Jeff Long

It would be too obvious to say "Dantesque" or Inferno in the same breath as Jeff Long's dizzying The Descent, as so many of the latter's blurbers have, and it would be misleading, anyway. Yes, The Inferno and The Descent both deal with the powers of Perdition, in their varied, and equally horrific, descriptions of what happens down there. But Dante's Hell exists in a poet's vision of the relocation of unregenerate souls into eternal torment after their deaths; while Jeff Long torments his show more characters in the right-here, right-now, pitch darkness underground. Their agony is all too corporeal, whether they've sinned against God or not.

The Descent has far more in common with Jaws than epic medieval poetry. The Descent indeed, is a marriage of Jaws and Journey to the Center of the Earth. Heaven, in effect, stands up Hell at the altar in this wickedly divine Descent not to the center of the earth, but to the very core of humankinds most archetypal, universal fear: the dark, and the demons who swim in it.

There's no great white sharks striking terror from the murky depths in The Descent; no, there's worse, much worse: there's great albino "hadals" disembowelling you alive from the cavernous depths. Once they've disembowelled you alive, they just might make a rope out of your intestines, using your innards to tie you to a stake, so that you, a) won't escape; and, b) can sample your flesh while it's still fresh, like you were human-sushi!

Are you scared? You should be. Because The Descent is so scary it will scare the Hell in to you, not out. Read The Descent and Jaws will seem a guppy by comparison. After all, a great white shark can only bite and eat you, but a great albino hadal can not only bite and eat you, but since they're amphibious and bipedal, they can slyly hide beneath the surface of what appears at first blush a tranquil, phosphorecently lit underworld ocean; but as you wade into that primeval, peaceful ocean ... up thrusts a wooden spear so fast and so fiercely and aimed so precisely it enters your anus unscathed before it impales the back end of your butt hole and punctures your abdominal cavity's wall ramming up past your kidneys and straight for your heart, so that you die instantly, standing up, having become a veritable homo sapien shishkebob, held in the hateful hands of one hungry hadal.

"Hadal" comes from the Latin, "homo hadalis," a team of scientists postulate, an evolutionary offshoot or hybrid of homo erectus and homo sapien. But all you need to know is that hadals come from Hell, the Hell waiting for you inside that cave, that mineshaft, or that archaeological dig. So obey those signs please ... and KEEP OUT!

That Legion of demons that tormented Regan and those two Jesuit priests in The Exorcist, would get their collective, possessive asses kicked by a single hadal.

Just ask the 150 members of the Helios scientific expedition sent to explore the theorized passage underneath the Pacific Ocean's floor that's hoped will connect the Galapagos Islands with New Guinea. Think of the logistic and power-opportunities available for the first-taking should such a passage be found. But what if the tyrannical head of Helios has ulterior motives for the expedition? Well, then maybe the mercenaries and the military and the scientists and the nun (yes! a nun) hired on board, and kept in line by tyrant's son, Shoat, have a secret, underestimated defense weapon hidden up their sleeves themselves: A half-human/half-hadal evolutionary cross breed as their guide? Could it be? And what about Satan? Whole role does the Devil play in all of this? Don't tell me Satan is a sshhhh you be quiet, 'Frique! Don't spoil the surprise! But do insert the mad laughter here.

Will all, uh, Hell inevitably break loose in The Descent? Maybe not all of Hell, but maybe all of Hell-in-the-flesh: Homo hadalis!

Bats belong in caves, Intrepid Reader, not you. So stay out of them! You've been warned. And remember what Dante Alighieri said about Jeff Long's novel (and tremble): "Abandon all hope, ye who read The Descent." show less

A lot of Science-fiction—even a lot of Golden Age science-fiction—lacks a genuine sense of exploration, and the awe that comes with it. The Descent does not have this problem. An odyssey into the bowels of the Earth that feels at time like a Michael Crichton horror novel, the bleak underground frontier of Jeff Long's infamously polarising story of religious mania, impossible ecosystems, and inner-Earth colonialism scratched an itch for discovery that I've only previously had scratched by show more Blindsight and Rendezvous With Rama.
I could feel the gentle warmth and reptile texture of the cave walls. I could hear the almost imperceptible ambient rumble of tectonic plates crushing into one-another, and the amniotic drip, drip, drip of ancient waters forming stalagmites. I could taste the hot mineral tang of moist cave air.
There is an erotic, suicidal allure to the thought of getting lost in the veins beneath—of losing yourself to the womb of Earth and becoming part of its slow, billion year long ecosystem of flowstone and chemical erosion. The Descent captures this allure with such beauty that it feels almost like it's breaking an ancient, unspoken taboo. show less

This book was an interesting surprise: a unique and entertaining (if appropriately dark) romp through an improbably congruent corporeal Hell, which manages to creatively retcon everything from the Shroud of Turin and Dante's Inferno to the origins of proto-language and human evolution.

I heard about it from a random comment on the internet, by someone who stumbled across this by mistake while seeking a novelization for the 2005 spelunking flick of the same name. As far as I can tell there is show more no explicit connection, although the two stories have enough overlap to make you wonder if there wasn't at least some uncredited/subconscious cross-pollination going on.

In any case, the novel was an lively cross between Jules Verne's "Journey to the Center of the Earth" and Clive Barker's "Cabal", with bits of Lincoln & Child's "Reliquary", Pérez-Reverte's "Club Dumas," and Salvatore's Underdark thrown in for color (infra/uv-only, natch).

Note that the comparison to Clive Barker is apropos -- Long's depictions of physical mutilation ("flensing," in Vernor Vinge vernacular) are frequent and explicit, and sensitive readers (one might say "sensible") will be justifiably repulsed by the rampant and seemingly gratuitous trespass of social taboos. Exploitative cheese this may well be; yet not, in the final analysis, pointless -- there is a rhyme and reason to the gradually revealed subterranean subtext, which ultimately lifts the novel above its basest peers. show less

A refutation of The Descent's evolution from horror novel to Crichtonesque sci-fi thriller, Deeper breaks apart the prior novel's science-fiction explanations, revealing them to be little more than post-hoc rationalisations for phenomena both ancient and irreducible.
Where The Descent posits that ecosystems can evolve to fill any niche, Deeper responds by asking why evolution exists in the first place.
No matter how many ways you find to explain a ghost; a ghost is still a ghost. There comes show more a point where you're just rationalising the impossible to stop yourself from going mad. show less