Abel Covey is a good man. Just ask his neighbors.
He’s a respected fisherman on the remote, moldering island of Kelcarrow, a smiling face in a tight-knit community, and, by all appearances, a dutiful father shouldering the burdens of a housebound wife and an aging father whose mind is slipping. Abel also regularly beats his teenage son, Jonathan, and drowns the boy in the bathtub to test whether he inherited his mother’s ability to breathe underwater. When Jonathan inevitably loses consciousness, Abel breaks his ribs trying to revive him. “They always healed crooked,” Jonathan says.
Jonathan is responsible for scrubbing away the evidence of his abuse, washing his own blood from the wallpaper and the deck; Abel’s reputation remains spotless. His son does the cleaning.
There are plenty of monsters lurking in C.G. Drews’ “Scorpion Deep,” a gorgeously grotesque work of gothic YA horror that’s populated by eldritch gods, kelpies, finfolk, krakens, and all sorts of other creatures pulled from the darker depths of maritime folklore. But Drews seems to be interested in more than what might be lurking beneath the waves: What makes someone a monster? And how much responsibility can we place on someone whose understanding of love and safety has been shaped by violence?
Monstrosity is practically 17-year-old Jonathan Covey’s birthright. His mother is a selkie, a mythical creature that can shed its sealskin to take human form. His father is proof mythology has no monopoly on making monsters. Jonathan has spent his 17 years trying to be good — or, barring that, learning how to make himself small enough to escape notice and hoping against hope that someone — anyone — might actually love him. Now summer is ending and his two best friends, Rae and Ellis, are preparing to leave for college on the mainland, unaware that Jonathan has been lying to them about also being accepted. Scared that the truth will cost him the only two people he has left, he keeps up his lie, even as he faces the prospect of being stranded in the house that has become his private hell.
Desperate to escape, he performs an ancient ritual said to summon Scorpion Deep, a long-dormant wish-granting sea god. To his amazement, something ravenous answers. The creature is terrifying, beautiful, possessive, and willing to do absolutely anything to protect him. For Jonathan, whose entire life has been defined by neglect and cruelty, this attention is intoxicating. Scorpion wants him. Scorpion chooses him. Scorpion vows he’ll make anyone who hurts Jonathan suffer. (Unfortunately, Scorpion’s understanding of affection involves a rather alarming willingness to murder anyone who threatens its object.) But the harder Jonathan clings to his newfound protector, the more difficult it becomes to find where the boy ends — and where exactly the monster begins.
Love — with teeth
Jonathan can be an exasperating character — but never an unsympathetic one. He’s withdrawn, insecure, and frequently dishonest (just ask his friends), and he’s so convinced of his unworthiness that he can’t recognize affection when it’s actually being offered. But Drews makes those behaviors make sense. Jonathan wants to be loved, but he has no idea what love actually looks like: Everyone he’s ever loved has either hurt him or left him, and he now sees both possibilities as equally inevitable. He’s learned to anticipate rejection so thoroughly that he seems to inflict it upon himself. “I need to be wanted when I’m sad,” he thinks. “I need to be loved as is.” But being vulnerable requires an expectation that someone will actually care about what he needs — and will actually care about him— and Jonathan has no reason to expect anything of the sort.
His friendships with Rae and Ellis are among the book’s most convincing depictions of Jonathan’s emotional paralysis. The two are falling in love and beginning to plan out lives that extend far beyond Kelcarrow. Meanwhile, Jonathan, who is asexual and biromantic, struggles to understand why their romantic attachment should apparently diminish the importance of the group’s friendship. He becomes increasingly isolated from the small world they once shared, sometimes because his friends are thoughtless (and are actually excluding him) and sometimes because he’s so convinced they no longer want him around that he retreats before they can outright reject him.
Jonathan imagines childhood friendship as “a corpse wrapped in wildflower crowns and jammy fingerprints and fairy magic,” a macabre image that’s both painfully adolescent and remarkably poignant: Childhood is something his friends are moving beyond, while Jonathan is still there kneeling beside its grave, “crying over something no one else misses.” But Rae and Ellis are also children. They’re allowed to grow up, fall in love, leave for college, and pursue lives beyond Kelcarrow. They’re expected to be selfish and emotionally turbulent. They’re supposed to grow up. And they can’t be expected to recognize, much less resolve, everything happening behind the doors of Jonathan’s home.
The adults of Kelcarrow, on the other hand, have no such excuse.
Drews is unsparing in their depiction of that failure. While Jonathan has spent years believing his father’s cruelty is invisible to the rest of Kelcarrow, what he eventually discovers is worse: Some people suspected, others knew, and no one ever intervened. One adult eventually explains that the community hoped to provide Jonathan with a safe place to turn when he was ready to ask for help. “I didn’t need a safe fucking space,” Jonathan responds. “I needed someone to step in and stop him.”
The adults have confused being available to help with actually helping. Their reluctance to pry, to disturb the peace, has allowed a child to be brutalized for years. Their inaction has consequences, and those consequences are borne by: the boy they were supposed to protect. Abel’s violence is monstrous, but the neighbors’ refusal to act is more ordinary, and perhaps for that very reason, more recognizable. Cruelty isn’t just committing a terrible act. Sometimes, it’s little more than just looking the other way. Jonathan needed help. He needed protection. No one offered either, and the damage is almost beyond comprehension.
Scorpion represents everything Jonathan thinks he isn’t allowed to be: angry, selfish, violent, demanding, powerful. So it’s hardly surprising that Jonathan finds Scorpion’s violent devotion comforting. When the sea god asks Jonathan why he never fights back, the boy admits that he doesn’t want to hurt anyone. “Then I shall hurt them for you,” Scorpion replies. Scorpion can be the outlet for Jonathan’s desperate need to feel powerful after a lifetime of helplessness, rage, and resentment, and for the violent fantasies of revenge that Jonathan can’t reconcile with his idea of himself.
Scorpion’s worldview is so binary that he sometimes resembles a petulant child. (My toy!) But it’s those same qualities that make his devotion dangerous. Jonathan isn’t equipped to recognize the danger that Scorpion presents. Jonathan has become accustomed to receiving affection from the very hands that hurt him, so he has no reason to recognize the difference between being loved — and being possessed. His longing is understandable. His willingness to accept affection without regard for its consequences is much more frightening.
And Jonathan’s inability to distinguish affection from appetite extends beyond his relationship with the tempestuous sea god. When his mother, in her selkie form, regards him hungrily, he finds comfort in the simple fact of being wanted, even if that desire might destroy him. But his mother is a prisoner, too; Abel has stolen Jonathan’s mother’s sealskin, imprisoning her in a human life she never freely chose and depriving her of the ability to return to the sea she so desperately craves. Regardless, Jonathan sees her longing for freedom as a rejection and can’t understand why she would choose the ocean over him — even though he desperately wants to escape the same household that she does. And in his fear, he finds himself capable of the cruelty that has plagued his family.
A sea of uncertain truths
Drews presents the book’s psychological horrors through prose that’s so richly atmospheric that Kelcarrow seems to exist somewhere beyond the pages. I half expected that I’d emerge from the book with wind-tangled hair and salt drying on my lips. Everything here is damp, decaying, or in some stage of grotesque transformation. Scenes are as revolting as they are mesmerizing — bodies split and mutate and shed their skins; strange creatures emerge from the water; the sea beckons with the promise of both liberation and annihilation. The imagery is often repulsive, occasionally beautiful — and frequently both at once.
The ocean occupies a similarly contradictory place in Jonathan’s life. Abel uses water to punish Jonathan, while the sea offers him a sense of belonging that he has never found on land. Its creatures are monstrous, but its embrace is tender. Even the bodily transformations — for all their gag-inducing and stomach-turning horror — suggest the possibility of becoming something other than what one has always been. But liberation, in Drews’ world, rarely comes without violence.
As Jonathan’s relationship with Scorpion deepens, Drews blurs the boundaries between the supernatural and the psychological. Jonathan’s perception grows uncertain, and certain revelations force the reader to reconsider much of what has come before. At one point, Rae calls him a pathological liar — and he can’t even know whether she’s right. Throughout the novel, Jonathan has struggled to convince others that his experiences are real. And his friends’ disbelief about Scorpion reinforces Jonathan’s certainty that nobody would believe him about his father’s abuse. So the reader, too, is placed in the position of questioning the testimony of a boy who readers have spent the last few hundred pages wishing someone would finally believe and help.
Drews never offers readers a tidy explanation (or solution) for every strange occurrence, but the novel is stronger because of that. A story about eldritch gods and other unknowable things beneath the ocean waves doesn’t need one final accounting of exactly which horrors were real. However readers make sense of the ambiguity, the horror survives each interpretation. What matters is that Jonathan has spent his life searching for someone else to help save him. Scorpion, for all his terrifying god-ness, is the only one who’s willing to offer the protection that Jonathan so desperately craves. But the god’s devotion also gives shape to the ugliest parts of Jonathan’s desperation — until his victimhood and culpability become nearly impossible to disentangle.
The novel — for all its blood and grotesquerie — is ultimately a profoundly sad examination of what happens to a child who grows up believing that he is fundamentally unlovable and that violence is inevitable. Jonathan wants someone to care for him, to choose him, to love him even at his worst. Those are hardly — hardly! — monstrous desires. But his desperation for those things distorts them, until being wanted seems worth any cost.
By the end, Jonathan recognizes that he is alive because he chose to be. It’s a moving assertion of agency after a lifetime spent feeling powerless, but it offers little comfort about the circumstances that made such a choice necessary. Survival has come at an appalling cost. The possibility that he may have saved himself cannot erase the fact that he was a child who should never have been left to do so alone. Perhaps the most disturbing achievement of “Scorpion Deep” is that its monsters can’t be cleanly divided into the innocent and the guilty, the human and the inhuman, the deserving and the damned.
“Scorpion Deep” is haunting, horrifying, and frequently heartbreaking. And Drews leaves us with a terrifying possibility: Perhaps the greatest horror on Kelcarrow isn’t that monsters exist — but that so many people can have a hand in making one.
Thanks to NetGalley and Macmillan/Feiwel for providing me with an e-ARC of this book in exchange for an honest review.
