Into the Drowning Deep (Rolling in the Deep, #1)

by Mira Grant

It seemed the public’s thirst for cryptozoological fiction thinly veiled as fact was insatiable.

The Atargatis sailed off the map, into a section of the sea that should have been labeled “Here be monsters.”

Nature abhors a form that cannot be repeated.

Everything ends.

Only fools sail where so many have been lost.

Do I think they found mermaids? Yes. Of course I do. And I think the mermaids ate them all.

The tourists were seeing everything for the first time. Through their eyes, she could do the same. She could be amazed by things that might otherwise become less amazing, and she’d never be jaded, and she’d never forget how much she loved the hammered silver shine of the horizon.

if mankind had any obligation left to the sea that had been its birthplace, it was preserving the ones who’d stayed behind.

“If I don’t have it by the end of the week, I’ll have to come back and ask about it,” said Tory, in her sweetest tone. “I guess I might wind up talking to some people about whales.” “That’s blackmail.” “You just fired me. I think I’ve earned a little blackmail.”

“You still chasing mermaids, Vic?” he asked. “I’ve never been chasing mermaids,” she said. “I’ve only ever been chasing Anne.”

The oceans were still the great unknown: with so many fledgling marine biologists switching to climate science and meteorology when the die-offs began, and with so many others going straight into conservation, the ones who remained didn’t have the manpower to chart everything that was out there.

The cameras she needed were smaller, less reliable, and almost entirely pointed at the Mariana Trench.

She’d lived on ramen noodles and dried seaweed sheets before.

Can we please stop glamorizing a diet like this?

They’d always been haunted by the ghosts of Steinbeck and Cannery Row, those two great icons of the Great Depression. Now they were also haunted by the coastal towns that hadn’t been so lucky, by all the pieces of a dying way of life.

They hadn’t been able to stop or slow climate change, but they had been blessed with a high concentration of scientists, drawn by the Monterey Bay Aquarium and its many conservation programs. Faced with the idea of losing that research site, those same scientists had set themselves against the problem with an iron will. They had chased funding, pursued grants, and encouraged innovation. As a result, while the rest of the state was falling into despair, the people of Monterey were building as fast as they could, throwing lines into the future and hoping they would hold.

The ocean’s potential to supply humanity with freshwater seemed limitless. But the rain forests had seemed limitless once, as had the redwoods. It was hard not to look at the plants and guess at the shape of an as-yet-uncharted future looming out of the fog, too distant to see clearly, but coming closer all the time.

Of all the things Tory had to worry about in this world—and she had plenty, thanks to her fondness for causes anyone else would have been willing to let go—the future of her parents was not among them.

He was surrounded at all times by strong-willed women, and sometimes the best way to deal with them was to step back and let them work through the obstacles they presented to themselves, rather than throwing up any of his own.

“You know she’s wasting her potential.” “I do.” “Then why—” “Because it’s her potential to waste.”

“We made her—and God, didn’t we do a remarkable job of that?—but that doesn’t mean we get to dictate what she does.

“She’s an adult. You can’t stop her. Learn to accept it, or we might lose her anyway.”

Locals knew to stay on the side streets and in the districts well away from the water, where a pizza wouldn’t necessarily lead to bankruptcy, and where they wouldn’t have to listen to overstimulated, sunburned children whine their way through dinner.

“Studying the ocean forces you to be poetic, because we haven’t worn all those ideas and concepts soft around the edges yet,” said Luis. “The language is still mired in the maritime, and I don’t know that it’s going to catch up anytime soon.”

Nothing that reminded them, as a family, of Anne was allowed to be forgotten; she was the ghost at every table, and they’d keep her with them forever if they could.

“You think something killed them?” asked Katherine. “Unless aliens are stealing our whales,” quipped Luis.

if it’s not an answer, if it’s not the piece you’ve been looking for, don’t let it break you.”

Luis looked at her worriedly as he unlocked the car. “You’re making the scary face again.” “Which one?” “The one that says you’re going to burn down the world if that’s what it takes to get what you want.” “It’s good to know I’m easy to read.”

Anne was never going to have that. The least Tory could do was solve the mystery of why not.

If Tory couldn’t make Imagine apologize for taking her sister away, she was damn well going to make sure the world knew the truth.

Scientists liked to argue about discoveries almost as much as they liked to make them, and arguing about someone else’s discoveries was the best game of all.

The seas of the world were a vast and interconnected graveyard, every inch riddled with bones and haunted by the ghosts of the lost.

THIS is why I would recognize Seanan McGuire's writing under any penname.

She loved the ocean—she always would—but it needed to give back as much as it had taken from her, even if it could never return her sister.

Some of the shorter researchers couldn’t get the lights to come on, and had to be escorted to the bathroom after closing time.)

She’d been tackling waves too big for her and problems beyond her pay grade since she was a child. She wasn’t going to let fear take her now.

The Atargatis was a tragedy—one the world has, by and large, allowed to be forgotten. The footage is dismissed as false; the tragedy becomes an unavoidable accident. The word hoax overtakes the much less pleasant slaughter. There was no hoax. The footage is real.”

If she was focusing on the pain, she wasn’t going to hit the man from Imagine with a chair.

preparations have been under way for years, only waiting for the science to catch up with the ambition.

The theme of human women being transformed by the combination of grief and drowning continued in the myth almost to the present day.”

The majority of mermaid stories written after this fable took root have shown this same sensibility—the idea that somehow life on land is superior.

she was a shadow, a silhouette, a conversation that began and ended in comfortable darkness.

Some flaws are the key to a Scooby-Doo mystery. Other flaws are necessary for a thing to be realistic.

Reality is much less convenient than fiction. People don’t introduce themselves every time they see someone that they already know. Mascara doesn’t magically reapply itself between takes.

“Yeah, well, the field of mermaid science is booming, in that ‘she’s clearly insane but the students love her and she works for peanuts’ sort of way. I may not have any credibility, but I have tenure, and that’s more than I can say for you.”

Because I’d love to contact security. You never need to get me another birthday present if you make me contact security.”

The best predators always learned how to masquerade as things that wouldn’t seem threatening. That was how they got close enough to strike.

“If something should happen, God forbid, I need to be able to say, without fear of perjury, that the motives behind the trip were pure.

The world just doesn’t like the answers we’ve been able to provide.”

Each new wave of humanity found itself crashing onto a beach that was a little more cluttered from what had come before, a little more damaged from the carelessness of others.

Earth would survive whatever humanity did to it. Humanity might not.

The constant pain was a side effect he could live with, given the alternatives. Most of the time, it was manageable, save when the damaged and regrown nerves began firing wildly, sending messages of agony shooting along his spine. Sadly, those periods were unpredictable; sometimes he could be fine for days, dealing with the sort of low-grade pain that would have been unimaginable once, but was now merely the cost of doing business. Other times, he’d be unable to stand without screaming.

LOVE chronic pain rep, especially when it puts into words what it's like to live with it