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The next stop in my end-of-the-world reading marathon was The Deep by Nick Cutter. This is a well-executed thriller by an author whose previous novel The Troop was terrific. Cutter, pseudonym of Canadian author Craig Davidson, returns to gothic horror with style straight out of the Stephen King playbook, with the spectacular body horror of movies like The Thing or The Fly thrown in. But what was terrible and exciting in his previous novel is done to death here.

The novel opens in Guam, where veterinarian Dr. Lucas Nelson has been flown five thousand miles from his home in Iowa City on the dime of the U.S. government. The world has been ravaged by a virus dubbed The 'Gets; beginning with an outbreak of dark specks, the condition spreads (like the bruises on a banana as it turns overripe) until the patient starts to forget things, like where the car keys are. Ultimately, they forget what hot and cold feel like and eventually, why they need to breathe.

Luke is ferried to research station Hesperus which floats atop the deepest point in the ocean, the Mariana Trench, six miles below. Two miles under that in the Challenger Deep is the Trieste, a tube-like station constructed by robots. This is where Luke's brother, the prodigious molecular biologist Clayton Nelson, is working. A primitive gelatinous substance which Clayton has dubbed "Ambrosia" has been discovered on the ocean floor and promises a cure for every human disease, including the 'Gets, as well as immortality.

The Hesperus has received a transmission from Clayton asking for Luke to come home. An animal doctor who is estranged from his gifted brother, Luke's presence on the Hesperus is nevertheless seen as critical. His escort is Lt. Commander Alice Sykes, a jocular servicewoman who asks Luke to call her "Al". Before they submerge, Luke is briefed on an unsettling development. One of the three scientists in the Trieste, or what's left of him, has surfaced. Madness and a high tolerance for pain are the only explanations for what might have happened, along with a message written in the submersible in blood.

THE AG MEN ARE HERE COME HOME WE NEED YOU COME HOME

Luke has agreed to venture to the deepest point on earth because he has nothing left to lose. His son Zachary disappeared seven years ago during a game of hide and seek with his father in the park. Luke's wife left him and then the 'Gets set upon the globe. Luke has a closet full of skeletons. In addition to his missing and presumed dead son, there's emotional abuse he endured from his mother, "Battle Axe" Beth, a prison trustee who went on disability, grew obese and set out to torment her youngest son. Then there are memories of a boogeyman that plagued Luke and later his son, which Zach called the "Fig Men" off his father's assurance it was just a "figment".

The Deep follows a trend in science fiction that I find annoying: bloat. Davidson introduces a worldwide pandemic and abandons it. He switches gears from the apocalypse into gothic horror, with the claustrophobia of the Challenger Deep. The novel steps all over the intellectual property of at least two first contact novels turned film -- Solaris and Sphere -- with scientists encountering an alien entity that manifests their nightmares. Even if Davidson had forgotten about the 'Gets, at best, the novel would've been highly derivative.

Davidson isn't done borrowing from other material, some of it beneath a writer of his talent. The setting has what could be called "Camp Crystal Lake Echo", where a character finds themselves alone in a remote setting and feels the urge to call out to a friend, thereby alerting the killer exactly where they are. I lost count how many times Luke called out, and this is a character who's seen horror movies like Alien. That annoyed me.

My biggest problem with the novel is how much woe and misfortune Davidson dumps on his main character. The battle of wills that take place between a young Luke and his cruel, obese mother might've been the backbone of a much better book. There's a sinister "tickle box" or toy box that Battle Axe Beth buys for her son, with the faces of clowns painted on the side. Creepy box and creepy clowns are scary, but piling a missing child, a failed marriage, an estranged brother and a global pandemic on top of that is overkill.

The Deep is executed with precision. It's spooky in spots, even when Davidson channels Uncle Stevie by relating observations by the main character to some event in his past; this gets repetitive, but isn't what sinks the novel. There were too many ideas, too few characters and something else that bothered me: abuse to animals. I'm not squeamish when it comes to fictional violence, but what was noticable in The Troop (lab chimps and a sea turtle do not fare well) is really made obvious here, with dogs, guinea pigs, mice and ... bees? Like everything else here, it it's too much.