Plunge

The Dereleth was a state-of-the-art mapping/drilling ship that went down near the edge of the U.S./Russia aquatic border nearly 40 years ago.  Everyone had assumed it was lost until a tsunami caused it to surface on an atoll and its emergency distress signal to reach the world at large.  While the fact that the Dereleth is now hung up on an island whose ownership is disputed by the U.S. and Russia makes recovering it a politically tricky situation, its owner, the Rococo Corporation, does not want to wait.  The son of their president was one of the 32 crewmen who were lost when the Dereleth went down and it’s up to their representative, David Lacome, to bring it home.  Which is why he’s recruited a crack team of divers and salvagers to get in and out before world powers have noticed.  While this seems like a simple enough situation, no one on the team ever stopped to consider whether or not anyone on the ship could still be alive after all this time…

“Plunge” follows “Basketful of Heads” as the second title Joe Hill wrote for his “Hill House” imprint at DC.  While they are very different books — both are horror, but the latter is supernatural-tinged while this has a weird sci-fi bent to it — “Plunge” gets the edge due to its tighter pacing and more effective characterization.  The miniseries has a really effective build of suspense over the course of its run as things get worse and stranger concepts are introduced in such a way to keep you absorbed and eager to find out what’s going to happen next.  It also helps that Hill makes most of the cast likeable enough that you’re actually sad when bad things start happening to them.

Make no mistake, there are a lot of bad things waiting for the cast in this miniseries and the way in which they unfold probably won’t seem too surprising to genre veterans.  So it’s a good thing that the execution is top-notch, and that includes the art from Stuart Immonen.  Granted, this is more of a showcase for his storytelling abilities as he’s asked to draw A LOT of talking heads here and he does a great job of keeping that visually interesting.  It’s just that he doesn’t get a chance to show off his skill with action and inventive (also tentacle-y) design until the very end.  All this means that the current hardcover edition of “Plunge” is a worthwhile hardcover purchase for fans of the creators, while people looking for a good, weird horror story are encouraged to check this out when it hits paperback.