Rating: 
Summary: The most scary intro I ever read
Review: The most scary intro I ever read.
Rating: 
Summary: Jules Verne + Clive Barker = falls a bit short of both
Review: This tale of humanity's discovery of a savage subterranean race should appeal greatly to those who enjoy highly-researched military-scientific novels, in the vein of Crichton or Alistair MacLean. Long has a very original and vividly-imagined fantastic vision of his underground world, and a seemingly intimate understanding of the workings of our military-industrial-powered surface world.However, I ended up being somewhat disappointed in the book. I bought it on impulse after reading the jacket and part of the first chapter while standing in the bookstore. Initially, it had the earmarks of a fascinating horror novel, albeit a bit gruesome for my usual taste, a la Dell's Abyss series. Unfortunately for me, the book's early implicit promise of insightful psychological terror-even supernatural occurrences-gives way to a rather mechanistically descriptive tale of strategy and exploration. Tantalizing hints of appalling human masochism, cruelty, and negligent insensitivity fade noiselessly to a dead end. A very lyrical and intriguing story of a captured human becoming a mad holy man among the subterraneans is shown only as a diminutive aside. Instead, the book features lots of seasoned military men engaging in stoic macho posturing of one kind or another, despite the addition of a semi-lapsed nun as a protagonist. Furthermore, while Long's writing is clear and straightforward, with occasional teasing forays into the darkly poetic, I was distracted by non-writerly errors. Although the plot and subplots are rigorously accurate, the symbolism is appropriate, and the main characters reasonably fleshed-out for the genre, Long makes "regular-guy" vocabulary mistakes. He uses "bemused" (puzzled) when he apparently means "amused," he repeatedly uses "enormity" to mean "enormousness" instead of "great wickedness or evil," (which could have been very useful given the subject matter,) and he noticeably overused the word "gracile" (pet word syndrome.) Long himself has veins of untapped subterranean resources. I would LOVE to see him write something purely imaginative and less scripted. To sum up:
Military, industrial, espionage, gory battle, scientific, "hard" sci-fi fans = YES!
Psychological thriller/horror, insightful dark speculative fiction fans = NO. Re cover art: very skillful and well-wrought, but the inside-cover depiction of one of the "savage" subterraneans was disturbingly African in appearance, especially given that the writing describes them as being pale and albino! In the context of our society's damnable history of associating African descent with brutality, this was a very questionable choice of illustration.
Rating: 
Summary: So close to being the ultimate horror/sci-fi/adventure epic!
Review: This was definitely an amazing book to read - once I started I couldn't stop. Loved the idea of another race of creatures living miles and miles beneath the earth's surface, and the possibility that they might have had a hand in many of mankind's "key moments"...Loved Ike and Ali and some incredibly intense moments in the dark with the hadals. Loved the descriptions of the various creatures living miles below us and what life must be like. I loved his creativity with certain historical reinterpretations and how the Hadals might have fit in. The reason I don't give this 5 stars is that I felt like the author lost sight of what he set up in the first 100 pages or so. It seems like he gave up on who/what Satan is and I would have liked to learn more about him, especially in the last 10 pages or so. I also wanted to learn more about Isaac. I would have also liked more Branch - he was kind of lost towards the end and didn't really serve any purpose, other than to possibly add something more to the "big twist" at the end. Is he or isn't he alive?????
All in all, I highly recommend the book - the intense, dark, horror elements were better than most pure horror books I read.
Looking forward to seeking out more of Mr. Long's books.
Rating:
Summary: A page-turner in every sense of the term...
Review: Well, maybe it's me. This book has a great, scary, philosophical comical tragical idea inside it -- but structurally it's an unholy mess. Beginning with some atmospheric, creepy tension-building, suddenly it rockets forward to an improbable/impossible set of circumstances -- as if the author is in too much of a hurry or unsure of how to morph the horror-story opening into a military procedural with sci-fi trappings, which seems the only place he's truly comfortable. Some of the writing is muscular and effective, especially the descriptions of physical suffering, but then there are the 800-pound gorilla elements: Eco-like fragments thrown in to please the intelligentsia. These appear almost at random and go nowhere. And some of the ideas are half-baked at best: after all, if a species can transfer consciousness from one body to the next, how can a civilization ever decline? What this book really needed was a better integration of the philosophical underpinnings with the adventure outline -- then you'd have something. That said, you will (1) not be able to stop reading it; (2) not soon forget it. For an altogether different experience but one which also affords some excellent and intense adventure writing, check out the NIGHT'S DAWN trilogy by Peter Hamilton (The Neutronium Alchemist et al) -- 'course, it too falls apart, but not until the very end...
Rating:
Summary: I had bad dreams, mission accomplished
Review: What a twist in reality. Simply loved this book. Did give me some scary nightmares. Very vivid, very real, well done.
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