3/9/24 10:11pm
my next book liveblog will be From Below by Darcy Coates!
No light. No air. No escape.
Hundreds of feet beneath the ocean's surface, a graveyard waits...
Years ago, the SS Arcadia vanished without a trace during a routine voyage. Though a strange, garbled emergency message was broadcast, neither the ship nor any of its crew could be found. Sixty years later, its wreck has finally been discovered more than three hundred miles from its intended course...a silent graveyard deep beneath the ocean's surface, eagerly waiting for the first sign of life.
Cove and her dive team have been granted permission to explore the Arcadia's rusting hull. Their purpose is straightforward: examine the wreck, film everything, and, if possible, uncover how and why the supposedly unsinkable ship vanished.
But the Arcadia has not yet had its fill of death, and something dark and hungry watches from below. With limited oxygen and the ship slowly closing in around them, Cove and her team will have to fight their way free of the unspeakable horror now desperate to claim them.
Because once they're trapped beneath the ocean's waves, there's no going back.
tag will be "bats reads from below" 🖤
3/9/24 10:41pm
yeah, i already like these people more, they understand the value of a good administrative assistant
3/10/24 11:02am
the lens of having to explain stuff as part of filming a documentary is such an engaging way to get your infodumping out of the way. you can present a lot at once with it still feeling fairly natural/not distracting because it makes sense in the scene
also i just really like specifically documentary-themed found footage horror sooo
3/11/24 2:42pm
hmm. okay. we have dual timelines. i don't have a lot of personal experience with them, but from what i've heard opinions on them are pretty split ba-dum tshh!
let's see... the book of speculation had dual timelines and i liked it. that one warhammer book i tried to read wasn't good, but it had a confusing fantasy calendar i didn't understand, which had a lot to do with it. maybe it's fine? we'll see.
if things get well & truly desperate i guess i could always just skip the bits with the timeline i don't like lol
3/11/24 2:47pm
ohhh nooooo aidan noooo this is worse than a last day before retirement speech
3/11/24 2:48pm
also is this not actually a dual timeline? did we just get a random flashback for no reason? it's tone-setting i guess but idk if it really does much service to the story if it's just a one-off
3/11/24 3:17pm
dude let vanna be weird & morbid, if i were a regular cave diver & about to go on a extreme deep-dive with a bunch of randos i'd probably write a lot of weird creepy stress-poems about it too
3/11/24 4:18pm
the flashbacks are a bit disorienting, which is probably (part of) the point, but they kinda kill the momentum/vibe of the main story
3/11/24 4:39pm
i'm really hoping we're not ramping up to some man of medan manchurian gold situation :/
3/11/24 5:03pm
ooo that's a bad idea don't do that
3/11/24 5:14pm
holy shit he actually survived? huh.
this part of the book has actually been weirdly choppy? like, we cut from the spooky ghost encounter to like halfway up and we're like "oh, just don't talk about it" but like, the encounter didn't even feel over? like what? and now we cut again to back on the boat
3/11/24 5:22pm
also i kinda thought taking the broken skylight up versus the planned dive route would have caused much more problems than it did?
maybe it's set up for later. or maybe it was entirely to have the ghost scare idk
3/11/24 5:29pm
the description of what happened via video playback back on the boat is much less interesting than if we'd just gotten to see it tbh
3/11/24 11:19pm
i've had this deep sea video on in the background while i read and it's been quite lovely https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t_S_cN2re4g
3/11/24 11:31pm
ooo we're splitting up, what could possibly go wrong lol
3/11/24 11:48pm
now the real question is, is this gonna be an rl stine fake-out or real genuine Ghost Peril
3/12/24 12:31am
so there is a second timeline and i've been formulating my thoughts as i go. i generally think my conclusion is that i sort of like them, but would probably prefer a version of the story where we only saw the main timeline. there's a lot going on that would be hard to convey in the main timeline, which would be missed, but again, i think the underwater terror vibes would be stronger if we kept the camera trained on the main event the whole time
3/12/24 12:47am
hey wait a second, just realizing it's been awhile since we got any updates on the sabotaged ROV plotline. i'm not necessarily complaining, i do like spending more time with the main story, but if you're gonna bring it up in the first place i would like to continue receiving updates
3/12/24 1:37am
i think my #1 complaint with this book, even more than the timeline quibbles, are these little pockets of time where we know less than the characters, for at times arbitrary reasons. it doesn't come up that much but it does bother me. like with the one incident i mentioned where we're told about a scene after the fact only a short while later via the characters watching video playback of it. like, there was no benefit to not just letting the scene play out, ya know? we don't necessarily need to know everything all the time but sometimes the withholding of specific info feels a bit cheap.
all that said i do believe it is high praise that that's my biggest issue. i really am enjoying this, despite mostly stopping to complain lol
3/12/24 1:42am
whyyyyy are you only making these decisions after you get in the water? shouldn't y'all have figured out you should get your shit straight on the surface by now?
3/12/24 2:02am
last time was a fake-out, but maybe this time we have real Ghost Peril?
3/12/24 2:05am
WE GOT GHOST PERIL BAYBEEE 🎉
3/12/24 3:11am
vanna is top-tier we love vanna
3/12/24 3:13am
i wanna keep going but i'm too sleepy to get through the last 100 pages :( so tomorrow then
3/12/24 10:34am
we're out of the ship and going up but there's a suspiciously large amount of pages left 👀
3/12/24 10:42am
oh nooo, we've been man of medan'd... but there are also real ghosts, so i guess it's fine
3/12/24 10:46am
that fucking moron's going back down for the ring
3/12/24 10:52am
so roy Did sabotage the ROVs!!! i'm so annoyed that we just never got back to that until now! i get sean was busy being a dick to vanna but still come on dude you had a mission!
3/12/24 10:53am
also fuck. roy could have brought this up earlier after the multiple close calls they'd had even before all the Ghost Peril. what a douche
3/12/24 11:13am
turns out vanna is top-tier and also gay! 🎉
3/12/24 11:19am
man this emotional bit with vanna would have really hit harder if we had just been allowed to see the cove/vanna convo when it happened
3/12/24 11:24am
finished the book! overall it was pretty good & i would recommend it. i don't think it's perfect, i've already discussed most of my complaints, but i think it's still fairly solid.
