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Customer Reviews of The Descent

"The Descent" ascends my expectations!
If you're looking for a book to read which is a page-turner and very different from anything you've read recently, this is for you! When I first ordered "The Descent" off of amazon, I wasn't sure what to expect. But the book kept me enthralled for countless days and nights. Jeff Long does an excellent job of character development (there are enumerous players in the story, but the ones that matter, you realy start to feel for). Best of all is perhaps Ali, the nun in search of both her way and for the origin of human language. Several readers have remarked on the great start the story has. I would agree; the first four chapters were fantastic. The book takes a brief fall, however, after this as the discovery of hell under earth and its human reaction is quickly blazen through in several pages which somehow encompasses global war and the deaths of millions. The book recovers nicely afterwards though, and you will find yourself deeply interested as The Jules Vernes Society searches for their knowledge, Ali searches for her word, Ike searches for his meaning, and The Beowolf Circle searches for their Satan. This is recommended reading for a twist of something different, and I look forward to more coming from Jeff Long.

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Jules Verne + Clive Barker = falls a bit short of both
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.

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The most scary intro I ever read
The most scary intro I ever read.