From Below

Product Information

As I kept reading, I loved all the explanations of what truly happens when it comes to deep-sea diving and exploration. It seeks to deepen understandings of the past, cast light on the present and agitate for change in the world we live in now. I often find that stories that rely on this type of story-telling have the same problem: one plot-line tends to be more interesting than the other. I appreciated the atmospheric and tense storytelling and I also became very engaged with all the characters. While the divers are exploring the halls, dining areas to the boiler room, the ship feels super claustrophobic, dark, and unsettling.

From Below - Apple TV (UK)

There's a bit of repetitiveness in the book with the diving sessions, but I didn’t have an issue with it. I'm gonna be honest, its an amazing game and all, but my one complaint is there isn't a way to manually set controls for it.The story just grabbed me right away and took me on a fast pace into the deep sea as the tension of the book took me on a roller coaster ride of emotions from breath-hitching moments of anxiety to throat closing claustrophobic atmospheric intensity as I barreled my way through the storyline! Coates really builds the creepiness into every scene, and I'm starting to worry about these characters.

From Below - Horror DNA From Below - Horror DNA

The Arcadia, lost in a deep, dense, and really nasty fog, slowly succumbs to madness, mainly narrated by one of the sailors. I needed something to explain this story, because everything the divers do is just stupid as hell and utterly inexplicable. The second heads back to 1928, eleven days before the sinking of the ship, with a countdown which slowly edges towards the disaster with revelations both startling and unsettling.I thought it was a brilliantly unique idea to format this novel by going to the past of the SS Arcadia and then the present with explorers to figure out why this weird ship mysteriously vanished. My personal problem was all the technical details made the read more of a "chore" to get through at times.

BELOW | English meaning - Cambridge Dictionary

Once the mystery of the ship starts to unfold, however, Coates goes beyond trying to build up the spook factor and introduces some over the top aspects that made me in the end rate this 3 stars. The wreck was discovered years later, and a dive team explores it for the first time for an upcoming documentary.The only downside for me was that there were some sections that felt slow but the overall sense of unease and tension, helped me to overlooks this. The Arcadia which has been missing since the 1920's has been located by a diving crew (Cove, Vanna, Roy, Hestie, Aiden, Sean, and Devereaux) and they are wanting to go to explore the ship as no one knows much about what could have happened to the ship or what happened to the ship crew so they want to go check it out and record their diving footage of the ship. This includes the methodologies we use, the sources we scour, and the narratives we employ to tell the story. The ending I felt was okay but there needed to be more explanation as to what happened with the SS Arcadia and you know, give readers a satisfying ending that checks all the boxes.