I read Alma Katsu’s last novel, The Hunger, because it was about the Donner Party’s fate. I knew going in things were going to be bad for the Donners and the families that followed them out west; slow starvation, ill-planning, and death buried in the snow-covered mountains. What I was not expecting was the horror Katsu created in such a constricted narrative. She was magically able to thread superstitious doubt, panic, and fear in a way that made reading the ill-fated journey less of an exercise in schadenfreude and more nail-biting. I am still scared when I think of passages in that book, so my anticipation for her latest novel, The Deep concerning the fates of the RMS Titanic and her sister ship the HMHS Britannic was palpable to say the least.
Both ships go down within four years of each other, and both sank due to the hubris of men enthralled by capitalism and war. While I may not know the history here as well as I did with The Hunger, I know Katsu is up against the challenge of reader expectations. The Deep is a strong novel and though tackling a historical tragedy so profoundly embedded in our cultural memory, it manages to build tension about exactly how the tragedy will unfold. As with The Hunger doubt, terror, and superstition haunt the characters and equalize them across the economic divisions that the Titanic made so clear. In The Deep, Katsu delivers another novel with a refreshing take on a story well-told.
I recognize the irony of writing a review that is hovering close to the ill-fated date of April 15th, when the Titanic struck the iceberg that caused the deaths of over 1500 souls. But reverence for the human toll of the sinking is what gives Katsu’s prose power. We know the history. We can probably see the James Cameron diving camera swooping over the wreck at the bottom of the Atlantic while hearing violins gently sing and, at the same time, we may think of a suave, but far too clean for third-class Leonardo DiCaprio screaming at the bow of the ship. We know the stories, we know the characters, and, most importantly, we know how it ends.
Katsu’s The Deep, though, seems to inherit these memories only to subvert them through her character development, her insistence on the supernatural (mostly through séances), and Irish folklore. The one disadvantage I thought Katsu would have trouble overcoming is the wealth of myth already surrounding the Titanic. Instead I was surprised by her ability to make the spectacle of the Titanic serve as a set piece for terror and action that does not merely capitalize on its cultural recognition.
For example, take the sinking of the ship. In other narratives, this tragedy is drawn out. It is the second half of a three-hour movie! Yet, Katsu does not fall into the temptation to exploit the sinking—it happens, as a matter of fact, well into the last quarter of the novel. The sinking is like a time-bomb, something readers know is ticking, but they can’t quite see the numbers counting down. We get dates and a sense of time, but it is all pushed to the margins as the development of the characters–Annie, Mark, Dai, Stead, Caroline, and Violet–takes the center. Mixed with the interruptions of time jumps into the future following Violet and Annie’s work on the hospital ship, the Britannic, the novel positions itself squarely on the Titanic, but not stuck in its shadow.
Instead, what shines throughout Katsu’s work is the creeping importance of folklore and the encroaching specter of a debt unpaid to a nasty sea witch. Except, as with The Hunger, the supernatural elements of the text are consistently cast in doubt by more secular explanations. Ghosts haunt—but they represent the trauma of a past unable to unmoor from the present. The myth of the sea witch is wrapped up in the treatment of ‘hysterical’ women by medical professionals in the early twentieth century. The supernatural in The Deep can, finally, be rationalized through the catch-all of trauma. However, and this is where Katsu shows her mastery, doubt of secular thinking nonetheless chips away at the fine varnish of rational thinking. These moments of tension between what can easily be explained and what most certainly cannot is where The Deep is the strongest.
For me, The Hunger left a strong anticipation for the next historical horror that Katsu writes. The myth of the Titanic is as vast as the ship and there are going to be blemishes. Katsu creates characters that are strangely conservative. The queer relationships that plays out in both The Hunger and The Deep (though there are more now) tend to be a bit tired and troubling. Both such relationships in The Deep involve violence, deception, and longing. Part of the reason, I think, is less about Katsu’s politics and more about trying to capture what these queer relationships might have looked like in period—both in the nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. One area, moreover, where I know I wanted a bit more in The Deep was in terms of class, especially on the ship. There are fleeting descriptions of Third Class, but it is quickly overtaken by the incense of Stead’s séance, and the plotline of Dai and Les. This was less of an issue in The Hunger, but it was much more apparent in a ship that was so vastly divided in terms of class–so much so that not to dive a bit into the bowels of the ship seemed more of a misstep.
Despite these quibbles, I enjoyed The Deep and fans of both the myth of and the tragedy surrounding the Titanic should be excited by this retelling and by the supernatural spin that Katsu brings to the story. While I may not be as terrified here as I was while reading The Hunger, with its wendigos and homicides, I am more unnerved and more adrift by the haunting in The Deep. Personally, as someone who loves historical research, I applaud Katsu and her team at Glasstown Entertainment for the depth and attention to detail when tackling the narratives of both ships and making their stories, once again, refreshing.
*I should note that I did receive an advanced reading copy of The Deep from Penguin Random House, but I assure you this is a fair review of the material and I did not receive compensation for this review.
You can buy The Deep from Amazon:
Kyle Brett is a Ph.D. candidate at Lehigh University who studies nineteenth-century American literature and Transatlantic Romanticism. He also is a horror buff and avid weird fiction reader, you can follow him on Twitter @burntcheerios. He has written previously for Horror Homeroom on It and Cargo.
