Still with me? Then strap in for a rollicking ride, as Katsu skillfully carries off sweeping time and POV shifts. “She thought, too, of Mark’s eyes, the coming storm inside them.”Įqually central to this eerie, brooding romance: Annie is of a social class both priest-ridden and brimming over with dark, primordial shades beyond the reach of both cross and confessional. She might be frightened, but she felt it in her bones: this moment in time, this ship, was her destiny.” Two snippets from early on should warn you regarding this novel’s generic affinities: Author Alma Katsu brings all the right stuff, with enough long-harbored memories, emotional wounds, violent outbursts, breathless reunions, furtive crimes, laudanum-spiked forebodings, “gypsy” curses, and spooky seances to keep the hearts of supernatural-fiction fans thumping to all hours. If this premise appeals, I say go for it.

But considering we’re signed up for a moonlight cruise to a darkly familiar moorage (genre-wise), there may be more to it. To the reader, Annie’s affliction may seem only an innocent malady of her youth, a persistent longing for a married man given up for drowned in the first disaster. Steeped in atmospherics and relentless foreboding, The Deep treads a bleak path between two maritime disasters from the second decade of the last century.Īt the novel’s romantic core: Irish lass Annie Hebbly, Titanic survivor, who seeks a new position on Britannic, its all-but-identical sister ship, now refitted for WWI hospital duty.Īnnie has been newly released from nervous confinement, her asylum director having determined that her discharge, after several years, is long overdue. This chilling tale of tragic death and spectral visitations bumps along behind the restless heartbeat of its plucky young heroine.

The deep alma katsu