Andrea's Reviews > Fathomless

In honour of Shark Week, I picked up Fathomless - a new deep sea thriller featuring no other but C. megalodon. I was so excited! To be honest, I did not expect literary genius here, but rather an action-packed adventure with lots of bigass sharks chomping on unsuspecting humans. While I did get kind of what I was looking for plot-wise, I really REALLY hated the characters.

Unfortunately a lot of the action was narrated through the dialogue, which was not one of the book's strongest points. To be honest, I couldn't stand interactions between any of characters. They felt stiff and pointless, and rambling... At no point in the story could I find myself really gripped by terror, mostly because I did not care whether these people survived or not. After a while they all blended in and sounded the same. The so-called experts were also not very convincing. The scientists were reckless and willing to mislead their colleagues in the name of research, disregarding any ethical, moral, or safety concerns. To think of it, the only people who emerged unscathed from this were people of questionable moral compass.

The romance between two main characters was also so laughable and overdone. When are we going to drop this whole "I'll pretend to hate you, but I secretly still have hots for you" routine? The scenes between them could be written by a juvenile, but at least a juvenile has an excuse of inexperience in real-life relationships to write anything convincing. Some of the writing made me cringe so bad: "She knew she needed him. Probably always had, but now more than ever." Seriously? Gag.

Other examples of odd choice of words: "Jack said, his brows snapping together." "Cate licked lips that had suddenly gone dry." Whaaaat?

Now let me address the Russian-ness of this book. Why?!! Why did the author go down that 90's action movie road, where all Russian characters are just cartoony stereotypes guzzling vodka and being awkwardly aloof? In this day and age it should be considered offensive. If you want to include foreign characters into your book, at least have the decency to research the culture and language properly. I lost track how many really bad, easily-avoidable mistakes the author made. Every time I read misspellings like "Prusalka", or a misused random words, or an obviously made up name, I wanted to burn the book in a raging ball of fire. Maybe if the shark also wore a shapka and danced a trepak across the seven seas I'd be more entertained by the comedic self-awareness. Or maybe if there was a scene like this:



A book of great ideas that was spoiled by the idiotic characters. Also once the megalodon surfaces, there are a ton of plot elements being borrowed from the fellow giant shark thriller Meg. I thought this would be a new guilty pleasure of mine, but it turned out to be a bummer. The editor should have been harder on Mr. Beck.