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The Descent

The Descent

List Price: $7.99
Your Price: $7.19
Product Info Reviews

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Rating: 4 stars
Summary: Hang on for the ride
Review: From the moment the characters find a body with mysterious tattoos... To when one by one they disappear... To when they find out what is below the surface of the earth... You will be totally engrossed. This book was awesome. The concept was well thought out & you get pulled into the story. It is a very long book & sometimes I felt a little lost, but it was well worth the effort. Highly recommended.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: Excellent Read!
Review: This was an excellent book. I could not put it down. Highly recommended.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: Yeeks! A wild joyride to Hell.
Review: Wildly imaginative, and yet familiar - like a childhood nightmare brought to life. This is a roller-coaster of a book that begs to be a big-budget movie, packed with CGI gargoyles and other hellbound lifeforms. A coherent and consistently compelling tapestry of multiple plotlines, with a surprise ending that defies your best guess. I'm not a sci-fi fan, but I am a fan of scary rides and I loved this book.

Rating: 4 stars
Summary: Well worth your time
Review: The Descent is an intelligent, thoughtful novel. It's one of those books that you read straight in two sittings because it is so gripping. I would, however, skip his follow-up, Year Zero, and try We All Fall Down or the Stand instead, Long drops the ball on his follow up novel and both of these books cover similar ground in a much better fashion.

Rating: 4 stars
Summary: Reading this is like a wild ride! It begs to be a movie.
Review: I shared this book with four co-workers, none of us with much in common, and everybody was so drawn into it that we'd talk about it, chapter by chapter, around the coffee machine each morning - the way people usually talk about a movie or TV. The beautifully atmospheric "sets" (it's impossible to read this without imagining it on the big screen) to the irony of corporate America delving into Hell to mine its minerals, this book is so richly entertaining and so tense that we were all hooked - including one co-worker who is an avid reader of high-brow stuff; his office partner who used to brag that he never reads; and even me, a woman who usually doesn't enjoy ski/fantasy stuff. The Descent 5 stars, but I'm ticked off that the author's new book isn't a sequel...After all, there is one more level left to descend...

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: Definitely worth your time
Review: I used to be an avid reader, but as of late, family/career issues have been keeping me from doing much reading. I bought this book on a recommendation and couldn't put it down. There were about 200 pages left when things really started rocking and rolling and I stayed up till 3AM on Sunday night to finish it. It left me wanting more, wondering what happened next. I can't wait to dig into Year Zero tonight. No real insight in this review, just a big recommendation.

Rating: 2 stars
Summary: Like an engine that just won't catch
Review: This book works on the premise that the surface world (land and sea) is not the only inhabited portion of our planet. Bypassing the hollow-Earth idea, Long instead imagines an incredible network of tunnels that line the entire Earth's crust. These tunnels are inhabited by a race later known as Hadals.

The book begins well enough with discovery and foreshadowing. But then it stops. More build-ups along the way have the same result, build-up and then nothing.

Long seems to have a strange idea about how the world's population reacts to the discovery of such a system of tunnels; they move in. For years!

Eventually we learn of a historic basis for Satan; a very-long lived Hadal. An expedition sets out to find him.

The book's so-called climax ends with an attempt to exterminate the Hadals using prions (those nasty beasties responsible for such things as mad cow disease). There is no mention, hint or anything of prions nasty habit of crossing species. Although Long makes no mention of it, the world is doomed in his book.

A lot of pages full of fits and starts with no real payoff.

Rating: 4 stars
Summary: A Must Read
Review: What a great book. I haven't been scared by a book in a long time, but this one did it. The first five chapters hook you in. I started reading it late one night and got halfway through before I had to close my eyes to sleep. I had a fitful sleep that night, and woke up in a cold sweat--what a scary book! Jeff Long portrays a vivid world, where the hadals occasionally come above ground for their sacrifices and food. I could totally picture the underworld. I told my family how scared I was reading the book, and they laughed at me, but when they actually read it...they got scared too! I highly recommend this book if you're into horror/sci-fi/apocolyptic tales.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: Fantastic!
Review: The discovery of an underground world and the Hadal civilization hide into the shadows for million of years force a group of scientifics and mercenaries to go into the center of the Earth in an expedition full of greed, curiosity and expectation with two different purposes: Hellios Corp. to destroy the underground civilization and colonize it later to obtain profits and The Beowulf Society with the purpose of prove and discover if Satan live underground as a sole ruler of the Hadal civilization. A novel so fantastic and complete that has a little of everything, from archaeology, history, theology, philosophy, adventure, science-fiction, action, suspense to terror. I strongly recommend it because it is fanciful, great, fabulous and terrific at the same time.

Rating: 4 stars
Summary: Enjoyable, but Preston/Child are more skillful
Review: Jeff Long follows Michael Crighton's "Sphere" and Douglas Preston & Lincoln Child's "Relic" in fusing the almost-supernatural with the half-fictional-science on such a grand and involved scale that the reader is inexorably drawn in.

Long still needs to hone his craft, though, to catch up with Lincoln/Child. His sense of pacing is off, with events falling over each other in a confusing jumble at first, then lazily shambling along as the story progresses. His characters aren't injected with the same life and dimension of Crighton or Lincoln/Child, but are certainly not dull. His scientific elements, however, are as dazzling to a laymen like myself as any others I've seen. The Hadals are some of the most diverse , dangerous, and innovative monsters since Jurassic Park's dinosaurs, Sphere's Jerry, and the Relic monster.

Another reader suggested this book would have made a suitable trilogy, which I wholeheartedly agree with. This might have resolved the pacing issues, making the discovery and colonization of Hell Vol. 1, the Helios trek Vol. 2, and the confrontation Vol. 3. A trilogy of that scope might then have supplied us with a latter day Star Wars or Lord of the Rings.


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