What Smack Said #29
Happy new year!
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Happy new year's eve! Calendars may be a mostly-arbitrary human construct, but if you made a goal this year I hope you either a) achieved it, or b) don't care that you didn't.
I didn't get anywhere near as much writing done as I wanted to, but I did read 159 books of varying length. Some were novellas, some were five or six hundred pages. And—as I kept telling everyone around me—earlier this month I figured out that I was fewer than 10 books away from hitting 700 in five years. That turned into another goal, and I hit it!
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From Below by Darcy Coates was one of the very last books I read this month. And while I generally remain a scaredy cat who freaks out after finishing a horror story, I do actually enjoy a lot of them while I'm reading them. It's my favorite kind of stress.
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There are a million and one different types of horror, though, just as fantasy can range from Tolkien to
Twilight, and I want to figure out more of what kind of horror I like. To that end, last month I checked
From Below out from my local library based on the good reviews its gotten and the gorgeously creepy cover. (I mean, honestly. Look at that thing.) The author has written something like a dozen other books, so she knows to to construct an excellent story. It was so tense, so well plotted, and so very, very scary.
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From Below tells two stories: that of a transatlantic passenger ship called the
Arcadia during its final, horrific voyage and sinking, and one of the exploratory dive team sent to record footage of its wreck for a documentary after the
Arcadia was rediscovered hundred miles away from its planned route. The former is told mostly from the point of view of a crew member as the ship descends into chaos and fear, and the latter from the point of view of three different divers. We (the reader) get both stories told more or less simultaneously, which makes for excellent and satisfying moments of recognition. ("Is the body in the dining room
Harland??")
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I also enjoyed
From Below because I know nothing about diving, whether it's cave diving or scuba diving. I feel like I learned something, even though a lot of it boils down to how insane we as humans are to keep going down to increasingly deep parts of the ocean. One of the characters (a diver herself, no less) described descending the 312 feet underwater to the shipwreck as "protracted suicide." They breathe special chemical blends and have to undergo extensive training to learn about all the different ways a dive can go wrong, and how if it does go wrong, you're probably dead.
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(A side note for comparison: the
Titanic landed approximately 12,000 feet down, but 312 feet for a human diver is deep af.)
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One of the more obvious ways a dive can go wrong is if you run out of air. Divers have to stay calm, keep their adrenaline down, and move slowly. They can't even escape to the surface quickly—if they ascend too fast, the nitrogen in their bodies will bubble up and kill them.
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One of the special bits of gear the dive team uses is called a "rebreather," which filters most of their air back through their tanks. It introduces some oxygen to the environment, but not much, which is key when investigating potential archeological finds. The dive team in
From Below uses rebreathers because the
Arcadia sank in the Gulf of Bothnia (a real place!) between Sweden and Finland, where ocean currents are extraordinarily slow. That means that oxygen isn't filtered through the region the way it is through most of the rest of the world's oceans; one character describes it as "a bit of a dead spot," without coral, fish, or even most bacteria.
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No bacteria means the bodies that went down with the ship haven't deteriorated the way they should have in the seventy years since the wreck occurred. Do you see where this is going? The more oxygen the dive team introduces to the wreck, the more the
things down there reanimate. And the more that the
things come after the divers, the more frightened they get, and the faster their air disappears.
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Anyway, sleep tight. See you in 2024. ;)
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