Monsterland Below
Book III
Mysterious horrors await determined heroes on land and on the sea in the complex dystopian novel Monsterland Below.
In Michael Okon’s tense dystopian novel Monsterland Below, scientists have fractured the natural order.
After the world was reshaped by failed theme-park experiments, Wyatt and his companions Melvin, Jade, and Howard move through abandoned towns, derelict outposts, and flooded laboratories. They hope to stop Vincent, whose creations continue to mutate beyond control. Parallel to their mission, a salvage vessel hunts a vanished yacht, the Windward, and stumbles into evidence of an old, dangerous presence beneath the waves. These threads converge in a fight to understand the origin of the “light.”
Wyatt is a pragmatic and decisive hero who struggles with the cost of leadership. Beside him, Melvin is driven by his grief, and he commands many scenes as a result. Meanwhile, Vincent is a formidable villain who describes his experiments on resurrected heads, and the purpose of mysterious glowing sea eggs, in unsettling detail. Others play support roles—Howard through his dry logic, for example, which steadies the group as they approach Vincent’s territory. The characters in the book’s ocean-based sections are the least developed and least individually memorable.
With the narrative’s focus shifting between the land and sea in a steady way, adopting a rhythm of action trading with revelations, the novel moves with speed. Its scenes include roadside skirmishes and tense sailors’ searches, punctuated by emotional turns and notes about the scale of the dangers people face. And as it traverses ruins, oceans, and laboratory settings, the book drops situating details, as of the cloying sea mist that clings to the Windward‘s deck and the severed human remains submerged in tanks in Vincent’s lab. These add to the horror of the shifting scenes where threatening physical elements like broken glass, saltwater in people’s lungs, and blood on the sand are emphasized. Many of the book’s monsters are quite familiar, though. They include shapeshifting werewolves, decaying zombies, pale giants, and bioluminescent spawn.
People’s conversations are expository and keep pace with the action, as where sailors issue warnings in clipped sentences. Some instances of banter are clichéd, though, particularly in the shipboard scenes. Still, the novel works toward a suspenseful ending that features major confrontations. These unfold underground and offshore, and in the course of them, people’s goals are tested, alliances shift, and revelations reshape the conflict, teasing hope for Wyatt and his allies.
In the imaginative horror novel Monsterland Below, human beings struggle to survive amid scientific ruin and instances of monstrous evolution.
Reviewed by
John M. Murray
Disclosure: This article is not an endorsement, but a review. The publisher of this book provided free copies of the book and paid a small fee to have their book reviewed by a professional reviewer. Foreword Reviews and Clarion Reviews make no guarantee that the publisher will receive a positive review. Foreword Magazine, Inc. is disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission’s 16 CFR, Part 255.
