The Medusa Deep

Volume XXX / Issue 35 - May 17 / 2024
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The Medusa Deep

The Medusa Deep

Author: 
David Neil Lee
Series: 
Midnight Games Trilogy; Bk. 2
Hamilton, ON: Poplar Press/Wolsak and Wynn, 2021
269 pp., trade pbk., $15.00
ISBN: 
9781989496312
Grades: 
Grades 7 and up
Ages: 
Ages 12 and up
Review by: 
Ronald Hore
4
Excerpt: 

“Pay attention Nate Silva. It was the forties.”

That got my attention, all right. In the first place I hadn’t been 100 percent sure that Evie even knew my name. All I knew about her was that at some point the Church, or the Great Old Ones Yog-Sothoth or Cthulhu, or the Hounds of Tindalos, had reached out and touched her. And the Church’s touch leaves a scar.

“Nineteen forty-six.”

I blinked. It was now December 2012, so Evie had been, say, twenty-five years old in 1946. Hmm. If she’d been born in 1921…I blinked hard. “Jeez, Evie, you get around pretty good for a ninety-year-old.”

“And you’ve got attention span of a June bug – tonight, anyway. What the heck’s on your mind?” Evie glanced at the kitchen door. “For your sake I’ll take that as a compliment, young man, though actually I get around pretty well. Use your adverbs. You’ve got important work to do and you can’t afford to talk, or think, like some illiterate hoser with his hat on backwards.

“Yes, ma’am.”

The Medusa Deep continues the story begun in The Midnight Games (www.cmreviews.ca/cm/vol22/no25/themidnightgames.html) in which the followers of the Resurrection Church of the Ancient Gods in Hamilton Ontario had attempted to bring forth the nightmare Lovecraftian monsters to take over the world but were foiled by 16 year-old high school student Nate Silva. This time, Nate, who is the tale’s narrator and is just recovering from the injuries he incurred in the first book, is swept up on the pre-World War II dirigible Sorcerer where he discovers his mother who has been missing for several years and thought dead. After falling to the ground while clinging to the legs of a flying monster from another universe, Nate finds himself in a small boat on the west coast of British Columbia, along with his grandfather, an ex-whaler, and H.P. Lovecraft, and facing off against another monster from the other side of the void. If the reader, like me, enjoys nameless drooling Lovecraftian monsters, heroic teenagers, a wild assortment of interesting characters, snappy dialogue, and tales that end by leaving you hanging on the edge of a cliff, The Medusa Deep may well be for you.

Highly Recommended
Reviewer: 

Ronald Hore, involved with writer’s groups for several years, dabbles in writing fantasy and science fiction in Winnipeg, MB, under the pen name R. J. Hore.