THE DEEP

An aimless young man is swept up in a fantasy adventure in Sheriff’s debut novel.

Poor, widowed Mrs. Anderson calls a man named Stanley about her worries over her son, Jason. She fears that he’s “gotten himself involved in some shady business” involving a get-rich-quick scheme engineered by a mysterious woman named Talina. Stanley tries to reassure her, guessing that Jason, his longtime friend, is simply distracted by his engineering projects and will be back in general circulation soon enough. Stanley, it turns out, has his own problems, including the sudden reappearance of his hated father: “He had never forgotten the broken home that had been his childhood,” Stanley recalls, “the bruises that had devoured his soul before his body.” However, Jason and Mrs. Anderson are like family to him, so he agrees to find out what Jason is up to; he thinks about how his friend has always been intensely focused while Stanley has always felt adrift. Much to his surprise, Stanley witnesses Jason being kidnapped, and he soon finds himself abducted by the same people, who are members of a mysterious cabal. Before long, they toss Stanley overboard off their strange, luminous craft. He assumes he’s going to die, but as he’s miraculously rescued by a woman named Lythea, he finds that he has the ability to breathe underwater. He soon embarks with the stranger on an adventure to rescue Jason from the Sirens who’ve spirited him away, and she introduces him to a fantastic world beneath the waves. Dark revelations follow about Jason’s fate and Stanley’s father.

Over the course of this novel, Sheriff relates the story of Stanley’s adventures, which include many supernatural elements, and Jason’s fate with a good deal of narrative energy. She also carefully and effectively reveals the various aspects of her fictional world, piece by piece, to keep readers intrigued. However, the work frequently has a tendency toward clichés (such as “all hell broke loose” and “green-eyed monster”) and offers a good deal of purple prose along the way. “He reached out in despair to check for the metal band that coiled itself around his ring finger,” she writes at one point early on, for example, referring to a ring; at another point, she sets a scene with a sentence that awkwardly begins, “The sunset extended its last exhales of rays over a row of sailing yachts….” The overall flatness of Stanley’s characterization will likely provide another impediment to readers’ enjoyment of the story; as the narrator, he’s a major focus of the book, but he’s among the least interesting characters in it despite the many intriguing things that happen to him. All that said, Sheriff’s imagining of the fantasy kingdom that Stanley encounters, and the enemies and allies whom he picks up along the way, is passionately enthusiastic, and the story’s fast pace will hold many readers’ attention. The tone of the book’s final segment is likely to surprise many readers as well.

An imaginative nautical fantasy hampered by uneven execution.