The Descent

Rating:
Summary: Incredible
Review: This was one of my all time favorite books. Jeff Long begins the story in the middle of nowhere leaving lots of juicy unaswered questions for some time which keeps you turning pages. THe intricate story weaved among the characters that builds upon traditional religous Heaven and Hell beliefs was incredible. I couldnt put this book down I burned through it so fast. I was, however, dissapointed with the abruptness of the ending as I had become part of the expedition at the end and was left salivating for more story...

This is a 5 star read. I am utterly disappointed that the rest of Jeff Long's books are out of print (except Year Zero which was also an amazing page turner). Apparently he has one scheduled to come out in April, 2004...

Rating:
Summary: The Descent
Review: Hard to believe that a thriller this long could feel rushed or perfunctory at times, but it does. Still, what is presented is pretty gripping--though if ever a book got better as it went along, this one is it.

I found the opening sections of the book to be the most routine. The book jumps around the globe three times to establish that something--some terrible race of beings--is dwelling in the dark beneath our very feet. Beneath everyone's feet, that is...it doesn't matter where you are. The first encounter, taking place in underground tunnels, is a great stage-setter, but the sequence in Bosnia where creatures are detected routing around in a mass grave, plus the scene at the South African leper colony where the afflicted are allowing some of their number to be given up to something called "the Older Than Old", do not have the same impact. The novel feels like it is going to be composed of little tidbits, little morsels that resort to hints and gratuitous gore to keep running the same mysterious riff about unseen demons we've always subliminally acknowledged, preying on us from underground.

But then, the book starts to establish a flow. At least those chunked early bits do introduce us to the two main characters, Ali and Ike. What follows is a bit of a shock, in terms of the overall tenor of the story--the whole world learns that there is some kind of weird hell under Earth's crust, and somebody better get down there, fast, to make peace, or get them before they get us. The secret snatches of spelunkers by shadowy beings, the unsubstantiated reports of these creatures emerging from the depths...all that cloak-and-dagger stuff dissolves in a few chapters. The world learns it's US versus THEM.

"They" are called the hadals. And a group of scientists/historians on the surface conduct extensive research all over the globe to try and discover if the leader of these hadals is actually the living embodiment of what's known as Satan. Meanwhile, another team, this one made up of scientists and military personnel, heads underground to see what's what. Special guide for this mission is Ike, snatched by the hadal in 1988 (at the beginning of the book), enslaved and transformed into something perhaps more hadal than human, and hopefully trustworthy once free of his hadal masters.

The underground trek takes place throughout tunnels that are below the Pacific Ocean, reaching at least 8,000 fathoms. This part of the story picks up momentum, and unleashes new surprises, with every chapter. Watch for: ambushes, disease, mutiny, starvation, betrayal, phantom radio messages from the future, oceans under oceans, remains of lost hadal cities, river travel, strange flora and fauna, a secret bio-weapon smuggled down, team disintegration, a secret corporate agenda,and, of course, battle with the hadals. It's quite a trip; the underground sequences are the meat of the book.

Less gripping, but still intriguing, are the scenes from the surface, as scientists discover that this so-called Satan they wish to confront may not be sitting on some throne deep down in some cave somewhere; discoveries about the hadal's mental powers--mind-transference and reincarnation come into play, here--mean that Satan may be a lot closer than was thought. Satan could be among them, when he chooses.

This hints at the continual shocks offered by the story. If the book has a major flaw, it is hinted at in the early, "chunked" portions. Characterization shapes up fairly decently, but chapters of the book do sometimes feel like they float out on their own. What I mean is, what happens to Ali while underground in, let's say, chapter twelve, may be quite heart-rending, but by the next chapter we see her, there is no emphasis on how she has been affected by what happened. The book is always simply marching on--not such a bad thing in a thriller trying to set a fast pace, but at the expense of characters reacting to anything that didn't occur half an hour before. The book is only concerned with the Here and Now, in the extreme.

But, overall, it was quite marvellous at times. Perfect for fans of Michael Crichton's book Congo, or even the film Aliens, though I feel it does cover some of the same ground, and run some of the same tricks.

Rating:
Summary: Worth the time
Review: The other reviews are fair.I also noticed the drop off of the books story. I can say that i enjoyed it and plan to read his other book! It's hard to be perfect and he got close enough for me !

Rating:
Summary: Way too much presented in too few pages
Review: The Descent starts off like a bomb. It tells three mini stories, origins of the main players that are all excellent and exciting in their presentation. The story then expands to weave interesting subplots and does this for a good two hundred pages.

But then the story gets lost.

An awkward, corporate bad-guy story is introduced, a subterranean expedition team wanders around in the dark for pages upon pages doing nothing, a group of theologians posulates the identity of Satan. By book's end, there are several huge loose ends left dangling.

The final third of the book finally picks up the pace and moves the story along to it's climax. Unfortunately, the resolution of a complicated plot takes less than thirty pages to complete and it all feels rushed. It's a very disappointing end to a very promising beginning. There were easily two hundred pages which could have been substituted to better flesh out the Hadals, tribes of underground dwelling monsters. Easily, the Hadals are the most interesting aspect of the book. Much of their civilization is hinted at but never revealed. One of the initial main characters dives into the sub-planet only to be forgotten for one hundred and fifty pages and only mentioned in the last two pages of the book.

The back half of this book has all the markings of a poorly written pulp novel, but the build up is fantastic and very interesting. Unfortunately, the climax leaves the reader feeling very unfulfilled. Had the book been longer, to include proper resolutions to all the subplots, this would have been a great book.

Rating:
Summary: An idea from heaven, sent straight to hell.
Review: The story itself is great. The idea that beneath our feet exists a gigantic world of subterranean tunnels and caverns, inhabited by a race of possibly demonic creatures, is intriguing and exciting enough to ... {$$$} out of myself and several thousands of others.

The book begins with three strong initial chapters, set in the Himalayas, the Kalahari, and Bosnia, each detailing a main character's brush with the underworld. Two of these especially, the first and third, I hold up as models of how the book should have been written. These are gripping action scenes that tantalize you with the mystery and danger of Hell, and the consequences of human interaction with that world. They fired my imagination, so that I was envisioning dozens of ways the book could turn out. At this point in my reading I was quite convinced that my money had been well-spent.

Then I reached the hundred-page mark, and suddenly realized that I was bored. Then came two hundred, three hundred, and nothing had changed. By the time I had reached the banal happy ending, I was angry with myself for being lured in by glitzy back-cover descriptions and blurbs.

Any literate person can immediately recognize the story's parallels to Dante, Verne, and Milton. Long seems to think that by tossing in numerous references to these authors he negates his theft of their material. Not so. I don't mind when a book covers territory already explored by previous works, as long as it's done better in some way, or comes at it from a unique angle. Long does not; he merely modernizes what the above three had already written.

Technically, Long is a somewhat skilled writer. That is not to say that he is talented; his plot lacks drive and purpose as his prose lacks clarity and imagination. When he actually bothers to describe the underworld, you'll still have little idea what it's like. His abuse of sentence fragments, comma splices, and single-sentence paragraphs is shameful. Errors abound as he throws scientific terms which, while mostly used correctly serve no purpose other than create more holes in the plot (which in any case would not have made much sense anyway- Long overestimates human capacity for the suspension of disbelief). High-school students can trash his use of "prion," and I won't go into his geology. The obvious scientific problems with the admittedly exciting premise could've been dealt with in some manner other than Long's sloppy disregard.

The author's dictum is to "Show, not tell," but the book is content to serve us boring descriptions of what otherwise could've been exciting or meaningful events. Riots, wars, and exploration are treated almost like footnotes- surely the author could've got up close to the Helios journey instead of describing it from a distance. The detailed scenes that do occur on this journey, that form the backbone of the novel, are a world apart from the tense and evocative sequences that begin it. They're simply boring- even the action at the sea, the fortress, and inside the pit numbed rather than thrilled me.

On a slightly different note, the book is littered with the author's pretensions as a philosopher and a poet. He tries far too hard to write meaningful or beautiful sound bites, so that those gems he actually produces are lost in the clutter. Make no mistake, there are good bits in here. I point to the "Incident at Piedras Niegras" as a prim example, and it is by no means alone. But whether they are about the colonization, Hell, or the under-used society of the "hadals," they are almost always esoterica that have no bearing on the main plot.

Characterization is nil; those that weren't stereotypes were barely there at all. The relationship between Ali and Ike is ludicrous, as is Ali herself for the most part. Walker and Shoat could've been interesting characters, but we meet them so rarely that we know little more about them when the book finishes than we did when it began. The rest of the scientists and soldiers are background scenery, and I don't think Long himself knew what the hell he was doing with Branch. (I would like to know how Branch exhibited the deformities of the underworld before he ever entered the underworld, and that's only one of a number of similar questions I have.) I'm wary of speaking much about "Satan," but rest assured that Long's "cheap twist" manner of handling this potentially powerful concept will disappoint. The Beowulf scholars exist as only as Long's homages to the adventurous scholars of Jules Verne, and I'm almost angry at the way Ike is handled. The possibilities with this character are nearly endless. He's a counterculture mountaineer/slave/overseer/soldier/scout, for god's sake, with almost enough personal demons to fill this fictional hell. But he spends most of his time as a strong, silent love interest, and the rest as a prototypical action hero. Such a sad waste.

That's the best summary of this review I can give: wasted opportunities. The ideas of a subterranean world, a race of demons with a real-life Satan, a physical and spiritual descent into Hell- it's hard to see how you could fail to write an exciting and interesting novel. I didn't expect a masterpiece; only a good read. I got neither.

Rating:
Summary: Devilish good
Review: Fantastic. I loved it. I've been wanting to read a book that does some kind of justice to cave networks and the subterranean landscape. This book does more. Linking an underground, decayed civilization with the myths surrounding Hell was clever, and the infusion of science added backbone to the story.

I expected the characters to be one-dimensional, after reading some reviews, but upon reading the book I found them completely consistent. The role of Ali, admittedly, tends to be stereo-typically female, but I guess the story needed a "soft" character in contrast to the dysfunctional, almost psychotic anti-heroes such as Ike and Brand.

Extremely well written. Doesn't beggar the intelligence. The imagery Mr. Long evoked is stark, and often brutal, but his description of the underground can be stunning. Spelunkers and mythology lovers will have a devilish good time with this book.

Rating:
Summary: My time would have been better spent reading something else
Review: The only reason that I finished reading the book was just out of morbid curiosity. I kept telling myself that it had to get better; it had to come together somehow, somewhere - - But... sadly it never did. The book jumped around without any congruity to the storyline. The characters were poorly developed, hard to identify with, and hard to keep apart from each other. Some of the characters tended to bleed over into each other making it difficult to know who was who. Couple this with a disjointed storyline and you have the makings of a complete dud!. This is the first book that I have read by Jeff Long, so I will not totally rule him out - - - just yet. Everyone gets a second chance. Hopefully "Year Zero" will be a better read. It at least sounds interesting; but then again, so did Descent.

Rating:
Summary: Not bad...but could have been better...
Review: I would imagine that it is hard for a person to write about a military operation when they never served in the military. Jeff Long just doesn't get my attention with his idea of how an op works. The book has many good ideas, but doesn't carry all of them out very well. The military stuff just doesn't work...he is writing about things that he has seen on TV or read in books. He should have spent more time researching the military aspect, since it leans heavily on the operations of small units/fireteams.

The book is good if you can get past the poorly written military ops, the political correctness, and feminist agenda. The whole thing about the nun and her ideology is more a political statement than giving background into the character. None of the characters are really fleshed out very well.

On the whole, it is entertaining...but not really a great book. Great idea and awesome descriptions of the tunnels...but it is missing something.

One side note...when Long refers to Marines as "jarheads"...it just doesn't work. I spent 6 years in the Marines and never liked it when a civilian called me or anyone else a jarhead.

Rating:
Summary: One of the Best!
Review: This is one of the best books that I have read. I would higly recommend it. It is the kind of book that you do not want to put down after you start reading it.

Rating:
Summary: Totally original
Review: I was completely caught up in the premise of this book. From the very beginning, it was quite different than I had expected. Compared to Dirk Pitt's adventures which, though fun, are unbelievable, this world is as original in it's own way as Rutherford's "London". I did find that because the book is long and highly detailed, the resolution seemed longer than necessary as well as less colorful. Still a very satisfying read for anyone who enjoys a good long story to sink one's teeth into.