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  • The Deep

  • Written by: Nick Cutter
  • Narrated by: Corey Brill
  • Length: 12 hrs and 27 mins
  • 3.9 out of 5 stars (69 ratings)

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The Deep

Written by: Nick Cutter
Narrated by: Corey Brill
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Publisher's Summary

From the acclaimed author of The Troop - which Stephen King raved "scared the hell out of me and I couldn't put it down.... old-school horror at its best" - comes this utterly terrifying novel where The Abyss meets The Shining.

A strange plague called the "Gets" is decimating humanity on a global scale. It causes people to forget - small things at first, like where they left their keys... then the not-so-small things like how to drive, or the letters of the alphabet. Then their bodies forget how to function involuntarily - and there is no cure. But now, far below the surface of the Pacific Ocean, deep in the Marianas Trench, an heretofore unknown substance hailed as "ambrosia" has been discovered - a universal healer, from initial reports. It may just be the key to a universal cure. In order to study this phenomenon, a special research lab, the Trieste, has been built eight miles under the sea's surface. But now the station is incommunicado, and it's up to a brave few to descend through the lightless fathoms in hopes of unraveling the mysteries lurking at those crushing depths - and perhaps to encounter an evil blacker than anything one could possibly imagine.

Part horror, part psychological nightmare, The Deep is a novel that fans of Stephen King and Clive Barker won't want to miss - especially if you're afraid of the dark.

©2015 Craig Davidson. All rights reserved. (P)2015 Simon & Schuster, Inc. All rights reserved.

What listeners say about The Deep

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  • Overall
    3 out of 5 stars
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    3 out of 5 stars

Forgetable but hes a great descriptive wtiter

book started great, mostly just got boring in the second half. I enjoyed The Troop so much more.

1 person found this helpful

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    3 out of 5 stars
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Meh

I found this book very difficult follow in quite a few places. Definitely not one of his better books.

1 person found this helpful

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    3 out of 5 stars
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    3 out of 5 stars

Underwhelming

Feels like a lot of the previous reviews nailed it: vivid descriptions of some genuinely creepy and unsettling stuff, but not much of a captivating plot.

If you've never read anything by Nick Cutter, I'd recommend The Troop a thousand times before I'd recommend this one.

If you're turned off by the pandemic premise of this story, don't be; it's a pretty minor plot point that doesn't get talked about a lot after the first couple of chapters.

The narrator does a great job, but the plot meanders a fair bit, and there's a lot of blurring of the line between reality and dreams/delusions, which I personally dislike. There's a bit of a payoff at the end, but by that point, I had kinda stopped caring about any of it.

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    4 out of 5 stars

Disturbing and Immersive

Fair warning: This book is gross. If you're not prepared for horrific and grotesque imagery to be plaguing you for the entirety of this book (especially if you listen to the audio), you will not enjoy this. This book is made to unsettle, terrify, and leave you with nightmares. And it does it's job.

As someone who's always been fascinated by the sea and the mystery of it, this was right up my alley. It's filled with disturbing themes basically from the get-go before things go completely off the rails and into insanity in the final acts.

This book is full of nightmares. Literally, almost half of it is the main character, Luke, working through his dark family life and trauma, to the sheer mayhem that awaits him at the bottom of the sea. The descriptions make every horrifying moment visceral, especially with the audio narration.

Luke is a tragic character stuck in a horrible situation, and you just can't help but root for the guy as he is literally in over his head. While he gets some development, most of it comes at the expense of his pain.

This is not a happy book. That said, I am impressed by the writing. It's very immersive and perfect for Halloween, but make sure you have a comfort snack or something lighter afterward. It's twisted and intense and is not going to be to everyone's taste, but if you're a fan of John Carpenter's THE THING, you will find a lot to enjoy here.

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non-stop horror

couldn't stop listening to this book. it was unbelievably scary and one of those stories that you NEED to know what's happening next!

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Felt like a chore to read

Boring and too many flash back scenes that added nothing to the plot. It felt like a chore to read, and there was so much being described that i often forgot what was actually happening. There’s also no sense of time conveyed at all

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A little underwhelming

I loved The Troop, liked Little Heaven, but unfortunately, this one fell flat for me. I can’t explain exactly why but the story felt disjointed and perhaps anticlimactic. I did enjoy the narrator though!

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An Interesting Listen

I enjoyed this book. The narration was great and the story was a different take on a popular theme. I liked how the flashbacks brought rich character development and was interesting and relevant.

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  • Kassandra Escandell
  • 2020-03-21

Extreme animal abuse warning

I’m a huge fan of Nick Cutter’s “The Troop,” so i was very excited to read this. The story itself started out strong; unique storyline with excellent writing/narration.

However, it all went downhill once Cutter introduced the lab animals. I don’t understand why anyone would want to listen to a grueling 30 minute-long scene of a dog slowly being tortured to death. And that’s just one of them. So many animals are tortured and killed in some of the worst ways imaginable... it’s just.. messed up.

I’m a lifetime fan of horror. I can literally read/watch anything. This book left me in tears at 2 am, and I sobbed uncontrollably for quite some time afterward. It wasn’t scary—it was cruel. It was traumatizing. I am still not okay and it’s been three days. Although “The Troop” is among one of my favorite novels, this one is being returned immediately.

68 people found this helpful

  • Overall
    4 out of 5 stars
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    4 out of 5 stars
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    4 out of 5 stars
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  • Mel
  • 2015-01-29

Deeply Disturbing; Descent into Madness

"The Abyss meets The Shining" and I would say also meets King's IT, and a quite a bit of Jeff VanderMeer's *weird fiction,* the AreaX: Southern Reach Trilogy. I can see why author Nick Cutter has amassed fans like Stephen King. To open this book, you are under the control of Cutter's chilling narrative in a setting that is completely foreign from what you know. He controls the horror with vivid imagery that (unfortunately for us) imprints itself on your mind. It is a multi-level horror attack that is claustrophobic, psychological, repulsive, and in the end, unfathomable. In other words..no happy ending and chances of some pretty macabre nightmares.

Readers, especially listeners, are at the mercy of Cutter's darkly creative mind as the book descends into the Marianas Trench and the total deprivation of the Trieste. Isolated 8 miles below the sunny surface in a pitch black world, a spider-like conglomerate of tubes form the lab. The lights illuminate only a tiny radius, lighting just parts of foreign creatures that glide in and out of the murky *sea snow* at the bottom of the ocean. The sounds are slurpy, slimey, and schllicky, and your mind does awful things with those sounds. At 8 mi. below, the pressure against the lab makes every sound a horrifying threat; they sound like bowels and digestion of a gigantic beast. It is almost traumatizing.

If not already terrifying, Cutter creates a pair of brothers that survived a very dysfunctional childhood that would be enough to induce nightmares. The older brother is the scientist that has not been heard from since the Trieste went incommunicado. Clayton spent his childhood escaping the abuse by unconscionably experimenting on (dismembering) animals. He is cold and without compassion, purely scientific. Luke has the opposite temperament; a veterinarian and a father that lost a son in a heartbreaking *missing-child* incident that haunts him. (Let's just say the boys have TONS of baggage between them.)

An issue I had with this book is the lack of story about the *Gets,* the initial catalyst for the story. So little is said about the effect on the world and how it motivates the trip down to the Trieste. That could be a whole great book. And for animal lovers...don't expect any mercy from this horror master. There are animals aboard the Trieste, cute, furry, animals and they don't fare well. The narration was spot-on, with great pronunciation of those onomatopoeia words that Cutter uses to make your skin crawl, and things slurp and splat and skitter.

Stephen King once said, “I recognize terror as the finest emotion and so I will try to terrorize the reader. But if I find that I cannot terrify, I will try to horrify, and if I find that I cannot horrify, I'll go for the gross-out. I'm not proud.” The Deep is one of those that swings for the terror, bounces on the horror, and lands square on the gross-out. If that sounds like your kind of read -- enjoy. A little too much like swallowing slugs for me personally, but to you horror fanatics I say...Bon Appétit! You'll love this.





45 people found this helpful

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    2 out of 5 stars
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    2 out of 5 stars
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  • Daniel A.
  • 2015-04-30

Torturous instead of scary.

I didn't like this book, partly due to the story, and partly due to the performance. I impulse-bought it, not having read any of the author's other works.

In short, The Deep is a book that follows the "torture" rather than "fear" route of horror. Nick Cutter takes depressed, stressed characters, and places them in a hopeless situation within the first few chapters of the book. The rest of the book is then concerned with watching them be repeatedly harmed and taken apart psychologically, in a grueling way that I found thoroughly uninteresting, yet still stressful.

People make comparisons to Stephen King's writing. I am a big King fan, but again, The Deep fell terribly short here. It has all the tropes and themes of a lot of King's books, in a blatant superficial way, but none of the narrative gifts that King uses to bring characters and situations to life.

The passages that I believe were intended to be scary fell flat for me. Clowns. Centipedes. Long fingernails. Lots of descriptions of how scared the main character was involved passages like "felt a spider of fear crawling down his spine" etc. I have read a huge amount of horror, so I might be more desensitized than the average reader of this book.

The only strong emotional content that came through in Cutter's writing was despair, depression and pain. None of the characters were interesting, just a little bit sympathetic at best. It's a parade of bad things happening to people over and over, and animals being explicitly tortured.

This was emphasized by Corey Brill's narration, in which he constantly emoted the voices of the depressed main character, and the assorted broken down or psychotic despairing individuals he encounters. This emotional tone went on for about 10 of the 12 hours of running time. It made me stressed out, but again, not afraid, so there was no thrill or tension release to any of it. It felt like a slog. Speaking again of Brill's narration, I thoroughly disliked the voices he used for the various antagonists of the book. It made a lot of them more grotesque and silly than threatening.

I almost just gave up on the book (something I never do), but I held on until the end to see if there would be any kind of plot development. There was, but not enough to make me happy about spending the credit and sticking around for twelve hours.

14 people found this helpful

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    1 out of 5 stars
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    2 out of 5 stars
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  • Melissa
  • 2015-11-04

Beware

This story is not really a psychological thriller, the images in it are disgusting and it never lets up. I love horror stories and the scarier the better. But I couldn't finish this one, made me sick to my stomach.

12 people found this helpful

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    5 out of 5 stars
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    5 out of 5 stars
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  • Raymond
  • 2015-01-15

Well, it was just my imagination ...

Mr. Cutter crafts a perfect horror story that depends upon our fear of "things that go bump in the night" coupled at the hip with the horrible things we do to our loved ones. In Mr. Cutter's mind, The Apocalypse is caused by a rampant and severe strain of Alzheimer's Disease; just as scary as a Zombie attack. Scientists are looking for a cure in the deepest part of the ocean.

And so it begins ....

I've enjoyed two of Mr. Cutter's books immensely (The Troop and The Deep) and look forward to my next trip with him as my travel host.

Buy this book!

12 people found this helpful

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    4 out of 5 stars
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    4 out of 5 stars
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    4 out of 5 stars
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  • Midwestbonsai
  • 2015-04-27

This book is rather strange and disquieting

This book is rather strange and disquieting. Full of flashbacks and sometimes rather confusing. The story starts out with Luke Nelson traveling 10,000 miles to meet with his estranged brother. The request came from the government and they made the travel arrangements.
There is a deadly plague that has invaded every country in the world. It makes people forget. They forget everything until they just die from starvation. Worse yet, no one knows how it is transmitted.

Luke’s brother, Clayton, may had found a cure. A miracle cure not for just this plague but for all disease. He has sent a message for Luke to join him in his research lab that is deep in the Mariana Trench.

As Luke travels to meet his brother, he thinks back to when they were children. These flashbacks set the tone of their relationship. Clayton is a genius and a sadistic psychopath and a sociopath. He only cares about his research and the fame it brings him. The lives of his subjects have no value. He can’t understand why Clayton would want to see him. He was a animal vet. Clayton was an animal killer. He didn’t want to clean up after him again.

This is a mix of “Twilight Zone”, “Outer Limits” and “X-Factor.” Horror story at it’s best. It gets very graphic in places. I think it was too much sometimes with all the flashbacks and dream sequences. It was hard to tell sometimes if it was real or another one of Luke’s dreams, or a dream within a dream. The parts that were in the dark with only a flashlight were the most frightening.

Cory Brill has a nice voice and gave a good rendition. His dictation was flawless. Sometimes his voice was too nice, considering what he was reading.
Production was clear and without static or breaks. Overall an engrossing story.

Audiobook purchased for review by ABR.

Please find this complete review and many others at audiobookreviewer dot com

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10 people found this helpful

  • Overall
    2 out of 5 stars
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    5 out of 5 stars
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    2 out of 5 stars
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  • cristina
  • 2015-03-10

Shocked by the good reviews

I loved "The Troop" and actually saved "The Deep" for an upcoming trip. What a disappointment!!! In The Troop, the characters come alive amidst the horror. In The Deep, the characters remain shallow and unbelievable. Not a single one becomes real. And the story, quite frankly, never progresses. Creepy, horrific thing after creepy, horrific thing happens to the protagonists but I, for one, did not care. And don't be deceived by the promise of what this author could do with a plague that makes people forget (two thirds of the publisher's summary devoted to this theme)...the book itself deals with this issue for about as long as the publisher's summary. Perhaps if I had not kept waiting for the book to return to that subject, I would not have been so impatient with the novel. Did the author forget...?

Mr. Cutter is a great craftsman, in total command of his words. The writing is indeed good. Wish the story was better.

Mr. Brill does a phenomenal job with the narration. I probably would not have bothered to finish it were it not for him.

9 people found this helpful

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    5 out of 5 stars
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  • Amazon Customer
  • 2019-02-08

Loooved it

Nick Cutter & Corey Brill are a match made in audiobook heaven ! Corey’s creepy voice perfectly matches Nick’s incredibly descriptive mind scraping words !

8 people found this helpful

  • Overall
    1 out of 5 stars
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    4 out of 5 stars
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    1 out of 5 stars
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  • frequentbuyer1974
  • 2016-09-21

Pointless

I would not recommend this book. The constant cutting away from the narrative got old, as did the obvious never-ending (sometimes laughable) metaphors. There really is no story here. Just gory details of events that seemed like side notes to the story. I like horror a lot but did not think the writing was compelling here.

8 people found this helpful

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    5 out of 5 stars
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    5 out of 5 stars
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    4 out of 5 stars
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  • Jessica
  • 2015-01-18

eeeesh!

so creepy it made my butt pucker! this one is so absorbing it could be dangerous to try to multi task!

8 people found this helpful