They called it the Event.
The Event changed everything. The earthquakes came first, including the Big One, shattering the Pacific Rim and plunging the world into chaos. Then the seas came, the skies opened, and the never-ending rain began. But as bad as that was, there is something worse.
The Rising has begun.
A lone man who abandoned the world for his addictions searches a waterlogged Austin for something, anything to cling to. Little does he know that something else searches for him.In the Sonoran Desert, the downtrodden of the world search for a better life north of the border, only to see the desert become an ocean: an ocean that takes life and gives death.
In the woods of Alabama, survivors escape to Fort Resistance, but soon discover that it isn’t just the horrors of the deep places of the world that they need to fear; but rather a new and more deadly pestilence that has grown in their own ranks.
In England, it’s too late to fight, and all that’s left is to survive. One man reaches for his own humanity, but what to do when humanity is an endangered species?And in the Pacific, He is rising.
In The Abyssal Plain: The R’lyeh Cycle, authors William Holloway, Michelle Garza and Melissa Lason, Brett J. Talley, and Rich Hawkins have created a timely and uniquely modern reimagining of the Cthulhu Mythos.
I really, really wanted to love this one. A great idea, four novellas all connected by “the Event” or the thing that ultimately wakes dead Cthulhu from his dream state in his house at R’lyeh. Cool, right?
Well, ultimately for me, only a little.
Here’s my thing when it comes to Lovecraftian horror…I love it. Hell, I’ve written it. But for me, it only really works when you work within the framework, or respect the mythology that Lovecraft built (and yes, I’m also aware that his mythos doesn’t necessarily all fit together well, but still).
And after digesting the stories in this book for a bit, I feel that this is the central issue of why this didn’t quite work for me. Cthulhu is name-checked a few times, but overall, the Great Old One mostly hangs around off stage and, while his influence is felt through the four stories, he plays virtually no direct role.
Instead, we’re left with several characters fighting “squids” that have evolved under some influence from their god. And while the stories are interesting, I just found myself waiting for the mind-numbing lumbering of some monstrosity into the playing field that only sorta kinda happened.
And while it’s always cool to bring modern military tactics up against an ancient evil, once the reader got the point that our weapons were mostly ineffective, that part was played out.
Through the stories, we’re instead given some very real, but mostly either utterly unlikeable characters (the heroin junkies and corrupt politicians in the first entry, the criminals in the second), or reasonably banal characters (the reluctant soldier in the third entry, the religious martyr in the final one) and, frustratingly, not a lot of them have any agency in any of the stories, seeming to lurch from situation to situation.
We do get some backstory on what the Event was and how it happened. We get some soft explanation on what’s going on with squids and why they’re morphing. We’re given less explanation on the other thing that’s morphing…it just kind of happens, and it seemed to serve mostly to save a couple of characters more than play a large role in either the ongoing story, or the finale.
And while I’d hoped for some sort of point to all of this—because the preceding stories did feel like they were tiptoeing to some conclusion in the final one—it never really coalesced into anything definitive.
Stuff happens. Bad stuff happens. Worse stuff happens. Weird stuff happens. The end.
And yes, if that ain’t pulled right out of the Lovecraftian playbook, I don’t know what is, but still, we’re almost a century past Howard Phillips now, and I’d like to see some continuation and exploration of the mythos. I got a little excited when the Christian God was thrown up against Cthulhu, but again it kind of didn’t go anywhere.
So, overall, while it was well-written and had some good stuff in there, overall, it didn’t quench my thirst the way I’d hoped.
As TV Guide used to state about certain movies, this one could be considered “an okay time-waster.”
