When a curious assortment of businesspeople, socialites, goons, and cardsharps shows up to board the yacht of well-connected arms manufacturer William Hawberk, everyone can tell something is afoot. But nobody expects the situation to rapidly devolve into kidnapping, multiple murders, cultist attacks, government conspiracies, and the imminent return of the shadowy forerunners who may have created the world itself.
Set in an alternate history just after WWI, Sam Locrian’s $20,000 UNDER THE SEA is a fun spin on the Lovecraft mythos (thankfully drawing much less from the Verne work whose title it remixes). Almost cinematic in its approach, the structure is clear and ready: the first few chapters each focus on introducing one of the principals, packing them into the bottle before shaking it hard and twisting off the cap. Although there’s mystery and horror here, fun certainly prevails, and $20,000 UNDER THE SEA drily leans into the comedically stiff formality of some of its British characters in particular. One aristocrat laments her colleague’s “American frontiersman’s idea of formalwear,” and the text prefaces (with winking understatement) an explosion of violence and gore by noting, “The next few seconds were distressingly eventful.” There are some quieter moments, though, and some particularly beautiful turns of phrase; descriptions of a villain’s “vinegared soul,” for instance, are piquant and satisfying.
$20,000 UNDER THE SEA does lose a little something with its energetic style. Lovecraft’s original works are suffused with an unsettling dread, built with a restrained pace where character isn’t necessarily important but setting is; and the atmosphere of a Lovecraft story is unmistakable. Ultimately, eldritch horrors may or may not arrive, but it is their looming potentiality which has power. $20,000 UNDER THE SEA simply moves faster: there’s a historical and cultural setting (alt-history 1920s), but, once the action kicks into gear, the scene changes too rapidly to develop real atmosphere. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, as long as the reader knows what they’re in for. The run-and-gun plot feels closer to game adaptations of the Lovecraft mythos (both video games and tabletop games) than it does to its peer stories. However, there’s an audience for precisely that, and $20,000 UNDER THE SEA delivers.
Sam Locrian’s $20,000 UNDER THE SEA is a fun, action-packed addition to the corpus of transformative works in the Lovecraft mythos.
~Dan Accardi for IndieReader