The Sea Hides Its Dead by Megan Bontrager

The Sea Hides Its Dead is a horror novel about a academic expedition to try and find an underwater cult of Leviathan. Caroline is a grad student who is the only person who believes in Edward Beck, an academic obsessed with a strange quasi-religious cult there’s little proof of. When Beck, who is also her lover, says he needs her to come along on an expedition into the sea caves where the cult may have dwelt, it seems like the chance she needs. However, once the group gets to the caves, they become trapped there, forced to undertake trials relating to their greatest sins.

I was drawn to this book thanks to the title and the sea horror idea, and whilst it isn’t really a sea horror book like I was expecting, I did find it a fun horror adventure. The plot is very much as you’d expect, with the group descending and then facing various dramatic things happening. There’s a big focus on Caroline realising that Beck doesn’t really care about her, and her focusing on her friendship with Mallory, a relationship she previously undervalued. At times it feels like Caroline gets all this emotional depth at the expense of the other characters, who are mostly just stand-ins for certain concepts or tropes. I also found the morality at times a bit black and white, with the ‘good’ characters always having ‘sins’ that are completely justified in the narrative. The ending reinforces this, with a sudden happy ending that didn’t quite carry the weight of its negative aspects.

To me, it felt like a cross between a ‘stuck in a cave’ horror like The Descent and the academia/power/belief side of Katabasis. The horror of the Leviathan wasn’t really there for most of it, so it felt less about that side, and more about the human side of things. Personally, I think that the title perhaps isn’t the best for the book, as the book really didn’t feel much about the sea at all, which I was expecting. If you go into this expecting horror about power and trying to find a cult whilst trapped in a changing cave system, I think you’ll have a decent time.