Reviewed by Carissa
TITLE: Down 
AUTHOR: Ally Blue
PUBLISHER: Riptide Publishing
LENGTH: 380 pages
BLURB:
Seven thousand meters below the ocean’s surface, the crew of the BathyTech 3 mineral mining facility has found something remarkable: a rock-like sphere of unknown material and origin.
For Mo Rees, the discovery calls to his inner explorer and adds color to his dull miner’s life. Even better than the promise of new knowledge is the unexpected connection he forges with Dr. Armin Savage-Hall, leader of the team brought down to study the thing.
For Armin, the object is the find of a lifetime. It could prove his controversial theories and secure his scientific reputation. And Mo is a fascinating bonus.
Then crew members start behaving strangely. Worse, they start to change: their eyes glow purple, their teeth sharpen. Then the violence begins, the brutal deaths. As BathyTech descends deeper into chaos, the surviving crew works desperately to find the cause of the horrors around them. What they uncover could annihilate the human race. And they can’t stop it.
REVIEW:
Mo has wanted to work in the deep of the ocean since he was a kid running around the blood-soaked streets of his home. And he loves being on BathyTech 3, working as a miner, even if the company can get a bit dull after months underwater. However, when something new and strange is found, and a group of scientist, led by Dr. Armin, come down to check it out, dull is smashed to peaces like a coke can at the bottom of the ocean.
But while Mo and Armin hit it off (and hook up) nearly moments after seeing each other, the object that Armin was sent to study sets off a series of strange and deeply troubling events. Soon the crew of BathyTech 3 is having to fight for their lives against something that cannot exist, but does. And if they are not careful, not only will no one on board survive, but they could very well damn the rest of the planet as well.
Ok. Wow. I really don’t know how to describe how I feel about this book. It’s a…. Yeah, I got nothing. Or, rather, I have lots of somethings I just can’t quite figure them out.
First off, I guess…this book is fucking freaky. Like the kind of story I usually take one look at and go running in the completely opposite direction from. It reminds me a lot of a movie I saw as a kid (I want to say it was called The Abyss but I might be misremembering the name) that went a long way (in conjunction with Jaws) in convincing me to never ever go into the ocean (I’m also a bit iffy about lakes and other large bodies of water, but for a different reason). So to be honest I have no fucking clue why I picked up this book. I could totally tell from the blurb what type of book it was…and yet, I still picked it up. Sometimes I think I need to sit my brain down and have a long conversation about not feeding my already overstuffed fears.
But for all the horror and downright creeptasticness of this story…it wasn’t bad. Which from me, is saying it was pretty damn good. I have to give myself a pep-talk to watch The Mummy; my threshold for horror is pretty damn low. The voices and things that these people keep seeing/hearing are written very well so that when Mo and Armin (and just about everyone else) start freaking the fuck out, you kinda do as well (hence why I have been jumping at shadows for the last four days).
The premise of this story was very interesting (and there are so many things I would like to say about it, but my god, the spoilers), though I have to say I spent a good portion of the story going “JUST CHUCK THE GODDAMN BALL INTO THE GODDAMN OCEAN AND RUNAWAY, YOU FUCKING MORONS.” I could have also done without the whole eyeball scene. Or, well, any scene where things that should not come out of the body come out of the freaking body! *shudders* They are really good scenes, but man am I going to be having nightmares about them for a while. (This, my people, is why I do not watch horror movies. I am about as squeamish as they get.)
I know this is kinda sounding like I didn’t enjoy the book, or it wasn’t good. But I did, and it was. I just guess I enjoyed it rather reluctantly. It left me feeling a bit (a lot) unsettled and uneasy, but I am thinking that was the whole point. This will never be my idea of light reading, but I can’t say I regret reading it. And for someone who likes horror a lot more than I do, I really recommend it. Even if I am a bit traumatized by that ending (which I can’t talk about, because SPOILERS!, but man I was totally ?!!??!!!).
So. Yeah.
RATING: 
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