What Katsu excels at, however, is the building of tension in the face of the unknown. A series of deaths, the fears of a strange illness, and a rash of burglaries causes a rush of paranoia to spread through the ship as passengers and crew begin to fear-perhaps justly-that the ship has been cursed by a vengeful spirit.Īs far as real terror goes, THE DEEP is somewhat tame. Ostensibly, we follow the ship maid Annie Hebbley, who’s thrust into a world of class expectation and aristocratic intrigue onboard the ill-fated ship. The mounting pressure of audience awareness of the historical facts of the tragedy meshes well with Katsu’s slow-burning gothic sensibilities. An air of doom lingers over the whole of the novel, with each passing day spent on board bringing us ever closer to destruction. The setting seemed gimmicky and unnecessary at first-why not just any luxury liner? why The Titanic?-but the longer the story continued the more I understood. Katsu exchanges the normal mansion of gothic ghost stories for the HMS Titanic, a move that I was cautiously wary of at the outset of the novel. If it works, it works, right? These kinds of stories are fun, no matter where you set them or what you do with the framework you’re given. Even Mike Flanagan’s update of The Haunting of Hill House stayed true to the formula while trying to subvert it. Take one spooky old mansion, add a cast of diverse characters, insert a smidge of class commentary, and voila! You can mix and match as you like, of course, but the core remains the same. Centuries have gone by without any real need to update the basics. It’s a tried and true formula that supports an almost endless array of plots and narrative threads inside of its creaky framework. Alma Katsu’s The DeepWho doesn’t love a good gothic ghost story?
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