This is a great book. Very well written and wonderful characters. The ending is also fantastic, it ties everything together.

Excellent. Heartbreaking story very clever is it or isn’t it type story. Loved the supporting characters, all in all a great read.

Gripping, creepy, an enjoyable roller coaster of a ride and a curse on board SS.Titanic - what more could you want!

As a proud card carrying member of the Titanic nerd club, mixing a haunting element into it was almost too much for my geekdom to take....in the good way! This was a great read and the setting and characters worked for me in every way. Two thumbs way up.

I failed to finish "The Deep" giving up at 48%, this was very disappointing as I loved "The Hunger". The problem is that the author tries to use the trick which worked so effectively in the previous book here; effectively trying to build a supernatural angle into the Titanic story, as she did with the Donmar Disappearance in "The Hunger". But it just does not work; the dialogue is stilted, characters are dull and I found the whole plot uninvolving and boring. I will be amazed if this book repeats the success of "The Hunger".

My thanks to NetGalley and publisher Random House UK - Transworld Publishers, for the ARC.
I found this story to be intriguing and absorbing, excepting I found it rather confusing at times, as the author has seemed to interject some supernatural/folk-lore element into the stories unfolding.
For those familiar with the last Titanic film (DiCaprio et al), and the previous films and documentaries of the ship's fateful maiden voyage, you cannot help but draw comparisons and parallels to those representations and accounts. The story presented is part fact/part fiction, bringing together 1912 on the Titanic and 1916 on the sister ship, Britannic, converted to a hospital ship in the Mediterranean.
The links between the two voyages are Annie Hebbley and her best friend Violet, together with Mark and Caroline Fletcher and their baby Ondine.
Annie, with Violet, was stewardess aboard the Titanic. A sense of unease clouded the lives of the passengers. From the moment Annie sets eyes on Mark Fletcher there is a connection; she knows him, she fantasises about him, they are meant to be together.
She becomes a heroine, saving Ondine from a potential watery grave.
Four years later, having spent that time in an asylum in Liverpool, Annie receives letters from Violet imploring her to work with her on the Britannic. Annie isn't mentally incapacitated and is willingly released to join the ship. One of the wounded soldiers she recognises as Mark Fletcher and her emotions get the better of her - with devastating consequences.

Is Annie really the stewardess from the Titanic or had she walked into the sea years before?

There's quite a bit of surrealism going on and you have to draw your own conclusions. I found the writing style to be rather convoluted and the narrative to be unnecessarily lengthy in some places with no real consequence leading from it.

Interesting - you decide.
2.5 stars really.

The fact that I don't know many actual facts about The Titanic's passengers meant that this book missed the mark for me sadly. It was an interesting story but I prefer my horror stories with a few more chills. I did like the paranormal/folklore twist.

Not for me I’m afraid. The writing was clunky and had an odd tone, and the plot was confusing and hard to follow. As for the supposing spine chilling nature of the story, it just never appeared and all attempts at horror felt quite flat for me.

DNF 60%

I'm not entirely sure why this book has been categorised as a 'horror'. Maybe I went in expecting a more 'adult' read, and so I was a wee bit disappointed by its Scooby-Doo type of mystery. All of its so called 'horror' elements felt either forced or unintentionally funny.
I think that one of the reasons why I was unable to connect or take the characters and their story seriously is the writing style. I'm unsure whether Katsu was intentionally trying to emulate certain books from the period in which her book is set in (mostly the 1910s) but rather than faithfully evoking that time it comes across as being a clumsy pastiche.
The two timelines aren't weaved together very well so that there seemed to an imbalance between the 'past' and the 'present'. The characters on the Titanic seemed very thinly drawn: the women and their husbands were all same-y. I knew that our 'protagonist' was interested in one couple but that's about the only thing that stood out about them.
This book tries to create suspense by having characters shiver or breathe...which yeah, doesn't do much for me. I thought the story could have benefited from a more mature and creepy atmosphere...sadly the story sets a rather cheesy, and therefore not very scary, tone which seemed more suited to early Gothic fiction (such The Castle of Otranto or in novels by Ann Radcliffe).
The story was silly and melodramatic, the writing mostly consisted of frivolous descriptions and an abundance of short sentences which tried, and failed, to create some tension (“They shake. His hand is not large but no small. His grip is warm but formal. His movements are precise.”), and the characters were both forgettable and unconvincing.
I tried to finish this (especially since this is an arc so I felt some sort of misguided sense of duty) but I just could not bring myself to read any more of it...part of me wonders how it got published in the first place.
Here are a few examples of why I didn't find the writing all that...great:

➜ “The night the great ship went down is, of course, cut into her memory with the prismatic perfection of solid ice.”

➜ “She took a breath. She might be frightened, but she felt in her bones: this moment, this ship, was her destiny.”

➜ “She can feel herself in the water once more, wrapped in it succumbing to it, called by it, by some force she didn't know yet recognize intimately. Some voice calling her home.”

➜ “He stood up a bit taller. He weren't scared of these ladies. (I'm unsure whether the 'weren't' was a mistake or if it was intentional).”

➜ “He shivered. Would she follow them until the bitter end?”

➜ “Maddy looks down at the cold, dark sea. Into the fathomless abyss. It was a long, long way down.”

➜ “[T]he joy went out of her, like a soul departing the body.”

A creepy tale about a haunting on the titanic. Quite interesting and believable. I loved it thjs take on it. Highly recommended to history and paranormal lovers

Having read The Hunger, I was interested to see how Alma Katsu continued her vibe of horror into The Deep, a re-telling of the story of the Titanic. Flitting between 1916 and the fateful maiden voyage of the Titanic, Katsu digs deep into tension and fear to present her unique brand of historical fiction. I love the smooth pace of the writing, the deep intimacy of the visual descriptions and the characterisations of the people who stayed with me long after I put the book down.

I'm always a bit of a sucker for stories about the Titanic. They're always thinking of new stories as to why it might have ended up the disaster it did and this book goes that bit further and involves things of the supernatural variety.

Annie Hebbley is a Titanic survivor but is now locked up in a Liverpool asylum but recovers to go onboard the Titanic's sister ship the Britannic, now serving as a hospital ship. There she encounters the wounded Mark Fletcher who she recognizes from the titanic. Strange perhaps, but then things get more curious still...

There'a mix of real and fictional characters here which blends to make a fascinating read. The Titanic's
rich list such as Madeleine Astor and Benjamin Guggenheim star as do the other, less human shall we say, beings on or around the ship. What is going on on that ship and why did it sink? What did the people see before the ship hit the ice? There's enough of the supernatural chills to make you shiver from the very start and it adds to the overfamiliar story of the ship by adding an exciting new dimension. Of course you have to suspend your sense of disbelief somewhat...or do you?

The stories of the Titanic and the Britannic are well documented and this two ships were very unlucky as it turned out. There is also the case of one woman having been on both ships and involved in an accident on a third who I read about and though strange things do happen!

Bizarre story but another one for Titanic 'fans'
.

After loving her [book:The Hunger|38092115], I had such high hopes for this but sadly it doesn't live up to that earlier book for me. Katsu's writing is still fluent and involving and this starts off well as Annie, an Irish girl and survivor of the Titanic, takes a job as a nurse on the Titanic's sister ship, now a hospital ship in 1916.

The narrative flits between the two voyages both of which, as we know from history, end up disastrously. I expected more of the creeping terror of The Hunger but there are no shivers here despite much talk of spirits, demons, silkies, sirens and a folkloric sea-witch.

The Titanic story focuses on the elite passengers: Guggenheim, Duff-Cooper, Astor; the 1916 story starts off with war-time detail then seems to forget about it... the final 'twist' made me, I confess, roll my eyes a bit.

I'd still say that Katsu's prose is a step up on many commercial writers but I expected more creepiness from this. The historical evocation works well but I just wasn't convinced by Annie's tale.

I’m a sucker for stories set around Titanic and this one was a creepy good tale, seamlessly blending fact and fiction, atmospheric and often very disturbing.

The research is impeccable, Alma Katsu giving you a real feel for both of these doomed ships, into that she throws an eclectic mix of characters both real and imagined. Throw in some ghostly goings on, huge insight into the trauma of war and disaster, plus an eerie obsessive central theme and you have a real winner.

The writing is superb, involving and genuinely absorbing the reader into the thrills and perils of ocean travel of the time where something unnatural lurks there in The Deep…

Very good indeed. Another to watch in 2020. Highly Recommended.