Deeper is a entertaining blend of ghost story and Lovecraftian monsters from the deep. Moore does everything right with this one: great depth of character; great set up; it's tightly written and has some genuiely scary chills. ( )

I'd read some really positive reviews of this novel, both from Amazon and elsewhere, and I thought it would make for a fun and light Lovecraftian horror/thriller. It was light, and there's no denying author James Moore's connection to the Lovecraft collective mythos, but it just wasn't a good novel.

The characters were flat, the story was bland and predictable, and there was no pull of the reader into the grander vision of what makes Lovecraft-style stories so (capital G) "Grand".

This would be fine if you're looking for an inexpensive, quick 2-3 day read, with monsters, some mystery and a connective tissue to the world of H.P. The plot flows quickly enough and the writing is capable. I'm extremely respectful and envious of the craft of writing, but potential readers of this work should beware. ( )

Deeper is a new book from Necessary Evil Press, written by James A. Moore. A print run of 500 of the limited edition was issued; list price on the website was $45. Production qualities are flawless; it is a handsome cloth bound hardcover with a very beautiful painting of a Deep One with some divers reflected in its eye. Cover art was by Alan Clarke who also provided two more interior sketches that were quite good. I believe all copies are signed by the author. We are given a list of Mr. Moore's other publications and there is a great photo of the author on the back, sitting on a pretty cool bike. Editing was tight with no typos I saw; the one textual inconsistency I blame on the author. Page count is 233, with text starting on page 9, all in all pretty standard value for the money from small presses these days. I first heard about this book in early January from none other than James Ambuehl. Although he is very widely published I only ever read one other book by Mr. Moore, Possessions, a cheesy Leisure Book. Never get your hopes up with a Leisure Book and you are unlikely to be too disappointed. Possessions was pretty lame if readable, but it did temper my expectations for Deeper.

The story is told in the first person, so we can anticipate the protagonist made it through the story somehow, although I guess that's not always the case with mythos fiction. We meet Joe Bierden, the skipper of Isabella's Dream, who caters to the New England tourist trade with his yacht. His first mate and best friend is Charlie Moncrief. It's the end of the season when a college professor Martin Ward asks to hire his ship as a base of operations to explore some underwater caves offshore from Golden Cove. Accompanying Martin are Jacob and Mary Parsons, a team of paranormal phenomena investigators, and a dive master, Diana. Also along for the ride are 15 or so expendable college students and a few expendable deckhands. We meet Charlie's wife, Isabella. Most of the characters were thinly drawn, no more than caricatures. The only one we get to know in any way is Joe. I wondered how much of his personality reflected author's. At any rate, we get a few soliloquies about how useless, unmanly and annoying college professor types are. The expedition sets out for Golden Cove, and we find out it is a tourist attraction sort of town built on the ruins of a much older village as an investment property. Here is the textual inconsistency. Jacob Parsons is expounding about this (and by now, any Lovecraftian worth his tentacles will have figured out the hook) and says he can't recollect he name of the town; 2 pages later he is relating how the British burned down the docks in Innsmouth in retaliation for some British ships lost at sea and there is no further attempt to be coy about the previous indentity of the town. To his credit, Mr. Moore never mentions the name Innsmouth more than a time or two and only ever hints around about the events from the 1920s, without explicitly rehashing them. It turns out Dr. Ward and his divers are trying to establish if there is any truth to the rumors about Devil's Reef, and the Parsons are footing the bill as part of their exploration of unusual phenomena. Without spoiling too much more of the plot, let's just say events spin out of control.

I had plenty of heartburn with this book. First of all there are ghosts in the area; a mixing of genres (Lovecraft's science fiction and the supernatural) that didn't work at all for me; I thought it almost irretrievably ruined it at the end. It seems the ghost of Obed Marsh has been patrolling the waters off of Innsmouth for many years, attempting to thwart the Deep Ones' plans. Whatever the heck else you can say about Obed Marsh, I doubt he wanted to wreak vengeance on the Deep Ones. The second thing was that I thought the depiction of the emotions and motivations of the characters was done clumsily, not particularly believably. After you see a Deep One why don't you accept the tainted blood causing the Innsmouth look? Some of the events strained my suspension of disbelief (you know, I'll take as an axiom the nature of the Deep One's, but I want to be able to make sense of the characters' actions, and the course and timeline of events). In this age of media circuses, when cell phones and digital cameras and recorders are rife, when two of your characters are telvision stars hunting the paranormal, why doesn't anyone outside the immediate circle of characters know anything when a Deep One is captured? This is not 1920s Innsmouth, it's a resort vacation town in 2008. Dialogue was perfunctory. When Joe plans a campaign of bloody retribution, we find out two thirds of the way into the book that his father-in-law is a gangster with connections to arms dealers, sort of deus ex machina (deus ex machina gunna?).

Some things were good. In spite of all my carping about the plot and prose, I found it an undemanding read and whiled away a few nights on it without letting it lapse. I must not have been too put off by it. The description of the Deep Ones was very vivid, and the actions scenes were exciting. Mr. Moore was not sentimental, a good thing in mythos fiction. There also ended up being internal consistency in the turn of the plot and the secret motivations of one of the bad guys.

Where does Deeper go in the pantheon? Radiant Dawn by Cody Goodfellow strides the mythos world like a colossus, never to be displaced from the pinnacle. The sequel, Ravenous Dusk, and the novels of Charlie Stross and John Tynes are not far behind. On my next tier of excellence I place The Haunting of Alaizabel Cray by Wooding, Balak by Rainey and Where Goeth Nyarlathotep by Reiner. I would rate Deeper somewhere below that, maybe at or just below the level of Hive by Curran, Denied to the Enemy by Detwiller and Monstrocity or Deadstock by Thomas. It is a better read than Servants of Chaos by D'Ammassa. Deeper is a beautiful book that I am happy to have in my collection. I may pick it up now and again to reread the fight scenes or the images of the Deep Ones, but I doubt I'll reread the whole thing. ( )

Deeper sounded like just my kind of horror story. A captain is hired at the end of the season to take a professor and his students on a thirty day trip to explore some underwater caves. Deeper is James A. Moore’s sequel to H.P. Lovecraft’s The Shadow Over Innsmouth. Surely that’s a goldmine for a horror story.

Unfortunately, the author just doesn’t do much with it. The book is poorly written. He constantly tells what is happening, but he never shows what is happening. As a result, the book never seemed to connect with me.

The book is narrated by a New England sea captain, yet he was never given a distinctive voice. There were no 'little details' or real nautical slang that would have shown me that the author did his homework and would have made the captain a believable character. An entire novel where the captain never says 'port', 'starboard', 'berth' or 'head'? He never sounded like a captain or for that matter, even a New Englander. All of the characters really were pretty flat, two dimensional and interchangeable.

The biggest sin of the book though is that it just isn't scary. If Mr. Moore is going to write a Lovecraft inspired story he should also learn to carry off some Lovecraft-style cosmic dread. Nobody in this story seemed to understand that they were in a horror story. At one point, the crew have an encounter with a fish-man. Yet nobody seemed to be particularly freaked out by it. There was none of the awe and wonder that you would expect at the discovery of another sentient humanoid race. No fear, terror or looming madness. Nothing.

At 270 pages, this was a fairly short book, but I felt no connection to the characters or any spark to the events of the story. For such a short book, it really felt like a slog. Ultimately the biggest problem with Deeper is that it just lacked depth. ( )