What Lurks Beneath by Ryan Lockwood

What Lurks Beneath by Ryan Lockwood

This novel starts with a bang as two divers get surprised by and eaten by a giant octopus. It’s a very well-crafted and exciting scene. Unfortunately, that was the last bit of excitement for quite a while as Lockwood transitions into super-slow-motion for much of the rest of the novel. Things simply do not happen. What we get instead is the heroine worrying quite a lot about the state of her relationship with her boyfriend and heading off to the Bahamas to look for a cephalopod which she somehow doesn’t connect with the death of four people—two of them the divers whose camera tells her that the cephalopod exists. It just didn’t make any sense.

 

In the final analysis the tiny bit of information about real octopi that Lockwood gives us didn’t justify reading this book. Perhaps if Lockwood had cut out half the prose and thrown out the touch of mysticism which is supposed to explain why our heroine isn’t killed by the giant octopus (and it really is huge) this would have been a good book.