Overall, I feel pretty "eh" about it. I got tired of the direct quotes (not just thematic inspirations) from *Moby-Dick*, to the extent that they felt pretty forced - and that's not even counting how the opening page has *three* quotes repurposed for this book. I also felt that the story-in-a-story conceit was so much longer than needed, and it ended up being a similar retread to Lovecraft's "The Dunwich Horror". By page count, the flashback is half the book, and it makes the eventual fishing trip that caused Abe such trauma to be humorously perfunctory. Likewise, there were some eldritch-adjacent tropes that felt silly: I felt markedly disappointed when the books of eldritch tomes popped up, to say nothing of the obvious sequel hook of the gem disappearing after the Rainer party returns from "killing" the fisherman.

Writing-wise, Langan has the same problem I see in a lot of new authors: fear that the audience won't "get it". Many of the more surreal and eldritch occurrences are qualified with "as if...", adding on a metaphor that so obviously states the horrific implications that it takes out any mental effort on me as a reader to piece things together or be scared on my own merits. The silliest one was early on when the main character pulls out a weird fish/human hybrid that says something like "there fissure", and then ten pages later you hear the legend of Der Fischer.

Compare to Shirley Jackon's *The Haunting of Hill House*, where she trusts your imagination is scarier than anything she can actually write. In contrast, Langan seemed like he foreshadowed everything so hard that nothing scary felt so.