100 Fathoms Below

How can you escape something horrifying when you are 100 Fathoms Below the surface? This question is obsessed over by the crew of the USS Roanoke, a US nuclear submarine on a top-secret mission into Soviet waters in 1983. Their goal is to find evidence of a new class of submarine the Soviets have supposedly built that could decide the fate of the Cold War. But things take a deadlier turn after one of the crewmen visits a brothel the night before they ship out. Now, this man has turned into something else, and the rest of the crew is trapped deep below the surface with him. The only thing these men can do is try to survive this horror and hope they can make it back to the surface.

I love vampire stories. I hope I’m not spoiling it for you, but it’s fairly obvious right away what’s going on, and it is still very suspenseful, as more than a hundred men are trapped in a tiny space miles below the surface. That element of being encapsulated while being stalked by something with inhuman strength really added to the horror. There were some really tense moments when characters you admired for their bravery seemed like they might not make it out alive but would be turned into one of the undead. The fact that there is not a lot of wood to make stakes or sunlight to help get rid of these blood-suckers brought another facet of terror. It was as if they were in the worst possible spot to be plagued by vampires.

If you like horror stories, especially of the vampire variety, then I recommend you read this book. Besides being entertaining, there is also a life lesson to be learned here: don’t visit a brothel; there are worse things you can catch than an STD.