The Devil and the Deep: Horror Stories of the Sea edited by Ellen Datlow

Nightshade Books, 2018

ISBN: 978-1-59780-946-7

Availability: Hardcover, paperback, audiobook, Kindle edition

On the surface, it seems like a good idea.  A collection of short horror stories with the ocean as a common theme, written by authors with solid track records.  Unfortunately, it fails to live up to its premise.  In terms of story quality, there are roughly four treasures and a few nice baubles, but you have to dig through a lot of sand to find them.

These stories all come in at around 20 pages, so there isn’t a lot of space for character development or backstory, and things often happen for no reason.  That’s part of what makes writing short stories challenging.   But, you still need to create an interesting plot and make sure that each event ties into another, using limited space.  The stories here that qualify as treasure do that very well.  Christopher Golden’s ‘The Curious Allure of the Sea” is a perfect example.  A young woman finds a necklace bearing a unique symbol on her dead father’s boat.  She has it tattooed on her arm, and soon many different living (and sometimes dead) creatures are flocking from everywhere to be with her, and sometimes attack her.  The weirdness escalates, and she is soon forced to make difficult choices to try to save her own life.  This story is a perfect example of how to write an excellent short story.  You never get an explanation for why her dad had the necklace, or what the symbol means, but who cares?  Details like that can be skipped as long as the story makes sense and moves along, and it does.  Golden keeps in just enough to keep the plot rolling, and anything else is cheerfully tossed over the side.  Seanan McGuire’s “Sister, Dearest Sister, Let Me Show You to the Sea,” and Brian Hodge’s “He Sings of Salt and Wormwood” also do an excellent job of getting in fast, blowing the reader away, and getting out without any unnecessary filler.  Michael Marshall Smith’s “Shit Happens” also deserves praise. It’s an excellent story, and written in an off-kilter, hilarious way that reminds me of how Stephen King used to write for some of his oddball characters.  People don’t have sex, they are interested in “activities that would have a bedstead banging against a cabin wall into the small hours.”  Advice on hot sauce consists of  “some of those local brand bad boys will put you in a world of sphincter pain.”   It’s a great horror story, and the author’s hilarious way of narrating it will have you laughing out loud at times.

As for the other stories, a few are decent, but the rest suffer from the same problem: a lack of coherence in the plot.  They aren’t sleek, fast jetboats: they are more like a collection of parts thrown together to get from one harbor to another.  The authors do have some very original ideas and the tales start well, but then they get too metaphysical and abstract, which drags the story down.  Quite often, you will get to the end of a story and find yourself asking “what just happened?” The stories go in a sensible fashion for a while, then wander off the deep end into nonsensical events.  It’s a shame, because many of the stories had promise, but wound up as unrealized ideas, leaving this reader annoyed.

If you have the money to spare, it may be worth picking this one up for the few gems. Otherwise, the reader would probably be best to pass on this one.

Contains:  violence

Reviewed by Murray Samuelson

Editor’s note: The Devil and the Deep: Horror Stories of the Sea is on the final ballot for the 2018 Stoker Awards in the category of Superior Achievement in an Anthlogy.