG OBOGsoW oB WcBh Cg sGmJ ocG Gse 4BJ sB PBBe JGmWBs EGWNeGW oB EGmJ hNosGWW Bs EGcmw4 B4 ocG JGmeGJ.

I did not mind reading it. I am glad I read it. I just also felt like it could have been much better.

Considering the sequel tends to have lesser reviews on both Amazon and Goodreads, I am not rushing for the chance to read it any time soon. One reviewer mentioned that the sequel seems to set up a third book [as far as I can tell, one has yet to show up eighteen-years later]. Which I do not doubt, based on this one.

Mostly recommended to big fans of hollow-earth, alternate (religious) conspiracy-history, and expert-expedition type stories. People heavily into caving may or may not like it, depending on how well Long has managed to capture that feeling. Which might be besides the point.