Starfish Made Me Grateful For My Boring Office Job

The pitch alone is a great filter for whether you’ll like this book, a corporation staffs a deep ocean geothermal power station with trauma survivors and borderline psychotics on the theory that people already broken by abuse are the ones who can handle the crushing dark down there. One reviewer called it a study in monsters, cyborgs, psychopaths, alien archaea, sea monsters, everything on the list except the obvious kind, and that’s exactly the register Watts is writing in, claustrophobic on purpose, both literally underwater and psychologically.

I read this after a string of lighter books and it hit like cold water, no pun really intended given the setting. The prose is dense with real marine biology and deep sea physics, one reader mentioned the edition they had included endnotes citing actual scientific studies behind the concepts, and that specificity is what sells the horror, this isn’t vague dread, it’s dread with footnotes.

Where it wobbles a little is a shift roughly two thirds in, the plot pivots hard toward tectonic and geological stakes, ocean earthquakes and some smart-gel AI subplot, and one reviewer described feeling disconnected right at that turn, like the book changed its raw materials mid stream. I felt that too, briefly, before it pulled back together for an ending that’s clearly setup for a sequel, close to seven eighths of the book is table setting before the real crisis even arrives.

Four stars. Bleak in a way I mean as a compliment, and I’m already planning to read Blindsight next based purely on how many of these reviews kept comparing the two.