Krescent Dune lives a tough life on a colonised island, a place where the native population has been reduced to certain specific roles, none of which benefit them or their community in any way. Her parents were miners, which much of the island’s population is forced to be, risking their lives for a mineral that makes the island of Kar Atish valuable to its powerful colonisers. But Krescent’s parents committed a crime that has haunted her for years since their death, so all she wants is to earn passage off this island. The only way she can achieve this (while avoiding the mining community who actively resent her for her parents’ crimes) is to fight all sorts of monsters and beasts in an underground gladiatorial fighting ring.
Set in the same world as Tanvi Berwah’s earlier novel, Monsters Born and Made, Somewhere in the Deep is a South Asian inspired standalone fantasy novel that takes place entirely on an island that is only mentioned in passing in the first book. It may expand on the world created in the first novel, but it holds its own as an independent story.
When Krescent kills one useful monster too many, she’s forced to accept a quest to act as protector for a team of people being sent off by the lead overlord known only as the Collector, on a search into the island’s deepest caverns, well below where any mining excavation has ever taken place, further along than any human has ever returned from.
The Collector leads the Landers—people from Sollonia, the biggest island of the archipelago that includes Krescent’s home Kar Atish. The Landers have simply taken over, as colonisers do. They are an “upper caste of rich, powerful people who seem to hold [Krescent’s] world in their fists,” and decided the inhabitants of Kar Atish needed “regulation, turning us all into prisoners in our own home.” It is the island’s underground store of zargunine that attracts the Landers, “an unknown substance mixed with gold… more valuable than the blood that flows in [our] veins.”
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Somewhere in the Deep
To control this substance, the Landers decide that everyone who was not one of them was “of a lower caste, a Renter, by birth.” Kar Atish’s people are forced to work for the Landers, in a feudal-style system that pushes an unending generational debt onto most, tears families and communities apart, and drives them to extreme labour for a very meagre and often dangerous existence on their own homeland, while the Landers’ live well, the rich getting richer. “Our island’s blood and stone builds their lands,” points out one of the characters, reminding us that this is a colonised capitalist world, near impossible to break free from. The Landers practice the classic divide and rule tactic of the British Raj, by providing some people with more resources than the rest, isolating them from their community but keeping them reliant on their work, so that their own people forget that the division itself was the point, “so they forget who the real monster is.” While groups of people do band together to protect each other as best they can, the entire system is set up to ensure the Renters will always be trapped under the Landers’ rule, for as long as they live on Kar Atish.
The island itself is host to endless terrors in the warrens; it is where the monsters Krescent fights emerge from. It is also the liminal space between the island’s colonised present existence and its mythic past, a place where earlier civilisations lived and possibly thrived, where perhaps a people known as the Children of the Shade still exist, free from the Landers’ rule. To venture into the depths is a dangerous, harrowing task, but Krescent is adamant about getting the job done, having her debts waived, and getting off Kar Atish to start a whole new, anonymous life (as she tells us, quite often). All this is made much more complicated by Rivan, Krescent’s childhood best (and only) friend (and potential love interest), misguidedly immersing himself in her quest, her two worst (human, but angry and violent) enemies joining the search party along with a crew of strangers who all have their own agendas, and an unending supply of terrifying creatures from the depths of the island just waiting for some action. It’s a brutal journey to the centre of Krescent’s world, full of violence and suspense and well… monsters and madness.
Somewhere in the Deep is well written, mostly well paced, and only repetitive at times (though that’s mostly caused by how often we hear Krescent’s inner dialogue on how desperate she is to get off Kar Atish, and how complicated her feelings for Rivan are). It does feel like it is written as a treatment for a Netflix TV show (this seems to be a trend for quite a lot of quest fantasy novels from India recently), but that can be fun. The writing is strong, visual and almost episodic, the many action scenes are set up well, the character reveals are neatly foreshadowed—well controlled and timely, if not particularly surprising.
The book’s strength lies not in any of this though, but in the background on which the plot rests, that of South Asia’s colonial history, feudal control and the divide and rule policy that make the world of Somewhere in the Deep a claustrophobic, heavy and dark one.
Somewhere in the Deep is published by Sourcebooks Fire.
Mahvesh loves dystopian fiction and lives in Karachi, Pakistan. She writes about stories when not wasting much too much time on Twitter.
